As consumers seek out more personalised experiences online, retailers must find strategies for technology to take the volume while people take care of the value. Forrester predicts more than 25% of all US retail sales to occur online by 2024, a figure which poses a real challenge to retailers to change their business model to deliver world-class customer experiences at that scale.
This speed of change makes it imperative now to look at how to bring humans and tech together in the online retail environment, using AI-powered chatbots to augment human agents. I like to think of this as the capability value of people multiplied by the capacity volume of technology, providing customised service while actually reducing cost to serve.
Gartner says the top three most significant challenges companies face when considering the implementation of AI are staff skills (56%), the fear of the unknown (42%), and finding a starting point (26%).
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This was endorsed by attendees at the 2021 iMedia Retail Summit in Rotorua, where the most pressing questions posed by retail leaders about AI were ‘where and when to start?’.
I believe that in New Zealand there are sufficient in-house and vendor skills to address the gap identified by Gartner. In most cases, employing small fast starts with rapid iterative improvements is the smart strategy and overcomes ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’. For some retailers, like Noel Leeming, lockdown provided the catalyst for implementing AI when its stores were closed but experiencing significant demand.
Launched in just twelve days in May last year (2020), the ‘Nola’ chatbot (really a ‘Digital Employee’) helped Noel Leeming customers with click & collect requirements, locating branches, returns, and exchanges, and taking the load off customer support.
Conversations were designed using a supervised machine-learning model to ensure that Nola remained on-brand with her tone of voice, protocols, and manner of engagement.
Nola now handles 89% of conversations with a current cost of 47 cents per conversation and falling. While Nola was implemented as a solution to handle Noel Leeming’s growing customer service volumes, it was not long before they realised the power she had when it came to increasing their upsell capacity.
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