Supported by BotXO’s technology, Saxo has developed Alfred, the bot, to help customers with their gift purchases and other support questions.
Denmark’s largest bookstore first introduced its new gift guide chatbot Alfred to help clients with their Christmas shopping. Soon, the bot’s role as a gift guide extended to a support bot as it started to handle a wide range of customer support questions.
Read the original article on Saxo’s ambition for the new chatbot in Danish here: Saxo.com tester virtuel assistent i julehandlen.
Key Takeaways
Goals
- Inspire online shoppers on what to purchase
- Try chatbots as a new way of helping customers online
Results
- The bot solves 67% of all its chat conversations without human support
- 400% higher conversion rates when supported by the bot
Gifting and product inspiration are common challenges for online retailers, this is also true for Denmark’s largest online bookstore, Saxo. Most retailers, like Saxo, collect data on you when you visit their webshop, data which they can use to show relevant products for you. But if you are there to buy a gift for someone else, they can not use that data on you. How to solve this challenge?
Saxo’s solution was to start using a bot
According to Jeppe Vestergaard Trier, Chief Customer Officer at Saxo,
“The ambition for the new chatbot is to improve customer service. But it’s not about replacing customer service representatives with robots.” – Jeppe Vestergaard Trier, Chief Customer Officer at Saxo
He continues:
“When it comes to customer service, we see a pattern in which 60-70 percent of support issues from first-time customers are largely the same. Furthermore, we experience that many of the questions customers ask our customer support are related to the purchase of a new book – which makes it natural to integrate first line support and help with product purchases in the same service.”
Using a chatbot on a webshop and in customer service helps solving the challenges of product recommendations. The bot can ask customers a couple of questions and based on those, fetch relevant products live from the product database. On top of that, the bot also answers those important question that online shoppers have right in that crucial moment in a webshop. It could be that the final concern before purchasing is what the return policy is and when the bot answers that question, it decreases friction and helps move online shoppers forward in the purchase path.
“We can easily imagine a scenario where customers don’t even have to buy through our website, but can do it via the virtual assistant through e.g. Messenger. Thus, customers will be able to concentrate all their interaction with Saxo there”, says Jeppe Vestergaard Trier.
Teaming up with BotXO
In order to realize the ambition for the new virtual assistant, Saxo teamed up with BotXO, a platform specialized for line of business people to work with and benefit from intelligent chatbots and voice bots, Machine Learning and Conversational AI.
Henrik Fabrin, CEO and co-founder of BotXO, explains how chatbots running on BotXO automatically becomes more knowledgeable about customer needs via the dialogues which take place:
“If a customer asks questions that are related to webshops in general (for example, return policy or shipping) or ask questions that are specific to the unique company, which the bot has not learned to answer yet, two main actions happen:
1) The conversation about specific questions are routed to a customer service representative, so that the consumer is not left without help.
2) Our proprietary AI engine uses Machine Learning to learn on-the-fly from the conversation and automatically improves the understanding of the general webshop questions. This is something that all our customers benefit from when using our out-of-the-box eCommerce AI solution.
The questions specific to a particular company are also automatically picked up, but are only added to that company’s unique layer of the eCommerce AI when a person from that company manually approves them. This ensures compliance and gives a ton of flexibility and speed for our customers as they can rely on us to take care of the common webshop causes for contact and while focussing on what makes them unique.” – Henrik Fabrin, CEO and co-founder of BotXO
Alfred, the gift guide & support bot
Saxo started the concept of Alfred being a gift guide but very quickly realized that people were also using the bot to ask support questions. They, therefore, added answers to him on a wide range of questions.
The results are impressive. Alfred solves 67% of all its chat conversations without any human involvement needed.
Furthermore, Saxo has achieved 400% higher conversion rates for online shoppers, assisted by the bot, Alfred. This means more people can be helped to make product purchases which is one of the main goals of any online retailer.
Tailored Danish solution
Regarding the choice of BotXO as a partner, Jeppe Vestergaard Trier from Saxo says:
“There are many technology vendors which advertise automation and AI, but to us, it was important to find one in the Danish market with which we could share a development collaboration.” – Jeppe Vestergaard Trier, Chief Customer Officer at Saxo
We also met Jeppe Vestergaard trier at Internetdagen 2018, where the subject of course was chatbots! Jeppe presented data, experiences, issues and success stories about their chatbot, Albert. Check out the video ‘How Saxo uses an AI chatbot as a first-line support’.
Written by Iren Asandi.
Designed by Iliknur Hyusnyueva.