How Kruidvat Netherlands and ICI PARIS XL Netherlands automate 70% of the questions

The retail industry is changing rapidly and developments in the field of artificial intelligence and conversational interfaces offer opportunities to optimize customer service. The result is a chatbot that can automate 70% of the questions.

The challenge

AS Watson Group is the largest international retailer in Health & Beauty in Asia and Europe. The global company is strongly represented in the Netherlands with Kruidvat, ICI PARIS XL, Trekpleister, and others.

The retail industry is changing rapidly and that requires passion for work, fast switching and enthusiasm for innovation. Every day AS Watson Group takes a critical look at what could be improved and how each euro can be spent as effectively as possible.

The dynamic retail industry in combination with developments in the field of artificial intelligence and conversational interfaces offers opportunities for optimizing customer service. The most important goals are:

• Improve customer satisfaction by being able to help customers 24/7
• Reducing pressure on the customer service team by automating interactions
• A user interface that is simple to use and offers possibilities for advanced cases

The Solution

Using the Flow.ai platform, AS Watson has developed smart chatbots for Kruidvat Netherlands and for ICI PARIS XL Netherlands. These bots are able to answer customer questions 24/7. The chatbots are now one of the channels where customers can interact with the brand.

The simple interface of Flow.ai allows us to design and train the bots. By giving the chatbots sufficient training examples, the system learns to recognize concepts so that the correct answer can be given.

Customers can now ask the chatbots questions in their own way and receive immediate answers. If the bots don’t understand, we’ll be notified and we can train the bots further or create new flows. That’s how the bots start to understand more and more.

The Result: Mila & Kiki

Chatbot Mila from ICI PARIS XL Nederland and Kiki from Kruidvat Nederland are both online to talk to customers 24/7. They are available at any time of the day.

Even though it’s a bot, customers still have the experience of a conversation. In addition, the bots support customer service. This gives agents more time to focus on complex questions.

Mila

The number of chats per day varies enormously, but that is no problem for Mila. During peak days, the number of chats can rise to nearly 600 calls per day. Mila is able to answer 70% of these questions. The questions that she can not answer are forwarded to agents. This process greatly reduces the number of tickets during peak times at customer service.

Kiki

Just like Mila, Chatbot Kiki is able to answer incoming questions independently. If Kiki cannot find a solution, it will refer customers to one of our contact options with a live agent such as phone, email and social media. The intention is to train Kiki even better and to use it on different channels.

Future work

The chatbots have proven themselves and we are going to develop them further. This way we let Mila and Kiki answer more and better questions. We want to achieve this by:

• Focus on developments, current events and processes
• Expand the number of intents in the short term and to continue training existing intents
• Expand to multiple channels (omnichannel)
• Expand to other store formulas and countries
• Integrate with existing services
• Personalize chats in a style that fits the brand