Client story National Retailer Elevates Customer Experience With Azure Bot Framework
By Insight Editor / 20 Aug 2019 / Topics: Microsoft Azure Customer experience
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Retail
Size of company:
Multisite with more than 300,000 employees
Challenge:
The client sought a streamlined, digital solution to improve its customer chat experience while capturing all conversation data.
Solution:
- Microsoft Azure PaaS features
- Natural Language chatbot
- Azure Cosmos Database
Results:
- Improved customer experience
- Reduced errors for internal teams
- Increased visibility into tool sets
- Simplified processes for future improvements
In the midst of rising customer expectations and the pressure to build brand loyalty beyond products, a national retail chain with more than 300,000 employees set an earnest goal: to make every customer interaction meaningful, memorable and efficient every day.
The company had previously implemented a chatbot experience designed to help route conversations to agents — but managing conversation paths within the platform proved overly complicated. Hard-coded patterns, fragmented systems and unclear ownership created unnecessary headaches for agents.
What’s more, without the ability to track and report within the tool sets, teams couldn’t see if a customer received enough customer service interactions — or too many. Communication between internal teammates looked the same.
The company needed an easier, more intuitive way to observe communication and reporting gaps in one tool set from all channels. It reached out to Insight for help implementing a solution that would provide a consolidated view of all customer interactions.
Starting the journey
Together, Insight and the client reviewed a statistical analysis of previous conversations and how well its current chatbot guided customers toward speaking with an agent. Once our team understood where users’ pain points were showing the most frequently, we re-evaluated the conversation flows to streamline interactions.
Building a better path forward
With a core initiative to dramatically improve and drive effective communication experiences across all channels, the following goals defined the retail company’s critical objectives:
- Drive awareness among all communication touchpoints with customers, associates and third-party businesses.
- Right-size customer touchpoints to manage communication sprawl.
- Provide central visibility into communications across all channels and customer types.
- Use natural language processing to take advantage of artificial intelligence capabilities around speech and understanding.
- Ensure interaction points and answers are data-driven to reduce the amount of development.
The new vision of the chatbot would be intuitive enough to continue previous conversations from returning customers if desired. It would also show time-of-day messages to help set messaging expectations when speaking to the agents.
Executing the vision
To accomplish an expansive list of user features — which require artificial intelligence, machine learning and always-on capabilities — our team recommended Microsoft Azure.
The agile and scalable cloud platform is rich in capabilities, such as Cognitive or Bot Services, Cosmos Database for lightning-fast storage and other Platform as a Service (PaaS) components.
Since the retail chain’s IT teams lacked experience building PaaS solutions within Azure, Insight provided the expertise to help connect the necessary components. We also developed the C# codebase for all function apps hosted and deployed through Azure DevOps.
Working with the retail chain, we developed and deployed the first iteration of the app in 16 weeks, matching feature parity. The pilot test assessed the entire solution and gathered feedback from actual customers and agents. The immediate responses came back positive, eliminating guesswork, solidifying trust in the solution and informing next steps.
Crossing the finish line — and reaping the benefits
For the nationwide retailer, the future looks bright. The Azure Bot Framework is accessible by any number of connecting clients. And the development environment makes it easy for the newly formed bot team to build on the foundation, increasing growth and enhancing different components with new features over time.
The improved platform also incorporates digital channels into its communication tracking with upgraded chatbots queued for customers and internal teams. The business can now use specialized communication tool sets to consolidate messages into a single view, maximizing the technology. The responsive, 24/7 virtual chatbot even knows the near-closing and after-hours of the agent call center to set proper expectations for when an agent can get back to them.
By offering a chat service to answer questions on its schedule, the retail chain is drastically improving the user experience, innovating faster and empowering its teams to focus on what always mattered most — the customer experience.
