Client story National Retailer Elevates Customer Experience With Azure Bot Framework
By Insight UK / 6 Sep 2019 / Topics: Microsoft Azure
A national retailer sought a streamlined, digital solution to improve its customer chat experience while capturing all conversation data. After a statistical analysis of previous conversations and how well the client’s current chatbot guided customers toward speaking with an agent, the Insight team were able to identify the areas where users’ pain points were showing most frequently. They then re-evaluated the conversation flows to streamline interactions.
The Challenge
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.
Additionally, 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.
The Solution
After a statistical analysis of previous conversations and how well the client’s current chatbot guided customers toward speaking with an agent, the Insight team were able to identify the areas where users’ pain points were showing most frequently. They then re-evaluated the conversation flows to streamline interactions.
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.
To accomplish an expansive list of user features - which require artificial intelligence, machine learning and always-on capabilities - our Digital Innovation 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.
