Enhanced customer experience with AI-powered chatbot

The challenge

Streamlining access to technical information

The client’s large global B2B website contains dense technical information, making it difficult for customers to find the specific solutions they require. Data indicated this often led to prolonged interactions and customer frustration, with significant drop-offs at key moments in the buying journey.

Primary pain points included:

1. Difficulty finding technical information specific to the products’ application (e.g., material thickness, composition, durability, and industry use).
2. Unfamiliarity with product line brand names, leading to confusion about which products to consider.
3. Reluctance to read lengthy technical documents, resulting in drop-offs before finding needed information.

Together with the client, we decided to explore whether a chatbot that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) could be implemented to streamline the customer experience on the site.

The solution

Implementing an AI-powered chatbot to guide customers

The implementation process consisted of four steps:

1. Training the AI

We had the secure AI model ingest all information on the client’s website, including technical documentation, brochures, PDFs, and presentations. This constituted the chatbot’s knowledge base.

To ensure a consistent brand experience, we also aligned the AI model with the brand’s tone of voice, brand guidelines, and technical vocabulary.

2. Tailoring the chatbot

As a global business, our client has customers from all over the world. To allow for a positive customer experience for everyone, we also tailored the chatbot to understand and accurately respond in the user’s preferred language.

Using advanced natural language processing (NLP) models, the chatbot is also tailored to understand and respond to complex technical queries, ensuring accurate and relevant answers.

3. Creating the chatbot interface design

We created an intuitive, user-friendly chatbot component that is aligned with the website’s look and feel, ensuring a consistent digital experience for users.

4. Setting up a performance dashboard

Continuous improvement is key. With this in mind, we also developed a backend dashboard to monitor all chatbot conversations and benchmark the chatbot’s performance against set KPIs.

This provided key insights into user behaviour which we then used to finetune the solution before rolling it out across their digital ecosystem.

The impact

Transforming customer engagement

The AI-powered chatbot significantly improved customer service efficiency and satisfaction, driving several measurable results for the business:

• Commercial impact: 80% of the conversations with the chatbot were about commercially significant topics such as product information, technical specifications, and company details.
• Answer rate: 83% of conversations were successfully resolved by the chatbot.
• Positive feedback: 78% of users provided positive feedback on the quality of responses.
• Sales enablement: 43% of users who interacted with the chatbot requested follow-up meetings with sales representatives, who had greater context after reviewing the customer conversation history.

Our initial testing also provided learnings for further enhancement. For example, the proportion of users choosing to interact with the chatbot was lower than expected, indicating a need for a more intuitive solution.

This project showcases the transformative potential of AI in enhancing customer service and, by doing so, building customer trust and driving growth for a global business.