Illustrative scenario
A retailer swamped by repetitive customer enquiries
Overview
How we'd approach customer communications for a small retail or e-commerce business answering the same questions all day.
The situation
The pain point Answering the same questions takes most of one person's day, and replies slow down at busy times.
A small online and high-street retailer answers a steady stream of "where's my order", "do you have this in stock" and returns questions across email and social media. The same answers get written again and again.
Where AI could help
The realistic opportunity is customer comms: drafting accurate replies to common enquiries from the retailer's own order and product data, for a person to approve and send. The aim is to take the repetitive load off, not to put a chatbot between the business and its customers.
How we'd approach it
- Intake. Which enquiries actually repeat, and what data a good answer needs.
- Opportunity scoring. We'd separate the questions that really do repeat from the ones that need a person, because not everything should be automated.
- Proof of concept. We'd build a working demo that drafts replies to a set of the retailer's real, anonymised enquiries, so they can judge tone and accuracy before any build.
- Report. Where it's safe to assist, where a person must stay in the loop, and the running cost.
- Build or handover. We build it, or hand a clear brief to their own team or supplier, including how to keep the customer's experience personal.
What success would look like
In the proof of concept we'd measure how many enquiries get an accurate first-draft reply, the time saved per day, and response times at peak. Whether it's worth it depends on those numbers for this business, which is exactly what the proof of concept is for.
See it on your own data
Every business is different, so the proof of concept is where we find out whether this works for yours.