Fashion and lifestyle e-commerce platform ZALORA has launched a new AI-powered customer service chatbot designed to provide personalized support to customers across Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
The chatbot leverages AI programmed to learn and understand the intent behind customer inquiries, providing relevant and accurate responses in a highly intuitive and visual format.
For simple queries, it uses generative AI and draws from an ever-growing comprehensive knowledge base of FAQs. For more complex questions, it utilizes natural language processing to grasp the customers’ intentions before providing useful answers, said ZALORA in a statement.
The chatbot can adapt and respond to any language communicated with it. For instance, an entire conversation can start in English and end in Mandarin or any of the local languages seamlessly.
The biggest difference between ZALORA’s new chatbot and standard industry counterparts is its deep integration with its core consumer services, it said.
This means that once customers sign into their ZALORA shopping profiles, the chatbot can directly access and offer personalized information linked to their accounts, including the status of their orders, deliveries, and returns.
Knowing customers don’t always recall their order IDs, the chatbot’s easy-to-understand UI concept presents purchases intuitively with pictures of individual items within each order. This is especially important for ZALORA VIP customers, who can easily sort through multiple orders, it added.
Additionally, the chatbot is envisioned to support and augment the capabilities of ZALORA’s human customer service representatives. Across the eCommerce industry, millions of customer service inquiries must be answered each year, traditionally requiring human customer representatives to address.
Since the launch of its highly intuitive customer service chatbot, ZALORA’s deflection rate has improved by 30%, exceeding its early targets, it said.
This means more questions can be answered by the AI-powered chatbot without the need for human assistance. For more complex inquiries, the chatbot will provide a summary of the conversation and hand it over to a human customer service representative if further support is needed.
This ensures shoppers need not restate the details of their conversation, allowing for a seamless customer service experience while also providing cost savings and time for human representatives to focus on providing personalized service to ZVIP customers and handling nuanced challenges that require a human touch and understanding.
“As a fashion company at heart, we want to help our customers discover great products and brands that make them feel great and confident,” said Liam Hutchinson, director of product, ZALORA Group.
“The chatbot sits as part of our broader investments in automation and artificial intelligence under TITAN, our proprietary platform intended to lead fashion eCommerce innovation in maintaining a safe and seamless experience for customers and taking the online shopping experience to the next level,” added Sumit Jain, chief technology officer, ZALORA Group.
eCommerce AI chatbots are not a new concept in the region. Recently, Lazada group released LazzieChat, an eCommerce AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology in Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to provide a more personalized shopping experience to its customers.
LazzieChat will answer a user’s shopping queries and act as a personal shopper by offering personalized suggestions and product recommendations based on a user’s queries.
“By combining the scale and power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service with the breadth of Lazada’s consumer reach, this collaboration will transform the shopping journey for Lazada’s customers, sellers, and brands,” said Diomedes Kastanis, CTO for Microsoft in Asia Pacific, in a statement by the brand at the time.
