It was mid-July 2017 when I got an email from a sales colleague about a potential chatbot opportunity with a short window to respond. The prospective customer was the UK branch of supermarket chain Lidl. The Lidl digital marketing director and his team had already looked at a variety of vendors and were ready to make a selection, but they were still open to listening to us. It was a long shot, we thought, but we still wanted to give it our best effort.

Fast forward 5 months, and we’re seeing tweets like this from the Daily Mail and The Sun:

Wow, what had happened? Well, a fantastic team effort is what had happened.

Winning Team Lidl Over

Lidl saw value in:

– our expertise around all things Customer Experience

– our unique approach to Natural Language Understanding with support for many languages

– our “cloud clout” and the resulting time-to-market

– our design-once-deploy-anywhere framework that allows taking one bot and deploying it on channels like FB Messenger, SMS, Amazon Echo, IVR, etc. with minimal additional effort

– our experience in building and hosting enterprise-grade, transactional customer self-service solutions that integrate into the larger marketing and contact center ecosystem of a multi-national corporation, including the ability to expand into eCommerce

From our Press Release: https://www.aspect.com/company/news/press-releases/lidl-uk-launches-ai-wine-chatbot-to-uk-customers-with-aspect-software

How does a conversation with Margot look like? Have a look here:

When implementing the application, we decided to work with one of our long-time application development partners, 2-steps-ahead, who has been building voicebots on our IVR and chatbot platform, Aspect CXP, for over a decade. Internally, we had all of the right people in place and ready to take on this project: Aspect Professional Services provided the project management and architectural support, R&D provided support by our on-staff linguists. With the combined forces of our team and 2-steps-ahead we were ready to embark on the buildout of the solution.

A Dream Customer

The project kicked off with a workshop in Lidl’s Wimbledon England HQ at the end of August 2017. The Lidl digital marketing team came with a thorough understanding of how a chatbot experience should look and even a high-level concept of the functionality it should provide.

One of the main drivers for this project was the realization that, while Lidl was successful with their wine selection, winning awards and increasing sales, they didn’t have anyone in their 800+ stores or their contact center that knew much – if anything – about wines. The knowledge was sitting with their full-time on-staff sommelier! The Lidl team wasn’t interested in sharing that knowledge through static content on a website like an FAQ; instead, they wanted to create a much more interactive and engaging way through which they could impart their wine knowledge on their customers.  Artificial Intelligence allowed them to accomplish that by creating a chatbot accessible via Facebook Messenger that could answer questions from customers directly, on the spot. They clearly understood the power of a Conversational UI (CUI) for an engaging customer experience!

A name for the chatbot was quickly found by the Lidl team: Margot – chosen to remind the wine connoisseur of the French wine-making region (Margaux), while generally being a popular first name in the UK.

What Can You Do, Margot?

On a high level, Margot is trained to help customers with 4 different types of inquiries, as the chart shows. In addition, it can direct users to the existing Store Finder, which will pop up as a webview within the Facebook Messenger app.

One of the key decisions we made together with the Lidl team was to put Margot on the main Facebook page of Lidl UK: www.facebook.com/LidlUK. Previous experiences have shown that if you create a separate page just for a chatbot, discovery and retention suffer severely. By adding her to Lidl’s main Facebook presence we were sure that Margot had her home in the heart of the social Lidl experience online.

Lidl UK has several full-time staff members that help with answering questions from social networks. Margot thus “collaborates” with live staff in the sense that they are monitoring the incoming messages for mentions of the desire to speak to customer service, and the user always has the option to involve live staff when needed.

From a CUI design perspective, we decided to go with a mix of natural language dialog and menu-based flows. The initial menus introduce the scope of the solution and provide basic guidance; from our 15+ years of experience of building these kinds of applications, we know that people can be overwhelmed if they know they’re chatting with a computer and feel they can’t interact with it like they would with a human when presented with an open-ended question such as “how can I help you” – they simply expectsome guidance in the form of menus. Over time, as these chatbot experiences establish themselves across brands, these hesitations should go away.

In the middle of the project, we came up with the idea to teach Margot to understand emojis. What if people asked her about ? or ?? We didn’t want to pass on the opportunity to add that element of fun to the mix.

Generally speaking, the Margot persona was designed to be light-hearted and informal; a true wine enthusiast but definitely not snooty, someone who loves food and good company. Margot is truly conversational in her style, answering questions as such as “which red wines from Chile under £6 do you sell”, “what goes well with grilled salmon”, or “how do I get that stain out of my tablecloth??” She has additional features, such as an interactive wine quiz to encourage further brand engagement and to interact with customers in a fun, intuitive, and light-hearted manner.

From a linguistic perspective, Margot was a welcome challenge for our linguists. Not only was Margot designed to allow for plain English inquiries such as “I’m making roast beef for my friends tonight, what should I get with that”, or questions including multiple items of information as in “looking for a red wine from Italy under 6 pounds”, or those staccato communicators that send a single word such as “rose”; but Margot was also to benefit from the food ontologies built into Aspect NLU, the natural language understanding engine embedded in Aspect CXP, so that she could easily subsume inquiries about ziti, farfalle, macaroni, spaghetti, tagliatelle, rigatoni, vermicelli, fettucine, pappardelle, penne, fusilli, … under pasta, or roquefort, gorgonzola, stilton under blue cheese, or … you get the idea. With the built-in ontology, Margot can now easily help with thousands of food items, offering over different 200 individual recommendations.

Some more impressive numbers:

Time to get serious

8 weeks after our initial project meeting we were ready to get serious… Margot was ready for friendly user testing from Lidl brand advocates. Lidl announced Margot on the Lidl Community, and first testers signed up. Testing chatbots early is critical to their success, and needless to say, we quickly found areas for improvement and gaps that we had to close, whether it was missing Mexican cuisine examples in our food ontology, or the ability to parse out money amounts expressed as diversely as “£5”, “5£”, “5 quid”, “a fiver”, or even “around five-ish”. Through a QA phase of intense collaboration between the teams, we were able to squash the bugs in record time and approach deployment readiness.

When we did go live, we decided for a soft rollout, before announcing Margot to the press. However, when the press embargo was finally lifted on January 31st, the feedback we got from the media, our partners, the analysts, but also Lidl customers expressing their joy of interacting with Margot on Twitter, was overwhelming positive, getting coverage in Contact Center World, Daily Mail Online, Telegraph, Food and Wine,  and our favorite was this video from the Huffington Post, who invited a real sommelier, Janet Harrison from Cracking Wine, to “compete” against Margot. Who won?

Itching to chat with Margot yourself? Go to www.facebook.com/LidlUK and hit “Send Message”. Or jump right into the conversation by going to m.me/LidlUK.

Stay tuned for more updates on the coming to life and the adoption of Margot over the coming weeks and months. Many new features are being added as we speak, and both teams aren’t running out of ideas what else automation, artificial intelligence-style, can do to support Lidl on their journey to the top of the UK and international grocery retail space. And this journey has just begun.

Interested in finding out more about the topics in this blog or Aspect? Aspect is one of the subject matter experts that will be sharing their insights and expertise at Customer Response Summit Charleston, March 12-14, 2018. CR Summit Charleston will feature speakers from Neiman Marcus, Indeed, Capital One, T-Mobile, and more. For more information about our leading event for CX professionals, visit our event website.

The post How We Built the Wine Bot Margot for Lidl appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The following is a guest blog written by Evan Dobkin, Marketing Manager at Aspect Software.  

I entered the contact center market five years ago, working on self-service interaction and the potential for personalized, customized experiences made possible by smartphones. At the time, the industry was planning for a multi-channel world. The domination of the “archaic” voice channel was starting to give way to native apps, social channels and SMS as the tides that would lift all customer service ships. It was very easy for businesses to get caught up in the hype of what was on the horizon and become paralyzed, wondering what changes they needed to make to their business to become part of this modern customer service world.

However, over these last five years, I’ve come to understand that despite the bells and whistles of sleek, up-and-coming communication channels, brands looking to add self-service interaction must begin by perfecting their IVR. A modernized IVR can help to improve the customer experience while providing a solid foundation for additional contact channels.

IVR has been, and will continue to be, the workhorse of your customer service offering. Often regarded by consumers as “the channel of last resort,” because they expect resolution when taking the time to call directly, it’s actually critical for resolving many customer issues. Not convinced? Consider these modern IVR realities:

– IVR is one of many contact points

– Improved speech recognition and dynamic personalization have made navigation easier

– New interactive voice solutions (Amazon Echo, Siri, etc…) emerged that are redefining how we interact with and our expectations of today’s IVR

– It is all about customer experience, ease of use – and containing costs

In 2012 Pew Research Center reported 46% of American adults owned a smartphone. By November of 2016 the number climbed to 77%. With this high adoption rate, consumers are more connected than ever before via social, apps and text and messaging platforms. In fact, KPCB reported in 2015 that six of the top 10 most used apps are messaging apps. Once upon a time voice was just IVR and live agent, but now includes virtual assistants and smart devices with the ability for voice and video.

It’s become apparent that brands can no longer afford to have their IVR operating in isolation. The enterprise IVR must become the foundation of the overall customer service ecosystem by adapting to changes in the way that customers prefer to interact, as well as adopting new technologies to enable the best possible experiences for customers. It’s time to leverage the technologies that make these new interaction points so popular to finally make good on the promise of IVR.

Join my Shop Talk, Modern IVR: Revitalize Your Most Important Touchpoint, at Customer Response Summit Vegas on Wednesday, February 8^th and learn how adding modern capabilities to your IVR can improve the customer experience and help you capitalize on your customer’s first impression.

The post The Contact Center of the Future: Everything Old is New Again appeared first on Execs In The Know.