How AllSaints, L’Oreal and Deliveroo are using AI to improve CX

Shelley Bransten, Microsoft’s corporate vice-president for retail, consumer goods and gaming industries, opened her conference session at NRF’s Big Show in January by saying: “You can’t spell retail without AI. It really is in our blood.”

It might have been a slightly cheesy way of making the point, but it allowed her to highlight the vast potential of artificial intelligence (AI) for retail and underline the rapid advancements it is already supporting in the sector, many of which were on display in the show’s expo hall.

Every week, a new deployment of AI in retail emerges, with several specifically focused on boosting the online customer experience (CX).

At The Delivery Conference in London on 6 February, AllSaints’ head of CX and payments, SJ Grabiec, said her “expectations have been surpassed”, talking about using AI-enabled online customer support.

After replatforming its entire e-commerce system at the end of 2022 to replace a custom-coded website, AllSaints embraced AI to provide better customer service. It started working with Digital Genius, which provides an e-commerce “concierge” service. This has helped to automate circa 30% of AllSaints’ chatbot traffic so far, according to Grabiec.

“We had to put in time, effort and planning; the devil was in the detail in terms of the process mapping,” she told the conference, adding that the tech investment has resulted in plugging the gap it had in dealing with “Where is my order?” requests from customers.

Grabiec also noted that the tech deployment means CX and customer service staff are now given more complex topics to tackle. “In our business, our CEO calls it a ‘talent utopia’ – making everyone enjoy their job a little bit more, removing that repetitive low-hanging fruit kind of task,” she said.

As well as launching the chatbot, AllSaints implemented email automation for some customer queries, which has “helped us through peak periods”, according to Grabiec.

“We’ve seen a 50% reduction in our backlogs – and that isn’t just the percentage of what was automated or resolutions provided, it was also the lack of duplication,” she said.

“If a customer doesn’t hear back from you in a certain amount of time, they are going to get nervous and reach out to you again. Then they are going to come to you on Instagram, and then come to you somewhere else.”

Essentially, the use of tech has boosted customer confidence in AllSaints’ ability to solve their issues.

“As soon as we strengthened our [tech and e-commerce] foundations, that’s when we jumped straight on the AI bandwagon,” said Grabiec. “Pre-Covid, we were a 24/7/365 service. We had a global team that supported global service. But after Covid, that wasn’t efficient for us any further. AI and Digital Genius have helped us to have 24/7 availability again, marrying human expertise and service with AI technology.”