Lovehoney’s AI agent saves it 1300 hours every month while achieving 94% customer satisfaction
Within 3 months...
Launched internationally
Saved every month for the CS team
Customer satisfaction rate
The Problem
Lovehoney is the UK's largest online adult retailer, with 1 in 3 adult products sold in the country coming from its warehouse. Internationally, the company has seen huge growth in recent years, with revenue increasing 22% in both of 2017 and 2018.
This increase in sales means the company now gets >100,000 orders a month. As Head of Customer Service, leading contact centers in the UK, USA and Australia, Matt Oxford’s biggest priority has been growing the customer service team to meet the increased demand.
Lovehoney’s customers know what they want when they get in touch. They expect to find the information they need easily without having to wait for a resolution. For a customer service team already handling the delivery logistics and dealing with complex product queries, consistently meeting these expectations is an ongoing challenge.
The Solution
Lovehoney needed a tailored data-driven solution with a self-evolving ability that could integrate easily into its existing systems. For an already time-poor customer service team, minimizing disruption and getting the new system operational quickly were also key priorities.
Having an AI agent handling a portion of the company’s live chats had the potential to create massive time savings for the team, as well as help them achieve customer satisfaction scores way above their industry average too.
For Matt, having a solution optimized for Lovehoney’s unique demands was critical.
“I was really impressed by how dynamic and flexible the Percept.AI team was in delivering a tailored solution for us,” he said. “The starting point was what we needed and how we wanted it to work, and within a couple of days the team delivered exactly that.”
The company needed a solution that could start adding value fast. Within two weeks Percept.AI had integrated with Lovehoney’s systems and the new AI agent was accurately deflecting over 25% of live chats.
The Results
Lovehoney’s Percept.AI solution learns from past customer questions, extracting insights on the most effective ways to handle different customer intentions. It quickly became efficient at directing users to the information they need.
“We've got very high satisfaction rates with our live chat, with a 92-94% score, while our industry average is more like 82%,” says Matt. “We've not had any complaints and the answers it gives align exactly with what our agents would say.”
The solution began adding value almost instantly, even ensuring a continuity of service when organizational challenges made this difficult:
“We went through a couple of weeks where we had some staffing challenges and actually had to turn our chat off,” says Matt, “but the AI agent was still running as the first point of contact, giving answers to customers. Before we wouldn't have had anything.”
By picking up a substantial portion of the customer service team’s incoming queries, the AI agent drives value for the company by allowing employees to focus on more value-add tasks. The solution has been so successful that the company has now successfully launched it across six of its international sites.
“I think the customer service world still isn’t sure about AI yet. There's too much talk and really little action and if I'm honest with you, I think they've made it over complicated.” says Matt, “I think a lot of people don't like to onboard new stuff, but I think they're missing something big at the moment because this solution works.”