Ocado deploys machine learning enhanced contact centre for customer emails
Ocado has deployed its new machine learning enhanced contact centre which employs an advanced artificial intelligence software model to categorize customer emails.
The online grocery retailer said the novel approach, which was developed in-house by Ocado’s technology division, ensures that customers still get the familiar human touch while also benefiting from the quick response provided by technology automation. This is due to the fact that the retailer’s customer service representatives do not have to spend time categorizing emails manually.
The AI model parses the email and provides a summary and a priority tag which then leaves the customer service representative free to focus on solving the customers’ problems.
Debbie Wilson, Ocado contact centre operations manager, said: “We strive to deliver the best shopping experience for all our 500,000+ active customers. However, working in an omnichannel contact centre can be challenging, with the team receiving thousands of contacts each day via telephone, email, webchat, social media and SMS. The new software developed by the Ocado Technology data science team will help the contact centre filter inbound customer contacts faster, enabling a quicker response to our customers which in turn will increase customer satisfaction levels.”
Ocado said the software model can process thousands of customer emails per day and has been trained using millions of past messages from customers. In addition, the application respects customers’ privacy by filtering out personal details such as postal or email addresses, telephone numbers and other sensitive information.
The new ML-enhanced contact centre application has been built using an in-house AI model and data sets created by Ocado’s technology division as well as TensorFlow and related products from the Google Cloud Platform.
