Step Up Mitra’s Customer Experience with AI Virtual Assistants, Acha!
As the largest all-commerce service provider, maintaining mitras satisfaction is one of Mitra Bukalapak priorities.
As we continue to increase the quality of our service across all of our platforms, adapting to changes and trends related to consumer behaviors is the key that drives our approach.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve made a lot of adjustments. As the pandemic made digital platforms the place where people turned to, we focused on developing features based on supply and demand perspectives. We had to ensure many products were available on Mitra Bukalapak app to serve as many warung owners as possible. We introduced different digital products and grew our grocery service.
We continue to deliver goods directly to warungs’ doors, empowering them to provide various services to customers, including phone credit and electricity top up, selling game vouchers, bill payment, e-wallet top ups, gold bullion sales, money transfer and parcel delivery. We aim our Mitra to have the ability to transform into “Warung Serba Ada”
However, the more services we provide for the Mitra, the more preparation goes into providing the best service. In delivering a great hyper-personalized customer experience — or in this case, Mitra experience — we get our Mitra involved during the product design stage to consider their thoughts and experience to help sharpen the decisions in catering to their unique needs.
We need to remember that listening is essential. It’s only by listening that we understand and can react to the customer’s needs. Continuously learning from the market and delivering a great experience will create trust which eventually leads to loyalty.
We take that principle into account and translate it to the Mental-Model method that we always use. Through this method, we consider our Mitra’s daily routines when it comes to creating and improving the features on the Mitra Bukalapak app. This way, our Mitra will easily adapt to any changes made. This is why the Mitra Bukalapak App is slightly different from most marketplace apps.
Let’s take a look at some of the examples!
Why do we have a menu/navigation bar on the top of the app while other apps place the menu on the bottom?
We implement A/B testing to find out which features and navigation buttons are most used by our Mitra. That drove our decision to put the navigation bar on top. We also choose to set the “most-used” features like Kirim Uang, phone credit top-up, and electricity payment on the top row of feature options so it would be easy for our Mitra to find them.
The main section of the app is also where we always put our newly launched features. This is so that the features grab the Mitra’s attention — and they give them a try.
Furthermore, we’ve been implementing data-driven personalized recommendations with real-time trigger communications that will help them find their products at the right time.
As an extension to that, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently being used for multiple use cases and expected to be the main driver towards the hyper-personalizations.
We created a Virtual Assistance for Mitra Bukalapak called Acha.
Acha was designed to give information and solve Mitra’s issues automatically, using chat features that replicate the exact real-life customer service’s data checking and treatment.
After implementing Acha, we saw a 53% decline in monthly issues handled manually by agents.
We also created an additional chatbox feature where Mitra can manually fill in their inquiries if they cannot find them in the list of predefined issues.
With Acha, we identified Mitra’s intent using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to solve inquiries/problems faster, along with automated-integrated solutions. NLP itself is a part of Artificial Intelligence that aligns the interaction between machines and humans using natural language.
We could understand their needs using the feature and provide a quick problem solving experience without forgetting the essential touch of a “human conversation”.
We find that understanding Mitra’s needs while continuously inventing new products that solve Mitra’s pain points plays a huge part!
