What??! IKEA’s AI is Taking Over Human Customer Service?
Global home furnishings, IKEA of Sweden already innovate in their democratic design approach when producing new products, but now they’re taking a leading approach with their customer insights: chatbot customer service and surveys. In this blog, I’m going to talk about how IKEA is using Chatbots to connect with its customers and whether it’s achieved its marketing objectives. Besides, I will give an analysis about if Chatbots in customer service will be a marketing trend in the future or not.
How did IKEA use it?
The IKEA chatbot could answer customer questions on 400 topics about ordering, delivery, payment, complaints, returns, promotions, or stores in natural language, forgives typos, keeps context, gives parameterized answers, and handles long questions.
Ikea focuses on providing a vast selection of furniture and an excellent shopping experience to its customers. Obviously, The IKEA chatbot already handles 5000 calls a day. It resolves more than half of the incidents correctly and automatically. At peak times, it speaks with up to 60 people at once. It is already doing the work of dozens of consultants, and as we train it with new knowledge, its effectiveness increases.
Especially during the pandemic, Chatbot helped reduce the load on the IKEA hotline, which increased significantly after the IKEA stationery stores were closed due to the COVID-19. Thanks to that, the IKEA customer service center can answer customers’ questions immediately 24/7.
As a result, it is able to significantly relieve the burden on the IKEA hotline, involving the consultant only in difficult conversations.
Did Chatbots Help IKEA Achieved Their Marketing Objective?
IKEA’s marketing objective is based on sophisticated customer research and market research. Indeed, IKEA sends design experts into people’s homes to listen to their concerns and provide feedback. This allows IKEA evangelists to make marketing decisions based on people’s real-life experiences rather than static results of surveys or data.
Actually, IKEA chatbots can help to consolidate existing customers and give them a satisfactory shopping experience, but it is not enough to conduct more in-depth communication with new customers, such as formulating reasonable plans and plans according to customers’ preferences and requirements. This part still requires professional expertise to complete manually. So, to a certain extent, it doesn’t help IKEA achieve its marketing objectives, but it can help to collect customer data and preferences by communicating with them, these data will be helpful for achieving its final goal.
Ask Anna to help IKEA customers around the world
Ikea was one of the first companies to use the technology which is launching its virtual assistant, Anna, as a way to guide people around its website. I noticed this information which is very attractive to me, I would like to know how this AI employee helped IKEA deal with their customer service and what happened.
Ask Anna is one of IKEA’s most versatile employees. Developed in conjunction with Artificial Solutions over the last nine years, Ask Anna converses in 21 languages and assists customers on IKEA’s website. With over 1 billion website visits in a year and 20% of visitors asking for Ask Anna’s help, she is extremely busy.
However, Ask Anna was shut down after using few years because it didn’t deliver the customer satisfaction it was created for. The real reason it failed is that it couldn’t answer direct questions properly. By focusing on sounding human, it forgot its purpose: commerce. The recent wave of chatbots should not fall into the same trap. Chatbots are built for commerce and should be able to help customers quickly, and faster than humans in the most accurate way, without sounding robotic.
In a statement to the BBC, an Ikea representative said: “For over 10 years, our automated online assistant, Anna, has cheerfully answered people’s questions on Ikea.com.But as times changed and technology developed, last year it was decided that it was time for Anna to quit.”
My insights
From my research, I found that customers prefer communication with a chatbot via text than immediately engaging with an agent. Moreover, The State of Global Customer Service Report 2018 shows that 66% of customers try to use self-service first. And one of the most effective self-service customer support tools that use texting is a chatbot.
By using it in the marketing area, Chatbots can help to connect sales, customer support, and more. Most companies using chatbots do so for one purpose only. Either it’s for making sales, generating leads, or providing support. While chatbots certainly are effective at each individual task they are given, chatbots built this way won’t realize their full potential.
Overall, I think using Chatbots in customer service will be a trend in the future, it can indeed replace humans to answer and solve some basic questions. However, when a customer has an issue, they would most likely want to skip automated response options and speak to a real person who can fix their problem — not chat with a semi-intelligent bot dishing out some canned responses. That’s the problem that should be figured out when we continue using and developing Chatbots in customer services.
Originally published at https://medium.com/@KathyXue on April 20, 2022.
