Ocado is using artificial intelligence in order to understand and prioritise its customer emails.
The online grocer, a Top100 company in IRUK Top500 research, is deploying a machine learning-enhanced contact centre, that uses an AI software model developed in house and using tools from the Google Cloud Platform, to categorise incoming customer emails.
Machine-learning helps the system to understand and respond to the natural language that customers us. The AI model parses the email, adding a summary and priority tag (as seen left), leaving customer service staff free to focus on solving problems for customers, rather than spending time categorising thousands of emails manually.
“We strive to deliver the best shopping experience for all our 500,000+ active customers,” said Debbie Wilson, Ocado contact centre operations manager. “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 Technology has created the AI software model, which also uses Google Cloud Platform tools including TensorFlow.
“We’re thrilled that TensorFlow helped Ocado adapt and extend state-of- the-art machine learning techniques to communicate more responsively with their customers,” said Zak Stone, product manager for TensorFlow on the Google Brain Team. “With a combination of open-source TensorFlow and Google Cloud services, Ocado and other leading companies can develop and deploy advanced machine learning solutions more rapidly than ever before.”
Ocado is also one of the leading partners for the Google Cloud Platform and its Cloud Natural Language API.
