Elkjøp is the largest Scandinavian consumer electronics retailer processing over 5 million customer inquiries every year. Over the last several years, Elkjøp has used Kindly’s market-leading AI technology to build e-commerce chatbots. These have automated much of their customer service, and now the chatbots have helped drive an 80% improvement in user satisfaction rates.

In the fall of 2021, Kindly introduced a new feature to the platform known as Bot Improvements, which has taken quantum leaps in terms of reducing time consumption on chatbot training and maintenance.

To achieve this, Kindly partnered with Innovation Norway, Norway’s state-owned innovation hub, along with selected customers. Together we developed a highly advanced system that automatically suggests improvements for chatbot conversations.

Elkjøp was one of those select customers. Now that they’ve had time to fully use the new feature, they’ve reported successful improvements in how they manage the chatbot so it can better support customers. This is their success story with Bot Improvements!

How Bot Improvements makes it easier to deploy updates

Since introducing Kindly’s AI Chatbot technology to their website, Elkjøp has dedicated resources to managing and improving the chatbot experience. One of the core responsibilities of the team is to identify gaps that prevent the chatbot from answering more customer questions. The typical maintenance workload consists of:

• Fallbacks: providing human support to help the chatbot answer all it’s
asked

• Dialogue confusion: identifying when intertwined dialogues confuse the chatbot

• Developing the content that serves as automated responses to customer
enquiries

• Identifying patterns in user behaviour to further enhance the chatbot experience

• Pinpointing how many people say “sorry” and other pleasantries to the chatbot

Bot Improvements has made it much easier to spot which conversations require updates. It’s allowed the Elkjøp team to quickly react to new topics and improve or iterate on existing answers. Kindly has taken a big step closer towards the dream goal of a self-learning chatbot, and Helmi says their team is very excited about the next version of Bot Improvements.

“To me, there’s no question that Kindly has become a better product because of Bot Improvements. Working with a chatbot requires all of us to step into other people’s shoes so that we can see, from their point of view, what is the most convenient path to solve their problems. With Bot Improvements, this process is much easier for us so that we can make the website that much better for our customers.”

Bot Improvements simplifies chatbot optimisations

Helmi Jokinen is the Service Experience Coordinator at Elkjøp, and one of the main users of the Elkjøp chatbots. Since the rollout of Bot Improvements, Helmi says the new feature has made their life, as well as that of their teammates, much easier from day to day.

Bot Improvements is a great example of machine learning and human intuition working hand in hand. It enables the chatbot to manage more manual work and repetitive tasks on behalf of the Elkjøp support team. The data from the archived conversations, which is the basis of the chatbot-training data, are in a structured form since Bot Improvements pre-sorts and presents the most important insights and tasks for you to solve from those logs of earlier conversations with customers.

With this knowledge in hand, admins like Helmi can easily pull up those insights and deploy the most optimal improvements to the chatbot experience.

The platform is intuitively designed and allows users to solve tasks by presenting them specific improvements for you to complete, rather than the status quo of searching for data from chat logs to make tasks from. With Kindly, it’s only a couple of clicks and you’re done. Bot Improvements is a game-changer in terms of how the traditional method of chatbot training is currently done. Look at how it's done here:

“Before Bot Improvements, admins had to review large amounts of data manually - which is a process all companies using chatbot solutions are dependent on. But now, with Bot Improvements, admins use 80 percent less time reviewing data and identifying problems. Simply having the tool makes the work so much faster, and the insights are far more intuitive for all admins. The time they save is used to improve the bot further.”

Bot Improvements saves our entire team valuable time

Manually inputting all necessary changes and improvements to chatbots is one of the biggest time consumers for customer support teams. Bot Improvements automates many of these manual tasks, giving more time back to support teams so that they can dedicate more resources towards solving more challenging problems for customers.

In Elkjøp’s case, the value of Bot Improvements lies in the reduction of trivial work. On average, trainers spend up to 50 percent of their time maintaining both the chatbot and the overall website experience for customers. With Bot Improvements, every trainer has been given back at least one hour per workday.

This extra hour is reinvested in overseeing chatbot quality which, in turn, benefits customers and the entire support experience at Elkjøp. The company prides itself on quality service in the post-sale customer experience. The chatbot has become essential to maintaining those relationships.

“Bot Improvements has saved our entire team hours of time on repetitive tasks. If someone used 10 hours for a set of tasks before, Bot Improvements allows those same tasks to be completed in just 2 hours. Work is also more pleasant, less repetitive, and there is far less boring log monitoring.”