About Bestseller
Founded in Denmark in 1975, Bestseller has since grown to become an international fashion powerhouse while remaining a family-owned business. With 20 unique brands under the Bestseller umbrella, including Jack & Jones, Vera Moda, and ONLY, Bestseller provides clothes and accessories for men, women and children. The company counts 17,000 employees worldwide and operates stores in over 40 countries.
With their commitment to bringing sustainable fashion forward, Bestseller has placed environmental sustainability at the heart of their business model. The company has also taken steps to create a 24/7 customer service experience, supported by conversational AI from Heyday by Hootsuite.
Summary: Rapid growth—and related challenges
Even before the pandemic emerged early in 2020, Bestseller was experiencing a sharp increase in the number of customer inquiries it received from the company website and social channels. With so many incoming communications to manage across the organization, Bestseller began looking for a solution that would allow them to ensure customer service requests could be received — and resolved — at any time, day or night.
Bestseller’s Canadian office was focused on finding an automation solution that would work in both English and French, and ideally would be built by a Canadian company. After choosing Heyday, the partners built a custom conversational AI chat solution, which was launched in November 2020 on the Bestseller Canada e-commerce website and the company’s Facebook Messenger channel.
Since then, Bestseller has enjoyed significant efficiency improvements by having the AI resolve customer FAQs and provide personalized product recommendations, all while delivering world-class CX.
Challenge: Find an AI solution to respond to inquiries 24/7
Philippe Gaboury, UX/UI Analyst at Bestseller, explained how it became clear that automation would be key to handling the company’s growing number of customer service inquiries.
“We were looking for a chatbot to extend our [customer service] coverage, because our CS department is only open during working hours,” said Philippe. He explained how many customers weren’t used to shopping online, and needed guidance to know how to inquire about order tracking and other simple questions. To solve the problem, using a conversational AI chatbot was identified as a potential solution.
When it came to choosing an AI solution, Philippe noted the winning provider would need to adapt to fit the size of their business, which is smaller than many of the companies that use AI chat automation. As well, because Bestseller Canada is based in Quebec, the company needed to find a chatbot that could handle the nuances of Quebecois French terms.
Cynthia Lemire, Ecommerce Customer Care Team Leader, said that Heyday was the only provider that met their needs.
“A lot of other companies were based in the US and they used Google Translate for French chats, which to me was a big no-no,” said Cynthia. “We saw that Heyday met our needs, and that they were located here in Canada, in Montreal — that really resonated with us.”
Approach: Respond, resolve, and centralize
Heyday and Bestseller teamed up to build a conversational AI to help the company achieve the following goals:
Centralize customer service messaging in one platform while creating an enjoyable CS experience for customers;
Help customers find answers to their questions through FAQ automation and product search functionality;
Allow Customer Service staff to focus on higher-value inquiries while allowing AI to handle simple questions (around order tracking, for example).
Once the objectives of the conversational AI solution were defined, Heyday got to work building BEST, the custom AI chatbot that would be implemented on the Bestseller e-commerce site and Facebook Messenger channels.
Results: Automation with AI and exceptional CX
Between November 2020 and February 2021, Bestseller’s conversational AI handled more than 38,000 customer conversations on Facebook Messenger, with a peak automation rate of 90%. The Heyday solution also handled over 6600 emails, ensuring customer inquiries were assigned to the right department.
In December 2020, over 70% of Bestseller customers who interacted with the AI chatbot reported their experience as being “excellent”. By January, that number had increased to 76%. The average time for the bot to respond to a customer during this same period was 1 minute and 31 seconds.
Cynthia Lemire of Bestseller noted how simple it is to transfer a conversation from the Heyday chatbot to a human CS representative when the situation calls for it.
“When a conversation is transferred from bot to rep, the customer’s history is available [to be viewed], it’s very smooth, seamless, and simple to understand,” said Cynthia.
In terms of how Bestseller customers interact with the Heyday conversational AI, Frequently Asked Questions are the most common customer requests resolved by the bot. Product searches, order tracking and newsletter signups round out the top four, illustrating how AI chat helps boost sales, support customer satisfaction and nurture loyalty, in addition to creating world-class personalized experiences.
Cynthia praised how easy Heyday is to use, saying the back-end of the solution is intuitive and simple to navigate. Asked if she would recommend Heyday by Hootsuite to anyone else who is considering an automation solution, she had this to say.
“Definitely. Whenever we have a question, we always get a quick response. Everyone is very helpful; we never feel like we’re just a number with Heyday. We’re very well taken care of.”
Find out how Heyday by Hootsuite conversational AI can help your brand automate customer care and drive social commerce sales by booking a demo today.