Is your chat bot making you look bad?

As a consumer, I can’t bear poor customer services. Even worse, is a poor customer services chat bot. This was one of the main drivers behind developing Levitate Supply Chain for the freight industry, which is not renowned for amazing customer services.

So I purchase a pair of Nike Air Max 95’s from a famous, fashion oriented high street sports chain.

 I wouldn’t normally spend £140 on a pair of trainers, but I promised myself to make them last.

I placed the order on a Sunday evening, expecting delivery by the Tuesday. Said retailer uses Hermes which are an awesome carrier, at least for other brands.

To be frank, I forgot about the order for a few days until the Thursday, when I decided to seek some help.

I used their chatbot, expecting to get an instant response. Which I did, but not a suitable one. Their chatbot, called Becky, told me my order was with the carrier. Also that some orders could be split into two shipments. I am not sure of the logic behind splitting one pair of shoes into two distinct deliveries. Anyway, Becky linked me to the Hermes site where I was told there was a delay, and that I needed to wait a week before contacting the retailer to get more information. The ability to ask questions there had been disabled and so I am lead down a maze of Christmas tree, customer services logic.

Back to Becky, near useless. Infinite loop of not answering my question and asking me to ask another/the same question.

I did email their customer support team and got an answer almost straight away from a human. There was not much more detail, why can’t anyone read my message and give me an adequate answer? I am only asking ‘When will my order arrive’.

I like to think that my pushing for a manual intervention managed to dislodge my trainers from the Hermes DC and get them with a delivery driver as they arrived at noon today.

The point I am trying to make is that there are solutions out there that are either entirely system driven, like aforementioned retailer, or answered by customer services teams, who spend half an hour trying to authenticate you and then proceed with a difficult conversation which lasts an hour whereby you may or may not get an adequate response, typically adopted by utilities and comms companies.

Levitate is industry agnostic so can work for retailers as well as couriers, carriers, freight forwarders and supply chain managers.

Levitate can be highly configured to answer any question, where the data can be presented via your ERP. It will also refer you to a human if it can’t answer your question within x number of attempts. If it cant’ answer one question, e.g. where is my container? it will ask you another question. What’s your bill of lading or shipment or order number? We will always try harder than Becky to answer your clients question.

I am not sure if the retailer has on boarded a bad solution, or badly implemented a good one. Having worked on client implementations of enterprise supply chain systems over the years, and knowing the pinch points, we have made the process really very simple.

You send us examples of your data, our algorithms build a dataset and schema within a few days. We present back a toolkit for your to take command of your customer services.

The trainers turned up, size 8.5 which came up small. So I ended up going to the high street store to change them. Annoyed, should have just gone there in the first place..!,