Zalora launches AI chatbot across SEA

Fashion and lifestyle eCommerce platform ZALORA has launched a new AI-powered customer service chatbot, designed to provide personalised support to customers across Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The chatbot leverages AI that is programmed to learn and understand the intent behind customer inquiries, to provide relevant, accurate responses in a highly intuitive and visual format.

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For simple queries, it leverages generative AI and draws from an ever-growing comprehensive knowledge base of FAQs, while for more complex questions, it utilises natural language processing to grasp the customers’ intentions before providing useful answers, said ZALORA in a statement.

The chatbot can adapt and respond to any language communicated with it, for instance, an entire conversation can be started in English and ended in Mandarin or any of the local languages seamlessly.

The biggest difference between ZALORA’s new chatbot and standard industry counterparts is its deep integration with its consumer core services, it said. This means, once customers sign into their ZALORA shopping profiles, the chatbot can directly access and offer personalised information linked to their accounts, this includes information about the status of their orders, deliveries, and returns.

Knowing customers don’t always recall their order IDs, the chatbot’s easy to understand UI concept presents purchases intuitively with pictures of individual items within each order. This is especially important to ZALORA VIP customers who can easily navigate and sort through multiple orders, it added. 

Additionally, the chatbot is envisioned to support and augment the capabilities of ZALORA's human customer service representative. Across the eCommerce industry, millions of customer service inquiries have to be answered each year, which traditionally requires a human customer representative to address.

Since the launch of its highly intuitive customer service chatbot, ZALORA’s deflection rate has improved by 30% since launch, which exceeds its early targets, it said.  This means more questions can be answered by the AI-powered chatbot without the need for human assistance. For more complex enquiries, the chatbot will provide a summary of the conversation and hand it over to a human customer service representative if they need to step-in for further support.

This ensures shoppers need not restate the details of their conversation, which allows for a seamless customer service experience while also providing cost savings and time for human representatives to focus on providing personalised service to ZVIP customers and handling nuanced challenges that require human touch and understanding.

"As a fashion company at heart, we want to help our customers discover great products and brands that make them feel great and confident," said Liam Hutchinson, director of product, ZALORA Group.

"ZALORA is continuously exploring ways to improve that experience, especially in a more scalable and digital-first way. The innovation around Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) has given us access to more capabilities and partnerships to deliver experiences to give our customers an elevated fashion shopping experience," explained Hutchinson.

“The chatbot sits as part of our broader investments in automation and artificial intelligence under TITAN, our proprietary platform intended to lead fashion eCommerce innovation in maintaining a safe and seamless experience for customers and taking the online shopping experience to the next level,” added Sumit Jain, chief technology officer, ZALORA Group.

eCommerce AI chatbots are not a new concept in the region. Recently, Lazada group released LazzieChat, an eCommerce AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology in Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to provide a more personalised shopping experience to its customers.

LazzieChat  will answer a user’s shopping queries and act as a personal shopper by offering personalised suggestions and product recommendations based on a user’s queries.

“By combining the scale and power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service with the breadth of Lazada’s consumer reach, this collaboration will transform the shopping journey for Lazada’s customers, sellers, and brands,” said Diomedes Kastanis, CTO for Microsoft in Asia Pacific, in a statement by the brand at the time. 

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