The high-end Swedish fashion brand Tiger of Sweden, founded in 1903, has become a great example of how traditional retail is embracing the digital era by expanding their services as an online, digital business.
Tiger of Sweden has several flagship stores in 8 countries and sells online to more than 30 countries worldwide. Tiger of Sweden represents a different and opposing voice to fast fashion.
Historically, the fashion house has always had a focus on crafting high-quality garments while standing for fair working conditions and ethical fashion production processes.
In their path to providing more purchase options and services online, Tiger of Sweden’s customer inquiries had been rising consistently year on year.
Questions from their customers were often very similar, relating to common post-sales questions around order tracking and returns, or pre-sales questions focused on sizing and shipping.
Responding to each individual inquiry would take up a large portion of the employees’ time in Customer Service. The result would be extended waiting times for existing customers and increased chances of cart abandonment for potential buyers.
Innovation through automation was needed to improve their support and pre-sales service. It would need to be fast to implement, easy to maintain, and well-integrated with their pre-existing business systems.
The idea was there: to provide high-quality user experiences across each and every customer touchpoint. But how?
The brand started considering using an AI chatbot to handle all first-line support across every pre- and post-sales touchpoint. By using an AI platform like Certainly to build a conversational AI assistant, it could be the initial gateway outside of opening hours, that would carry out the whole conversation and resolve the ticket or pass the request on to an employee in case it was more complicated.
Tiger of Sweden chose Certainly because the platform was the best fit: it facilitated all the integrations they needed, and it was easy to use for employees outside the IT department.
The Certainly platform, while being built on state-of-the-art technology, is easy to use for non-coders:
“Across companies and across industries, we find that development teams are extremely busy. One of the priorities for us at Certainly, was to build an advanced platform that developers would love, but businesspeople too could easily use, without needing to use developers’ time.”
Henrik Fabrin, CEO of Certainly.
As more customers were chatting with the bot, Tiger of Sweden was able to use the Certainly platform to train and improve its understanding of human input and the formulations of the answers.
The more customers communicated with it, the better Nadin Kempel Sigh, Head of Customer Service, was able to optimize her AI chatbot. Answers to customers’ inquiries got quicker, and the company’s customer satisfaction increased.
Next, by analyzing the conversational, zero-party data gathered in the Certainly platform, Nadin established that the AI chatbot was delivering exceptional post-sales service, but was often having to hand over product questions to human agents. From early on, it had been the target of Tiger of Sweden to expand the scope of the chatbot to assist with more of these pre-purchase, ecommerce questions.
“Tiger of Sweden is a premium brand, and a premium brand should deliver premium user experiences at every touchpoint. This means that from the moment a user browses the website to the moment they unpack their new product it should be a high-quality experience.”
Nadin Kempel Sigh
With assistance from the Certainly team, they expanded their offering to pre-sales. They now benefit from an AI chatbot that is present across every customer touchpoint. It not only answers customer FAQs, but guides users to the right products with sizing recommendations, delivering personalized gift suggestions, and helping shoppers through checkout.
Since starting to use the Certainly chatbot, Tiger of Sweden has seen an increase in overall inbounds because of the 24/7 customer service availability.
At the same time, the type of inbounds changed radically. Inbounds on email and phone decreased by 50%, while inbounds via chat increased by 400%.
The first-reply time for customer service employees dropped significantly from 17 hours to just 10 hours.
The chatbot works as first-line support freeing up time for their agents, who now have more time to respond faster to customers and more time to handle more complex tickets, that might require an agent to look into them.
Today, 35% of Tiger of Sweden’s customer inquiries are handled by their chatbot.
Perhaps one of the most uplifting results from the chatbot implementation is that the Customer Satisfaction score has increased in just one year from 73% to 96%.
Nadin stresses how the bot is playing a vital role in the improvement:
“We can feel the results in the business.”
Nadin Kempel Sigh
The primary goal of a Conversational Commerce chatbot was to deliver exceptional onsite experiences from the moment a user arrives on the site. The benefits of this would be threefold:
And the results of this addition speak for themselves:
Progress with conversational AI has been rapid and the results which Certainly are helping to delivering are impressive, to say the least. But Tiger of Sweden aren’t stopping there!
A multilingual bot supporting conversations in Swedish, Danish, and German is on the horizon – fortunately the Certainly platform, as well as a target of the bot handling 50% of all queries without human support.
Having built an effective ecommerce chatbot based on data from user conversations, Nadin wants to continue to use ‘zero party data’ to drive further insights and grow customer lifetime value:
“The bot will continue being valuable to us in so many ways. The more information we have about our customers through direct dialogue at the time of purchase, the more we can tailor our product collections and create offerings which we know will increase satisfaction and long-term loyalty to our brand.”
Authors: Beatrice Carraro