Problem / Objective

Nykaa, a fashion and beauty retail company is a go-to destination for online beauty and wellness. The company always ensures a positive customer and buying experience, with its customer service executives spending over 32,000 staff hours a month answering and replying to support queries. However, it faced a challenge as customers were now preferring self- service over speaking to agents. Therefore, Nykaa decided to automate its customer support to focus more time on other important aspects of customer experience.

Solution / Approach

Nykaa collaborated with Verloop.io to increase customer engagement by solving customer problems over chat. Verloop.io implemented a solution in which Nykaa was able to use bot-qualified questions to handle repetitive requests, including cancellations, returns, shipping inquiries, replacements, refunds, and payment issues. Verloop.io’s broad range of integration options enabled Nykaa to experience a smooth transition while switching software systems (including Ticketing Software, CRM, among others). The automation and Verloop’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) modules were built equally on classical machine learning as well as modern deep learning ideas. The tools that were utilized for the implementation included spaCy, MITIE, and Duckling - these tools cover the main NLP-focussed toolkits. PyTorch and Tensorflow were utilized to develop the deep learning flows. The goal of utilizing AI and ML tools was to understand the user intent and respond to the queries in a personalized manner.

Impact / Implementation

After implementing Verloop.io, Nykaa has been able to clear customer queries with deeper context - this has resulted in higher post-purchase customer satisfaction and improved customer loyalty. In the first 30 days of using Verloop.io, Nykaa handled approximately 1.6 million unique conversations. Customers were also given a button called ‘Beauty Advice’. Once clicked, the conversation was handed over to one of Nykaa’s in-house experts who would handpick products based on the customers’ requirements, eliminating the need to manually assign conversations. This was feasible via the chat threads that Nykaa was able to create on Verloop.io to offer a personalized experience for its customers. Over 90% of the customers who participated in these conversations rated the Verloop.io bot as highly favourable or excellent.

Image from Nykaa