Singapore – Regional fashion and lifestyle e-commerce platform ZALORA has announced the launch of its AI-powered customer service chatbot, designed to provide seamless and personalised support to customers across Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
ZALORA’s new customer service AI-powered chatbot is the result of a partnership between ZALORA’s technology team and Forethought, a provider of customer-first AI experiences.
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. 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.
Moreover, 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.
In addition to delivering a seamless customer experience, the chatbot is envisioned to support and augment the capabilities of our human customer service representative. Across the e-commerce industry, millions of customer service inquiries have to be answered each year, which traditionally requires a human customer representative to address.
For ZALORA, what makes its AI-powered app to other ones in the industry is that it has a deep integration with our consumer core services. 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.
Liam Hutchinson, director of product at ZALORA Group, said, “As a fashion company at heart, we want to help our customers discover great products and brands that make them feel great and confident. ZALORA is known and loved for its industry-best customer service and we’re continuously exploring ways to improve that experience, especially in a more scalable and digital-first way.”
He added, “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.”
Meanwhile, Sumit Jain, chief technology officer at ZALORA Group, commented, “The chatbot sits as part of our broader investments in automation & artificial intelligence under TITAN, our proprietary platform intended to lead fashion e-commerce innovation in maintaining a safe and seamless experience for customers and taking the online shopping experience to the next level.”
