How Victoria Plum provided round-the-clock support for its customers

Highlights

• Victoria Plum was dealing with a monthly chat volume of up to 45,000 queries a month
• Before working with Ultimate, 85% of requests were being escalated to employees
• Today, Victoria Plum has an automation rate of 38%
• 50% of chat requests regarding damaged items are successfully handled by their AI-powered virtual agent
  
  Learn more about AI automation rates in our Ultimate glossary

The Customer: Leading customers to "little bathroom victories"

Victoria Plum is a pure-play online retailer specializing in bathroom furniture and accessories. The business is committed to providing products and services that are best suited to its customers’ needs and offering a quality customer experience (CX) including certified end-to-end design and installation services. It has helped customers across the UK achieve what Victoria Plum calls “little bathroom victories” for more than 20 years.

The Challenge: Increasing automation rates without sacrificing authenticity

Victoria Plum’s CX team had three goals in mind when getting in touch with Ultimate. These were:

• Increasing operational efficiency
• Harnessing the power of AI to handle a greater number of customer queries more quickly
• Maintaining the brand’s distinctive tone of voice while embracing automation

The business’s vision is based on being completely customer-focused, so it was imperative that this evolution was completed while making sure customers did not feel sidetracked under any circumstances.

"We wanted our virtual agent to reflect our tone of voice. We needed a conversational virtual agent. And, we wanted a virtual agent that was quite...human," recounts James Tempest, Chatbot Architect at Victoria Plum.

Instead of turning to a generic chatbot to provide a solution, the Victoria Plum CX team wanted to make sure their virtual agents could hold meaningful conversations with customers. This would mean creating precise intents as well as incorporating the brand’s distinctive tone of voice into their dialogues.

The Solution: Leading Victoria Plum to automation victory

The Victoria Plum CX team gravitated towards Ultimate thanks to its supportive team and glowing reviews, and quickly found that they provided all the expertise and solutions needed.

Thanks to a watertight onboarding process and a simple deployment process, Ultimate steered Victoria Plum to its very own Little Automation Victory.

Not only is the company’s CX team able to hand over queries to the virtual agent after hours, they can rest assured that it will transport the brand and its values through the dialogue they have helped shape.

85% of Victoria Plum's requests regarding damaged items were being escalated to human agents just six months ago. Today, 50% of replacement queries are handled by their virtual colleagues.

The Success: 500 chats a day

Thanks to automation, every Victoria Plum customer is now greeted by a virtual agent, which can handle 500 chats a day – that’s an average automation rate of 38%.