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

Victoria Plum collaborated with ultimate.ai to drive efficiencies in the way it handled customer queries through automation, helping it reduce customer response times while preserving the brand’s distinctive tone of voice.

In this Customer Story

1. The Company: Leading customers to "little bathroom victories"

2. The Situation: Increasing automation rates without sacrificing authenticity

3. The Solution: Leading Victoria Plum to automation victory

4. The Success: 500 chats a day

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• Victoria Plum was dealing with a monthly chat volume of up to 45,000 queries a month
• Before working with ultimate.ai, 85% of requests were being escalated to employees
• Today, Victoria Plum has an automation rate of up to 38%, with up to 44% deflection
• 50% of chat requests regarding damaged items are successfully handled by their AI

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 to achieve what Victoria Plum calls “little bathroom victories” for more than 20 years.

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 bots to reflect our tone of voice. We needed a conversational bot. We wanted a virtual agent that is 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 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.

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

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

And, whereas 85% of 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.