Smoothing the customer journey with always-on answers
Blue Diamond Growers is the world's leading almond marketer and processor. Today Blue Diamond® has over 3,000 growers across California. Every month, Blue Diamond’s consumer advocate group deals with a high volume of consumer questions related to coupons, products, recipes, and more. Lisa Diehl, Blue Diamond’s Consumer Advocacy Manager, saw an opportunity to provide a quicker, easier way for consumers to find answers to their questions.
The company was looking to simplify the customer journey by enabling consumers to get answers without needing to pick up the phone. As an added benefit, they wanted to free up agents to focus on engaging more deeply with consumers.
"I was looking for an alternative and interactive way for consumers to self-serve," said Diehl. "Emplifi chatbot can answer many of our FAQ’s and provide links to different pages within our website, including links to SmartLabel and even a link to our Blue Diamond Amazon page."
AI-driven chatbot delivers quick value
Blue Diamond looked to their longtime CRM provider, Emplifi, and chose the award-winning, powerful, conversational self-service solution, Emplifi Bot.
The Blue Diamond team deployed the chatbot on their website, www.bluediamond.com, in 2018, with the purpose of answering the most common consumer queries, including questions about coupons, product flavors, allergies, ingredients, and recipes. Since these questions generate the highest contact volume, the team at Blue Diamond singled them out as the most impactful topics to cover from the start.
Emplifi Bot, driven by intelligent narrow AI and natural language processing, is designed to allow consumers to engage conversationally to answer questions and complete a variety of transactions. The core functionality can be built once and easily deployed across multiple platforms, including websites, mobile apps, messengers, and voice-based virtual assistants. Blue Diamond is following best practice by taking a phased approach with their chatbot, starting on one channel and then expanding channels and functionality as the bot learns. With unprecedented insight from active listening, Blue Diamond can respond to fast-changing customer expectations with powerful experiences.
“We are continually updating Emplifi Bot with new information such as when we launch new products,” added Diehl. “We also have links to our product locators, and the Bot returns images of our products, including a google map of where to purchase.”
Serving up answers and surfacing consumer insights
Within its first month alone, the Blue Diamond bot engaged in more than 9,000 interactions with close to 6,000 consumers, delivering correct answers with 90% accuracy. As the AI continues to learn and identify questions that don’t yet have an answer, the accuracy rate has increased.
Blue Diamond can see how many people have interacted with the Bot on the website each month and which pages they visit. Within the FAQ’s, they can review how many links were successful, and where tweaks need to be made to ensure the information is accurate.
In addition to providing conversational self-service experiences, the bot is also surfacing valuable insights that can be used across the organization, including by the marketing, web development, and product teams. For example, upon launch the chatbot received a larger than anticipated volume of recipe requests, indicating that consumers were extremely interested in what recipes they could make with Blue Diamond products. The consumer advocate team shared this insight with the marketing and web teams, suggesting that the next website redesign makes recipe information more readily available.
"Emplifi Bot helps in our day-to-day," said Diehl. "From the Bot, we offer Live Agent Chat, along with self-serve. This has become an important consumer channel, and we look forward to continuing to add new features as they are developed."
Recently, Blue Diamond also started using Emplifi Bot Messenger. "I love the graphics and how it looks outwardly to consumers," added Diehl. “It makes it eye appealing and has been effective for our consumers. This also helps me to know what is important to our consumers by the links they are clicking, and how I can keep this information fresh and enticing.”
