MESSENGER
Decathlon UK
Boosting customer satisfaction by 10 points with Messenger
THEIR STORY
Sporting goods emporium
With over 1,600 stores worldwide, Decathlon aims to make sports and fitness accessible to all by providing a variety of equipment, products, and apparel for people of all ages.
Over the past year, Decathlon UK temporarily closed its physical locations to comply with government regulations during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. As a result, its ecommerce operations experienced unprecedented growth as people purchased equipment and products to build home gyms.
of customers were satisfied with Messenger
increase in number of queries resolved through the automated experienced
increase in agent productivity in six months
decrease in support costs
point increase in overall customer satisfaction score
increase in number of people communicating with Decathlon via Messenger
THEIR GOAL
Offering faster and more productive customer service
After seeing a 4.5X increase in inbound Messenger requests between March and May 2020, the sporting goods brand wanted to scale and automate its digital customer care capabilities quickly so it could keep up with demand while also providing fast and personable service.
THEIR SOLUTION
Introducing enhanced automated care
Decathlon UK turned to Heyday, a conversational AI company it already worked with to provide messaging assistance via its website. Heyday and Decathlon worked together to build a Messenger-powered digital assistant that would offer an always-on method for solving customer’s simple online queries. Using Heyday’s natural-learning understanding (NLU) framework, Decathlon’s automated experience for Messenger could detect over 1,000 customer intentions and respond to sporting goods-related questions – this allowed the sporting goods retailer to automate 65% of its customer queries as soon as its new Messenger customer care channel launched.
To sharpen the digital assistant’s capabilities, Decathlon and Heyday worked together to create conversational flows that matched the brand’s tone and style, and that answered questions related to order tracking, returns, store locations, operating hours and updates related to COVID-19, product searches, and technical support. Because a large volume of conversations were related to the return process, Heyday and Decathlon developed a custom conversational flow that informed customers they could safely return goods to their nearest Asda outlet, an essential business with over 630 locations across the UK.
Additionally, a handover protocol was included to transfer customers needing live agent support to resolve their question seamlessly. The Decathlon customer care team could easily access a customer’s conversation history using Heyday’s customer management solutions, which helped them provide more personalised and efficient support.
To further scale the services available via Messenger, Decathlon UK progressively introduced Heyday-built tools that replicated the in-store experiences online and that boosted sales. This included the ability for the customer care team to curate a personalised shopping cart for a customer and then share the recommendations with them via direct message.
THEIR SUCCESS
Efficient conversations
After working with Heyday to introduce new automated conversations and solutions for its Messenger experience as well as implementing Heyday’s customer relationship management hub, Decathlon UK increased customer satisfaction and boosted operation productivity without risking burnout. Since early 2020, the brand has achieved the following results:
- 96% of customers were satisfied with Messenger (incl. 85% very satisfied)
- 55% increase in number of queries resolved through the automated experienced
- 25% increase in agent productivity in six months
- 25% decrease in support costs (phone channel closed)
- 10-point increase in overall customer satisfaction score (from 82% to 92%, including emails and live chat)
- 175% increase in number of people communicating with Decathlon via Messenger
“In the past year, Decathlon UK’s brand awareness significantly increased as more people were looking for fitness and home gym equipment. We wanted to find a way to reduce our cost to serve, while also engaging new customers. Heyday’s comprehensive customer messaging platform and Messenger provided the right mix of top-notch conversational AI and platform features to boost our human team’s efficiency. This was our second time testing out automated conversations for Decathlon UK, and thanks to this partnership, we progressed from using a “robot” to being an AI-powered conversational expert.”
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