Decathlon UK

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.

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.

“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.”