Elkjøp (known as Elgiganten in Sweden and Denmark, and Gigantti in Finland) is the largest consumer electronics retailer in the Nordic countries, and their customer center processes 4.8 million queries each year. In 2019, they decided to extend the opening hours of their customer centers in order to become more available to customers.

However, they needed a viable solution to help them fulfill that pledge and maintain an expected level of customer service. Their in-house customer support team had a limited number of agents and resources. The solution was an e-commerce chatbot, which quickly became their front-line support that handles recurring questions.

By extending opening hours, Elkjøp gave customers more flexibility and opportunities to ask questions. While that’s great for customer satisfaction, that can easily overload even the most experienced customer support team and add additional costs for their working hours. So they needed to find a solution that took over some of the burden from the customer support team without having to hire additional support personnel. Here is precisely where a e-commerce chatbot was the ideal solution.

24/7 access to chatbot support from all over the world

An e-commerce chatbot can be available around the clock, doesn’t take breaks or holidays, and can handle numerous enquiries at the same time. This allows customer support staff to handle enquiries that require human attention without the more simple enquiries affecting their processing time. It’s a win-win for businesses like Elkjøp, because customer support team members feel less stressed to answer loads of questions and there’s no need to hire additional team members.

Automation of FAQ responses frees up valuable time for customer service agents

After analyzing Elkjøp’s chat logs, Kindly’s developers found that eight repetitive requests accounted for half of all customer center enquiries. Automating these enquiries was advantageous for Elkjøp, because we holistically streamlined how they handled phone and email enquiries. Instead of being stuck giving the same answers every day, the customer support team could shift their resources to focus on more complex enquiries, which resulted in a higher customer satisfaction rate.

Easy-to-use centralized platform streamlines operations for Elkjøp

Kindly’s e-commerce chatbot solution is straightforward, easy to implement, and flexible enough to utilize for any of Elkjøp’s customer support needs. Kindly’s “Expertise in Nordic languages was extremely important to us," said Hafskjær, which made it a top deciding factor when they chose to work with Kindly.

Nearly 3,000 conversations are managed by automated responses every day

Since its launch, "Elbot" has helped facilitate over 2.3 million customer interactions per year. In Norway alone, it handles around 3,000 conversations daily, and of these, 50% are fully automated, meaning that the customer never requests a transition manual chat. In fact, Kent Hafskjær says that these numbers exceed what they envisioned when setting up the business case. He also points out that they are working to find the perfect balance between good customer service and optimization.

When asked if he has any tips for those considering an e-commerce chatbot, Hafskjær says: "Go for it!"