Kindly

Unisport reduces customer inquiries by 52% with chatbot technology

Unisport has grown into one of Europe’s leading football retailers with a big focus on their online business. Kevin Ishøj, Head of Country Operations, explains how the busy period during the World Cup reignited their interest in implementing a chatbot.

“We came from a period that was really hectic with the World Cup and a warehouse move because we were growing out of our original one. All of that basically flooded our customer service and we couldn't keep up.”

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Kevin Ishøj, Head of Country Operations, Unisport

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“There had been an interest in a chatbot before, but nothing had really come of it,” Kevin continues.

‍Challenges

With Unisport’s ambition to grow, Kevin realized that their only way to handle peak times and increased customer interactions was to hire more customer service agents—a solution that wasn’t sustainable in the long run.

“We needed to do something and saw value in putting a chatbot as a defense for our customer service team, allowing them to do their other tasks as well. Because that was a big issue, they had so many other responsibilities than pure customer service which they didn't have time to do properly.“

Unisport wanted to ensure they had a customer service that handled cases faster and more efficiently, but found it challenging when answering the same questions repeatedly.

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“We got a lot of repetitive emails like ‘Where is my order?’ Customers should be able to find that information themselves without having to ask and wait for a reply. Sometimes we couldn't keep our live chat open because we were overwhelmed.” Kevin says.

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Besides giving a more efficient service, Unisport also values giving personalized purchase advice, leveraging their expertise to create a more personal experience.

“We really wanted to be able to give that type of service, but we did not have the time when going through ten emails asking the same question. So the chatbot has definitely helped us a lot in that direction.” Kevin says and continues:

“We could also see that our target audience, the younger generation, is going more in the self service direction. They’re not picking up the phone, so those factors combined lead us to the thought of a chatbot again.”

Selection

When Unisport decided that a chatbot was the way to go, Kevin explains how they began evaluating different vendors, focusing on main factors like ease of use, maintenance and overall feeling.

“The time spent on building and maintaining the chatbot, and whether we can educate ourselves without it being too complicated, was probably the most important factors. We also needed a general feeling of whether we were able to go into this and be successful. And once we had that feeling, it was actually relatively easy."

After investigating several solutions, Unisport decided to go with Kindly.

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“For us, building the chatbot and working with Kindly’s interface felt more intuitive and better. We could see the potential for us to save time instead of taking the hours we saved and using it on building and maintaining the chatbot.” ‍

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Kevin also acknowledges the importance of staying ahead with the latest innovations:

“Kindly also seemed like a company that was on the forefront in innovating the chatbot and the solutions for us, that was key."

Results

With the chatbot being live on the whole website, it now takes care of more than half of Unisport's incoming questions: ‍

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“We see that the chatbot solves 52,2% of all our incoming inquiries, so that is of course huge.” - Kevin Ishøj, Unisport ‍

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“8,8% goes to livechat or an email and we have a fallback rate under 5%.” Kevin states, meaning that the chatbot has a success rate of 95%.

Unisport has also experienced a significant reduction in inquiries, especially emails, even though Kevin anticipated an increase in inquiries as they are expanding into new markets:‍

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“Most importantly, we have cut 50% of all emails. That is a really big one for us.”

‍Kevin says and continues:

“We expected that we would start seeing more inquiries because we were expanding, but despite growing 25%+ year after year on orders, we have the same amount of customer contact as the years before.”
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A key performance metric for Unisport is Contact Per Order. Kevin explains that prior to implementing the chatbot, their Contact Per Order stood at 1 in 4. Today, they consistently meet their new target of 1 in 5 and sometimes even surpass it even while scaling into new markets—an achievement Kevin credits to the chatbot.

With various tournaments and retail events, such as Black Friday, creating peaks in the customer support for Unisport, the chatbot has helped them tackle the increase of inquiries:

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‍“We no longer feel the impact of peak periods as much. During Black Friday, we usually extended our opening hours, but we reduced the total amount of customer inquiries, making us shorten our opening hours.”‍

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Kevin recognizes the value of being available to customers around the clock, increasing conversations with customers and reducing backlog:

“We see a lot of customers engaging with the chatbot outside opening hours. Up to 40% of all our chatbot sessions happen during those hours. Before the chatbot, most customers would have sent us an email outside opening hours, creating a backlog.”

Kevin further highlights the chatbot's role when in enabling Unisport to scale and grow without having to hire additional support agents:

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‍“The ability to grow in each market, and to expand into other markets without necessarily having to find new agents, has been major.”‍

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Kevin concludes by emphasizing how the chatbot has transformed their channel strategy and sparked new ideas for further improvements:

“We have changed our mindset on our customer journey in general, it needs to be chatbot first. It has also created inspiration for other initiatives that make us become better at self service in general.”