Overview
Shopify merchants spend a considerable amount of resources on customer service. Customer Service AI Assistant is a website feature that would decrease the customer service handling time by 77% and increase business revenue by 25% through automation of most common service functions such as product returns. Ensuring that customers have a faster and more personalized experience with customer service while also decreasing the strain on business owners.
The Problem
Shopify merchants, especially small businesses, often feel overwhelmed by the amount of customer support requests. Which leads them to spending considerable amount of time and money on customer service, and prevents them from growing their business. All the while the customers also feel unhappy and frustrated with long customer service response time and unhelpful replies.
How might we enable e-commerce merchants to offer self-service options to their customers to decrease the amount of support requests?
The Solution
Customer Service Chatbot is a new website feature for Shopify merchants that makes customer service a breeze! This feature integrates custom ChatGPT AI into e-commerce websites, allowing the customers to solve customer service issues on their own. Improving their experience through instant communication and personalized experience. While also allowing business owners to refocus from customer service onto growing and improving their business.
Background
My team was given a task to improve Shopify merchants' customer service by decreasing the strain on business owners who have to handle customer service issues, and decrease the waiting time for customers who are engaging with customer service. Notably, Shopify business goal is also to put more agency into customers' hands through self-service options.
Secondary Research
While I performed research into e-commerce customer service, it became clear that majority of requests can be solved through customer self-service or automation. Especially the issues related to product returns. Discussing the findings with data scientists and software engineers in the team, we came to a conclusion that integrating an AI assistant into customer service page would solve many issues.
How AI Improves User Experience
By relegating simple customer service issues to AI, business owners can decrease their operational costs and focus on growing and improving their business.
With customers being able to quickly solve issues with AI assistance, they will be more satisfied with the service and would feel comfortable buying products again.
Looking deeper into the use of AI for customer service, we found out that it has many advantages that can vastly improve the experience of clients who are engaging with customer service. Besides saving costs for business owners and decreasing waiting times for clients, AI assistants can also give personalized responses and spend more time conversing with the clients.
How Customers See It
While the issue was clear from both research and business point of view, I had to make sure that we also understood how an average customer, that being a person who bought something from e-commerce site and now contacts customer support, experiences the problem. By building a persona, my team had an easier time empathizing with customer needs and understand them better.
Concept Ideation
Through discussions with software engineers on our team, we came to a conclusion that our solution, an AI chatbot, should be website feature that would live on the customer support page. Being an add-on feature to existing e-commerce websites. Thus, we only needed to design 1-2 web pages for this project. The storefront page and the customer service chatbot page in desktop and mobile viewport.
UX Considerations
Since this project was on a very tight timeline which did not allow for user testing or iterative prototyping, I had to use my best personal judgment and observations from similar existing web pages while designing the new customer service chatbot page. Notably, I chose to add a Suggested Discussion Topics feature that would let customers start a conversation quicker and also show them that AI can solve that particular issue.
Final Solution
By the end of our 24-hour design sprint, I finalized UI for the customer service AI chatbot page. This AI customer service assistant is a feature for Shopify e-commerce websites that helps customers by handling simple issues such as product returns and answering questions. This solution balances both client and business needs by improving user satisfaction through quick and personalized support, while also saving costs for business owners by relegating customer service from workers to artificial intelligence.
Instant Customer Service Assistance
Customers are now able to get into conversation with customer service from any page of the website by clicking on the Need Assistance button. Unlike human customer service which may take days to reply, AI chatbot can assist the user instantly.
List of Suggested Topics
To help the customer start a conversation with AI chatbot, a list of most common customer service topics is already pre-written and can be clicked on. Giving customers a good starting point and letting them finish the statement with their specific details.
Accessible on Desktop and Mobile
As customers often shop online from their mobile devices, the customer service chatbot function is accessible on both mobile and desktop version of the website to make sure that the customer can get their issues solved no matter which device they use.
Outcomes
This project won BrainStation's 2024 Industry Project Hackathon competition as the most viable solution created within 24 hours. Earning praise from Shopify partners for effective use of cutting-edge AI technology to improve user experience of online shoppers by decreasing customer service request handling time by around 77%, while also increasing the revenue of businesses by up to 25% through automation of customer service operations.
Takeaways
Sometimes, project deadlines can be very strict and restrictive. And certain steps in the design process have to be skipped. In such cases, it is important to balance business needs, user experience, and technical limitations in a way that the project is still done on time and provides good value for both the stakeholders and the end users.
