Oracle Magazine, July/August 2019
ORACLE MAGAZINE JULY AUGUST 2019 36 L ast fall the fast growing package delivery company Hermes launched a digital assistant named Holly to help customers get answers to their questions about their packages Just seven months later this chatbot is handling 38 of all chat volume and Hermes has reduced the support interactions that require a human by 30 Holly helps customers track their shipments change delivery orders update account preferences and handle many other tasks A software bot can manage routine interactions quickly and effectively says Chris White director of customer experience at Hermes Holly automates a huge volume of transactions with our customers and with our network of couriers Founded in Germany in the 1970s Hermes is one of Europes leading parcel delivery services The company delivers approximately 340 million parcels over the course of a year both for consumers and as a partner of 90 of the UKs top retailers Hermes created Holly to help the company contend with a familiar problem rapid growth With year over year growth exceeding 20 Hermes customer service staff was working overtime to field a mounting volume of inquiries via three main contact channels telephony email and chat On any given day we have roughly a million parcels running around in our network and about twice that many during the busy holiday period White says As our physical parcel volume continued to grow we started to outgrow the elements of our services infrastructure New Girl on the Job To create Holly Hermes used Oracle Digital Assistant a platform and set of tools for building AI powered assistants Developers use this cloud based software environment to create natural conversational interfaces through text or speech to enterprise systems It enables them to build and train digital assistants without the need for specialized AI skills Developers dont have to worry about creating algorithms to understand natural language processing or classify inputs We got Holly up and running fairly quickly White says Most of our time was spent establishing the flow or journey that consumers follow during conversational interactions We
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