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World’s largest online-only grocery retailer harnesses the power of AI and the Google Cloud Platform to categorise and prioritise customer emails

Ocado announces the deployment of its machine learning (ML)-enhanced contact centre which employs an advanced AI (artificial intelligence) software model to categorise customer emails.

This approach ensures customers are still getting that familiar human touch while also benefiting from the quick response provided by technology automation. From the contact centre point of view, the customer service representatives don’t have to spend hours categorising thousands of emails manually; instead, the AI model parses the email and provides a useful summary and a priority tag. The customer service representative can then focus on solving the customers’ problems in a timely manner.

“We strive to deliver the best shopping experience for all our 500,000+ active customers. However, working in an omni channel contact centre can be challenging, with the team receiving thousands of contacts each day via telephone, email, webchat, social media and SMS. The new software developed by the Ocado Technology data science team will help the contact centre filter inbound customer contacts faster, enabling a quicker response to our customers which in turn will increase customer satisfaction levels.” – Debbie Wilson, Ocado contact centre operations manager.

Thanks to a robust architecture, the software model can process thousands of customer emails per day and has been trained using millions of past messages from customers. In addition, the application respects customers’ privacy by filtering out personal details such as postal or email addresses, telephone numbers and other sensitive information.

The new ML-enhanced contact centre application has been built using an in-house AI model and data sets created by Ocado Technology (the technology division of Ocado) as well as TensorFlow and related products from the Google Cloud Platform.

“We’re thrilled that TensorFlow helped Ocado adapt and extend state-of- the-art machine learning techniques to communicate more responsively with their customers. With a combination of open-source TensorFlow and Google Cloud services, Ocado and other leading companies can develop and deploy advanced machine learning solutions more rapidly than ever before.” – Zak Stone, Product Manager for TensorFlow on the Google Brain Team

Ocado is also one of the leading partners for the Google Cloud Platform and its Cloud Natural Language API.

About Ocado
Established in 2000, Ocado is a UK-based company admitted to trading on the London Stock Exchange (OCDO), and is the world’s largest dedicated online grocery retailer, operating its own grocery and general merchandise retail businesses under the Ocado.com and other specialist shop banners. For more information about the Ocado Group, visit www.ocadogroup.com.

About Ocado Technology
Ocado Technology is a division of Ocado developing world-class systems and solutions in the areas of robotics, machine learning, simulation, data science, forecasting and routing, inference engines, big data, real-time control, and more. The fusion between the Ocado retail and Ocado Technology divisions creates a virtuous circle of innovation that leads to disruptive thinking. For more information about Ocado Technology, visit www.ocadogroup.com/technology.

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Ocado announces machine learning-enhanced contact center for customer emails | Ocado Group