Danone transforms customer engagement with AI-powered virtual assistant

Danone enabled friction-less end-to-end customer care journeys, trained immense amounts of data, while also complying with legal regulations in the early nutrition space.

The Story

Transforming customer care and engagement in the early life nutrition category

Danone is a global leader in four key areas: Essential Dairy and Plant-Based Products, Early Life Nutrition, Medical Nutrition, and Waters. Their portfolio is centered on health and wellness, which enables them to play a significant role in the food industry’s evolution. With over a century of research in baby nutrition, Danone Nutricia Early Life Nutrition uses both scientific knowledge and practical experience to assist parents, caregivers, and healthcare professionals.

As a provider of early-life nutrition products and specialized guidance, Danone’s mission is to assist expectant and new parents with expert information, empathy, and care. However, it can be challenging to consistently offer this expertise across channels and languages around the clock.

Therefore, the Specialist Care team was searching for a solution that could create seamless end-to-end customer experiences, process large amounts of data, and comply with legal regulations in the field of early nutrition. The two key objectives were:

Automation of Scan & Spaar (Loyalty & Rewards) Campaign 
Danone implemented a loyalty program that offered discounts and cashback to parents who scanned the QR code on their product packaging and redeemed their loyalty points for repeat purchases. To support customers through the registration and redemption process, Danone enlisted the help of Gupshup to provide instant guidance and assistance. This allowed parents to easily claim their rewards and incentivized them to continue purchasing Danone products.

Intuitive Guidance for New Parents 
Expecting and new parents often have numerous questions and may require immediate guidance at any time of the day. To meet this need, Gupshup’s digital assistant, powered by its Retail Al Brain, provided a single platform where parents could access specialized information and receive personalized support from specialized nutritionists. This helped ensure that parents had access to the expert guidance they needed to make informed decisions about their child’s nutrition.

The Solution

Enabling Smart AI-Powered Conversations

Danone’s Specialist Care team started by automating the Scan & Spaar campaign, after the successful execution of which, the brand provided specialized conversational support to the early life nutrition audience.

End-to-End Campaign Support
 

• Seamless end-to-end customer experience management at every step.
• The user-friendly digital assistant helped take Specialist Care Agents’ first-hand knowledge accurately and efficiently to new parents.
• Created a mobile-first experience aimed at driving customer awareness and engagement.
• Supported friction-less hand-offs between the digital assistant and agents, which is crucial when parents are in urgent need of guidance.

Conversational guidance to new parents 
During the pandemic, when parents were facing issues like product shortages owing to panic buying, they reached out to Danone via the Nutricia Platform to access information that was reliable, easily accessible, and validated by experts. Helped new and expectant parents access to early nutrition information. Customer support engine was built to function even out-of-office hours, meaning no parent’s queries were left unanswered.

Previously unknown customer insights 
The made-for-retail analytics engine helped Danone access real-time quantitative data covering every single customer interaction across their digital channels. A customised dashboard tracking live metrics lead to better customer journeys being created within swift turnaround times. Areas monitored included peak hours, conversational engagement metrics by the hour, out-of-office hours support, and most-asked questions by the hour. Identified key ‘problem’ categories that new parents were seeking guidance for.

Comprehensive campaign automation 
Automated the Scan & Spaar campaign on the brand website with minimal dependency on customer service teams to help design a customer journey that was both user-friendly and convenient.

Real-time analytics monitoring
The Specialist Care Team at Danone puts their customers above all else, and by identifying previously unknown insights, they were able to understand customer behaviour and patterns leading to proactive support.

FAQ automation 
The digital assistant was able to automate Frequently Asked Questions, thus scaling up the support offered to Danone’s customers.