Skip to content

Retail

AI customer assistant

A grounded assistant that answers order and product questions from real systems, and hands over to a person the moment it should.

Fewer tickets reaching an agent
42%Fewer tickets reaching an agent
Answers with a verifiable source
91%Answers with a verifiable source
Median response time
< 2sMedian response time
Client
A multi-channel retail group
Sector
Retail
Duration
5 months
Stack
  • FastAPI
  • pgvector
  • PostgreSQL
  • Next.js
  • Redis

The problem

Support volume grew faster than the team, and roughly two-thirds of contacts were routine order-status and returns questions. An earlier off-the-shelf chatbot had been withdrawn after it answered confidently and incorrectly about refund eligibility.

What we did

  1. Grounded every answer in retrieval over the actual policy documents and order system, with the source cited in the reply.
  2. Built an evaluation set from real historical tickets and gated deployment on measured accuracy rather than impressions.
  3. Defined explicit refusal and escalation rules for anything touching payments, personal data or refund decisions.
  4. Instrumented the handover so an agent receives the full conversation and the retrieved sources, not just a transcript.

The outcome

Routine enquiries resolve without an agent, and the assistant declines rather than guesses on anything with financial consequences. Agents now spend their time on the cases that needed a person all along.

Illustrative engagement profiles. Figures show the shape of outcomes we design for, not published client results.

Services

Practices used here

More work

Other engagements

Start with a conversation

Tell us what you are trying to build and what is in the way. We will tell you whether we are the right people for it.