BurdaForward represents the digital media house of the future. Its leading brands and utilization of cutting-edge technology demonstrate a commitment to journalistic innovation. BurdaForward incorporates various known brands, including Focus Online, CHIP, TVSpielfilm, BUNTE, Finanzenl0o, The Weather Channel, netmoms, EFAHRER and fit FOR FUN. With a reach extending to over half of Germany’s internet users, BurdaForward plays a pivotal role in shaping public discourse. It’s part of Hubert Burda Media, an organization with a century-long history of shaping media landscapes and shouldering social responsibility.
BurdaForward wanted to set up an automated assistant using generative AI (gen AI) to improve customer service and buying advice.
BurdaForward partnered with IBM® Client Engineering and IBM Expert Labs on a pilot to see if gen AI could be applied to transform its product review and recommendations into a mobile and chat first experience. The company was looking for a scalable conversational AI solution that could cover more than 1,000 products.
Together, the team used the combination of IBM watsonx™ Assistant, IBM Watson® Discovery and IBM watsonx.ai™ to build conversational AI that advises customers on product questions in a semi-structured dialog and enables the purchase. The solution uses watsonx.ai to generate API request filters from natural language, and it uses watsonx.ai and watsonx Assistant to guide the dialog dynamically, reducing the modelling effort. And the solution is scalable to allow the onboarding of hundreds of products without complex action modelling.
Results indicated that customers were able to get to a selection of products that match perfectly to their personal criteria. The selection process is 10 times faster than it was previously, before the use of automated step-by-step guidance with gen AI.
The entire conversation felt very friendly and at the same time goal-oriented for users, and as a result customer satisfaction increased by around 15%.
In addition, the easy and time-saving way of creating individual chats with question-and-answer options increases the scalability of product recommenations throughout various categories.
Based in Germany, the digital publishing house BurdaForward (link resides outside of ibm.com) publishes many journalistic offerings, including Focus Online, CHIP, TVSpielfilm, BUNTE, Finanzenl0o, The Weather Channel, netmoms, EFAHRER and fit FOR FUN. The brands highly appeal to their target audiences and most of them rank among the leading portals of the areas they cover.
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