In a largely digitized world, vendors are expected to maintain state of the art technology to help facilitate customer inquiries and feedback. Ventura Foods, a global food manufacturer and distributor, understood the importance of tech in business, marketing, and customer service. Ventura Foods worked closely with Filament AI to build a conversational agent called Brie for their website. By using artificial intelligence, Brie helps customers and clients find relevant products efficiently and in as little time as possible.
Headquartered in Brea, California, Ventura Foods has been providing food solutions for customers since 1996. Ventura Foods produces over three billion pounds of finished goods each year that are sold in more than 60 countries around the world. Sold in everything from grocery stores to restaurants, their product line consists of household staples like Hidden Valley® Ranch, Sauce Craft™ sauces, and Mel-Fry Performance Oil.
Ventura Foods maintains a strong commitment to excellence in quality and service, striving to meet the needs of their foodservice customers. As part of their effort to modernize and improve their service offerings, we partnered with Ventura Foods to create Brie, a virtual agent located on their website who can answer any customer’s most pressing questions.
Implementation
Is Sauce Craft Taco Sauce Vegan? Is Mel-Fry Original High Performance Fry Oil Kosher?
Ventura Foods fields thousands of questions like these daily, and their website is the main resource for their customers to find answers to those questions. However, with such an extensive product line, Ventura Foods needed a way to communicate product information quickly and effectively to their customers.
Introducing Brie: a helpful virtual agent who can answer general FAQs about the company and product lines, as well as specific attributes about individual products.
Brie uses Ventura Foods’ product database to identify attributes such as ingredients, package size, storage instructions, and allergen information. Customers now have the ability to access product information in real-time without having to get in contact with an actual employee.
We also delivered a dedicated management platform designed to let Ventura Foods monitor and develop the chatbot themselves. The Ventura Foods team will use the platform to manage customer inquiries, access advanced analytics, and easily integrate new content when new products are introduced.
It focused on four central themes: information on medication and conditions, guidance on isolation, maintaining mental & physical well-being, and financial guidance. A button-based experience was used to guide users to the most relevant answer for their query, ensuring that accurate responses were provided to users.
Although getting all the new content medically approved presented an initial challenge, the simple and flexible nature of the EBM platform made it easy for the Versus Arthritis team to quickly switch out content and save efficiencies further down the line.
Finally, COVA also utilised a coronavirus risk calculator developed by the British Society of Rheumatology to help users assess whether they were more vulnerable and should shield.
Results
Brie fields over 1,000 messages from customers per month, and accurately matches 89% of them. Ventura Foods plans to further develop Brie by integrating it into a live-chat platform so that users can be redirected to a live agent when Brie is unable to answer their questions. We will also be improving Brie’s capabilities by adding additional parameters that can be answered. Improvements to Brie include recommending products based on particular ingredient attributes (such as vegan, non-GMO, and kosher products); providing product nutritional values on request; and providing recipes associated with Ventura Foods products.
With their new virtual agent Brie, Ventura Foods is better equipped to handle varied and detailed requests from their partners.
“Ventura Foods recognizes the importance and benefit of digitalizing business processes. Our primary focus is to ensure that the customer experience is seamless and efficient. Working with Filament AI has enabled us to implement emerging technologies that will help improve our operations and add value to our business. We take pride in our partnership with Filament and look forward to working together during future projects.”
May Vat
eCommerce and Digital Marketing, Sr Manager | Ventura Foods.
