In collaboration with Google Home, French retail group Auchan has launched the first vocal chatbot for food and wine, which will advise customers based on their specific viticultural needs.
The voice assistant allows the user to answer a number of specific questions, such as, ‘Which wine with which dish?’ , ‘Which dish with which wine?’ or ‘Which wine according to the taste of my hosts?’
The new platform is available on Google Home and the Google Assistant mobile app, and it combines 1,200 wine references including Old and New World varietals, with a range of price points.
Fluid And Efficient
The retailer notes that the experience will be ‘as efficient as it is fluid’. Customers simply tell the chatbot the accompanying dish, the colour of the wine they prefer, and the budget envisaged. The expert advice of Auchan Retail wine experts is then given to the customer.
Claire Koralewski, the director of customers and innovation, said, "The vocal chatbot is a technology that opens the way – or the voice! – to a more fluid experience, which is why we do not limit this service to customers during the Wine Fair period. As a next-generation retailer, we want to make the vocal chatbot an axis of our strategy to reinvent the customer experience."
The introduction of the vocal wine chatbot comes a year after the launch of Auchan's Mets & Vins chatbot, which has a satisfaction rate of 82%.
Auchan Italia also recently launched a new mobile payment app in collaboration with Mastercard, called AuchanSpeedy.
© 2018 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Aidan O'Sullivan. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
