NTT DATA dovetails its conversational AI eva with GenAI to reimagine CX for L’Oréal

NTT DATA and L’Oréal have joined forces to enhance L’Oréal’s digital E-commerce proposition. Through the alliance, L’Oréal gains access to NTT DATA’s advanced enterprise conversational AI platform eva, now equipped with GenAI capabilities. This engagement aims to enable L’Oréal to support the digital customer lifecycle along with providing hyper-personalized recommendations on the go. The collaboration aligns with HFS findings, The consumer goods and retail playbook for navigating disruption while driving innovation, citing the increased willingness of enterprises and service providers to collaborate on experience-driven initiatives and unlocking new sources of value underpinned by emerging technologies such as generative AI (GenAI).

The conversational AI platform, eva, can now be trained on comprehensive user data, including past interactions, browsing history, purchasing behavior, context, intentions, and other demographics-related information. After this, GenAI tools like Azure OpenAI services—that leverage machine learning algorithms to analyze user data and generate personalized recommendations—can be integrated with the primary platform through NTT DATA’s GenAI cell module. The GenAI cell enables prompt chaining syncing responses from past interactions to deliver more accurate and empathetic answers like humans. This leads to more powerful and context-oriented interactions led by the conversational AI interface. eva can be deployed across various channels such as contact center, web, mobile, WhatsApp, Instagram, Google Home, and chatbots. Furthermore, it can be integrated with leading contact center solutions from Salesforce and Microsoft.

eva is almost equivalent to a human associate in some dimensions with add-on benefits

Most contact center (human) agent duties can be performed by eva. These include the capability to handle multiple languages and dialects, understand context and emotions and showcase empathy while interacting with the customer, solve or escalate complex user problems, deliver personalized suggestions, and even make precise persuasive arguments to recommend products. Moreover, it trumps the contact center (human) agent’s role by being available to multiple customers simultaneously around the clock. With its human-like conversational, cognitive, and decision-making abilities, NTT DATA is positioning eva as a digital employee . Furthermore, NTT DATA claims that implementing eva can lead to an overall 10% reduction in operating costs and a 30% bump in customer satisfaction by eliminating waiting queues.

L’Oréal is likely to experiment with eva across multiple areas

Although L’Oréal has not revealed the exact plans for eva, we expect L’Oréal to be testing it out for the following use cases:

• Product selection: eva can be leveraged to list various beauty products of interest and provide quick comparisons on specific dimensions while considering the purpose behind the purchase and other personal information (skin type, budget, frequency of usage).
• Direct buying: eva can be integrated with payment gateways to complete a purchase without human intervention.
• Customer retention: eva can study consumption patterns and make timely calls recommending the right products. Also, with its human-like capabilities, it can alter suggestions based on changes in customer preferences.
• Sharing make-up/beauty ideas: eva can be used by end-users to generate pictorial inspirations. For example, depicting a particular mascara on a specific skin tone and eyelashes.
• Post-sales help: eva can play the contact center agent role beyond product tracking or cancellations to assisting with complex queries like changing the order quantity or coordinating with delivery agents for last-minute address changes.
• Tag funnel: eva understands the various user purchase paths and correlation of in-demand products with different user channels and journeys.

The Bottom Line: CPG and retail enterprises should seriously consider integrated solutions like eva that can automate critical manual actions such as utterance generation and promise a much richer and more consistent user experience.

With premier clients (Santander, Zurich, Unilever) and a proven track record (processes 20 million monthly transactions), eva is a proven conversation AI solution. Its newfound proposition of a digital employee is still untested but shows promise and gives us a sneak peek into the future of commerce and the value that GenAI can help create for enterprises.