SOPHY, YOUR PERSONAL SHOPPER FOR ONLINE PURCHASES

Sophy is your e-commerce chatbot that’s available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It understands your customers’ needs and supports them with personalised advice – from choosing the product to completing their purchase.

ANY TIME, ANY PLACE

According to a recent survey, a total of two out of three generation Z customers (aged between 16 and 24) have already bought clothes on Amazon over the last six months. While such shoppers – as digital natives – do appreciate the in-store experience, retailers need to do even more if they are to successfully transfer their traditional strengths to the online arena. The growth in online shopping requires a personalised, customer-centric support tool that goes beyond what ordinary sales assistants can offer. This is why we have created Sophy.

SOPHY – A NEW CONCEPT

Sophy is the chatbot developed by Portaltech Reply on the SAP Commerce Cloud omnichannel sales platform. The basic idea behind Sophy is to offer online users a personalised experience that’s focused on the customer and that supplies something that can’t be found in store: availability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Sophy combines machine learning and natural language understanding in order to “learn” customers’ preferences and communicate with them. To do this, it utilises Facebook Messenger, an interface that is user-friendly, widely available, and which includes features that enable third parties to easily integrate a chatbot in their customer communication platform.

THREE STEPS FOR MAKING PURCHASES WITH SOPHY

PRODUCT SEARCH

Sophy’s conversations with customers are processed by the NPU engine so as to identify the actions the user wants to perform and the type of product in which he or she is interested. A Natural Processing Unit (NPU) is a microprocessor that specializes in the acceleration of machine learning algorithms, typically by operating on predictive models such as artificial neural networks. The natural language search text entered by the customer is translated into a structured request that can be used by the e-commerce platform to perform product searches.

ADD TO BASKET

Starting from the results obtained from the search, Sophy guides the user through the process of completing the purchase by suggesting sizes and available colour variants that can be chosen until the product is finally added to the virtual basket. Each of Sophy’s actions is performed in such a way as to offer a complete and unique shopping experience.

CHECKOUT

The items in the virtual basket, transferred into the e-commerce platform as an order, are now ready to be purchased. With Sophy’s help, the user can authenticate and complete payment and specify the delivery methods. Payment details are then sent to the customer.


SOPHY AS A RETAIL ADVISOR

Based on conversations with customers, it is possible to gain an accurate knowledge of their tastes and behaviour patterns. To enable this, Sophy provides analytics features that enable you to monitor performance KPIs such as active and closed chats, the total number of items sold and the average total number of orders that have been completed. Sophy therefore represents an effective support tool for retailers and e-commerce companies in enhancing both their offerings and their marketing activities.

KEY BENEFITS

  • 24/7 availability

    Sophy never sleeps and is the perfect support for human colleagues.

  • Ubiquitous availability

    Accessible at the touch of a button.

  • Customer centricity

    Sophy genuinely understands the customer and learns what he or she needs.

  • Increased sales

    The purpose of Sophy is to grow the lifetime value of each customer through an increase in sales.

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    PORTALTECH REPLY

    Portaltech Reply is the Reply group company who is a leading digital engineering company working with major brands across UK & Europe within Retail, Food Beverage and Travel. Our objective is simple, to enable our customers to deliver true Customer experience using SAP technology and Innovation that can scale into global markets.