AI Empowerment in Practice: Spotlight on Retail
How can the promise of artificial intelligence be translated into clear, measurable results for companies? One big retailer shows the way. As ALDO Group’s Victor Hernandez Saldana, who leads workforce management at the company, explains in a recent interview, AI holds many practical applications for a firm’s customer experience function, ones that will inevitably drive further investments in AI technology.
ALDO Group is a Canadian multinational retailer specializing in footwear, handbags, and fashion accessories. Founded in 1972, it operates 1,500 stores (300 in North America) across more than 100 countries. As Saldana notes, before a recent partnership with Five9, ALDO Group was like many other global companies in that it had developed over time into a mix of on-premises and cloud environments, featuring multiple vendors and legacy applications that offered significant opportunities to upgrade, replace, and modernize with new AI-powered capabilities.
The Challenge and Journey
ALDO Group’s challenge was having a fragmented, outdated customer experience (CX) landscape with separate providers for IVR, telephony, chat, workforce management (WFM), quality assurance, and agent dashboards. The on-premises systems were costly, slow to update, and inflexible. Applications were siloed, and scheduling was time-consuming, with no ability for agents to check or change scheduling remotely.
As a recognized thought leader in WFM and contact center operations, Saldana understands how improving employee experience (EX) can positively impact CX, which helped drive the decision to invest in tools to streamline operations and assist both administrators and agents. Five9’s unified CX platform provided the answer with omnichannel CX (voice, chat, and email) and a completely redesigned intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) experience. Agents benefited from AI-powered assistance, insights, summaries, and transcription features. Significant operational improvements were achieved through new workforce engagement management, quality monitoring (QM), and Web-based CRM integration.
But was there resistance from agents or a significant adjustment period? Apparently not. “Introducing Five9 was the easiest transition ever,” Saldana says, and then gives several examples to explain why. He notes that it’s a game changer for voice-only agents to be able to switch to chat without managers having to manually make the switch, as was the case when those channels derived from different vendors. Similarly, the new summarization features allow agents to easily copy and paste into the post-call wrap-up, which significantly decreases average handling time (AHT).
Scheduling has become easier, with clear benefits for agents and supervisors. Switching from a premise-based system to an AI-powered application lets Saldana plan schedules six weeks in advance. Agents who previously had to be on-site to view their schedules can now check them through a secure, compliant mobile app, with automatic change requests and approvals. This speed and flexibility save time, improve work-life balance for his agents (who are often students), reduce part-time attrition, and lower hiring costs.
Saldana also highlights Five9’s AI Insights as another winning feature, noting that it has significantly reduced inquiry time with executive management. Now he can filter by topic and respond to a trend in 15 to 20 minutes, whereas pulling, cleaning, and analyzing data from different systems sometimes took up to a day.
The Proof Is in the Pudding
But the transition has done much more than simply make Saldana and his agents’ lives easier. ALDO Group has achieved meaningful results with the implementation of Five9: a 12.7 percent decrease in abandonment rate, a 24 percent increase in average speed of answer, and a 20 percent reduction in agent attrition. Agent downtime has been cut from five hours per week to just 20 minutes. Post-call wrap-up time has been reduced, with AI summaries automatically populating the CRM system, and AHT has decreased by 100 seconds. Additionally, the Ease Score (measuring customer loyalty) has improved from 60 to 80.
Building on this initial success, the company is working to expand self-service capabilities to cover simpler interactions and allowing agents to focus on more complex cases. Additionally, they are working to implement automated QM. For Saldana and his team, this AI empowerment is only beginning.
Nancy Jamison is founder and principal analyst at Jamison Consulting LLC, bringing more than 40 years of experience in contact centers and customer experience. Her career spans many years each at ROLM, Gartner, and Jamison Consulting (1.0), and most recently she spent 13 years at Frost & Sullivan, as a senior industry director in ICT with a specialty in the retail and healthcare sectors.