Pep Boys is an American automotive aftermarket retail and service chain. They are referred to as the “founders of the automotive aftermarket”. Pep Boys provides name-brand tires, automotive maintenance and repair, parts and expert advice for the do-it-yourselfer, commercial auto parts delivery, and fleet maintenance and repair to customers across the U.S. Pep Boys operates more than 8,300 service bays in over 930 locations in 35 states and Puerto Rico.

Business challenge

Founded in 1921 at the birth of the Automotive industry, Pep Boys has always been ahead of its time, weathering several economic events to remain one of the most widely known aftermarket auto parts and service brands in the country. But being a leader in the highly competitive and rapidly evolving auto parts market, means you can never stop innovating. So Pep Boys decided to embark on a “Digital Transformation” initiative with the hope of employing new AI technologies to automate business processes and improve efficiency. The company turned to Avaamo for help.

The main challenge they wanted to address was improving customer self-service and digital engagement. Specifically, they wanted to reduce the large call volumes currently handled by their live agents—and the resulting high cost to Pep Boys.

Other key performance goals included reducing customer effort, increasing first contact resolution, increasing digital channel usage, reducing agent frustration, and improving the knowledge base.

Transformation

The AI transformation began with Avaamo processing and classifying over 35,000 live agent chat and voice transcripts. The analysis revealed that the majority of live agent calls were being consumed over just a few simple use cases: “find a store”, “track my order,” and FAQs. It was decided that the AI initiative would revolve around quickly automating these routine queries with a virtual agent residing on the Pep Boys website.

The timeline for development was aggressive with a 6 week production schedule. This included Avaamo writing an entirely new API to integrate into Pep Boys  SAP Hybris platform and backend, since none existed. Meanwhile, on the design end, several conversation styles and approaches for the new Pep Boys Virtual Assistant were designed and tested. After several iterations, a balance between the appropriate conversational style, personality, and brand resonance was agreed upon. The virtual assistant was completed and after some UAT testing, the Pep Boys Virtual Assistant was deployed on to their website.

Results

The benefits of Pep Boys new conversational agent were immediate. Pep Boys has been able to significantly improve their key customer service metrics and save thousands of dollars per month in the process. The Pep Boys Virtual Agent receives over 30,000 queries a month (and climbing) and is able to handle 97% of all queries. More importantly, this has led to a 68% reduction in live agent calls, helping the Pep boys support team significantly, leaving them with more time available to solve complex customer queries and to have a more proactive approach to customer service. Also, since the implementation of the virtual agent, customer engagement has steadily increased each month for an overall increase of 206%!