{"id":28943,"date":"2018-11-12T16:27:59","date_gmt":"2018-11-12T21:27:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/ai-chatbot-behind-alibabas-31-billion-singles-day-sales-miracle\/"},"modified":"2018-11-12T16:27:59","modified_gmt":"2018-11-12T21:27:59","slug":"ai-chatbot-behind-alibabas-31-billion-singles-day-sales-miracle","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/ai-chatbot-behind-alibabas-31-billion-singles-day-sales-miracle\/","title":{"rendered":"AI chatbot behind Alibaba\u2019s $31 billion Single\u2019s Day sales miracle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Increasing customer service demand drives Alibaba toward intelligent customer service <\/strong><\/p>\n

On Nov. 11, 2018, Alibaba scored another blockbuster Singles\u2019 Day shopping festival with RMB213.5 billion ($30.8 billion) gross merchandise volume (i.e. the dollar value of total transactions), 27% higher than last year\u2019s RMB 168.3 billion. This figure is more than twice the size of Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined in 2017.<\/p>\n

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As the world\u2019s largest e-commerce platform, Alibaba has more than 550 million active consumers, millions of active sellers, generating millions of transactions through various Alibaba promotion tools and services each day. The whole Alibaba ecosystem also involves thousands of e-commerce operation vendors, almost all 3rd party logistics vendors via Cainiao Logistics Network, 1 million offline mom-and-pop shops via Alibaba retail service, and 870 million consumer finance users via Alipay under Ant Financial.<\/p>\n

Alibaba traditional relies on its intimate customer service to enable shopping transactions and related post-sales services. The complexity and surge of Alibaba Group\u2019s business results in an increasing challenge to the customer service team. For example, from the 1st Single\u2019s Day shopping festival in 2009 to 2017, total transaction volume grew from 50 million to 168.2 billion, and the number of sellers grew from 27 to 180,000. Given the skyrocketing customer service demand, simply adding customer service staff is obviously not a long-term solution. As Alibaba has already built up one of the world\u2019s most complex customer service systems, intelligent customer service is the only sustainable solution in the future.<\/p>\n

Intelligent customer service: AliMe<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alibaba launched AliMe, the artificial intelligence chatbot, on July 24, 2015.<\/p>\n

AliMe is an intelligent human-computer interaction (IHCI) based shopping guide and assistant for both sellers and customers. This product is powered by a range of AI technologies such as speech recognition, semantic understanding, personalized recommendations, and deep learning.<\/p>\n

Based on the numerous customer transaction data, AliMe can proactively analyze and predict customer service needs and reach out to customers. Based on accumulated data each year, AliMe can have the knowledge base automatically updated in minutes for the first time in the industry and predict the problems each user may encounter in real time. Therefore, AliMe can send users precise service information even before users have even asked for help.<\/p>\n

During the Single\u2019s Day shopping festival in 2017, AliMe responded 9 million queries, i.e. 95% of the customer services on Alibaba e-commerce platforms. Alibaba intelligent recommendation system also created 56.7 billion different personal recommendation shopping lists for customers. In 2018, AliMe expanded to empower the whole integrated customer service team of 3,000 Alibaba own staff and about 1 million 3rd-party sellers\u2019 staff. AliMe was fully upgraded to provide 4 key services in pre-sales promotion (product recommendation, proactive promotion, intelligent shopping reminder to complete transactions), during-sales and post-sales automatic services (generating invoices, changing address, reminding delivery, appointing logistic vendors), shopping transaction data dashboard for sellers, and intelligent shopping assistant. For instance, AliMe chatbot can understand a customer\u2019s emotion and then prioritize and alert human customer service agents to intervene. It can also remind sellers to increase inventory to keep up with the demand.<\/p>\n

Short-term: establish the AliMe bot platform <\/strong><\/p>\n

In the short term, Alibaba expects to create the AliMe bot platform as a complete set of intelligent human-computer interaction solution as follows.<\/p>\n

Face to three domains solutions:<\/u><\/p>\n