Batteries Plus, which calls itself the nation’s leading battery and power solutions service center, unveiled three artificial intelligence tools aimed at a problem that has cost the retailer sales for years: the phone ringing at a store while an employee is elbow-deep in a device repair and can’t walk away, the company said in its announcement.
Each of the company’s more than 700 stores receives an average of 30 calls a day and some go unanswered simply because an associate can’t step away from the customer standing in front of them. “That’s not indifference; it’s an associate midway through a device repair who can’t walk away from the customer standing in front of them,” said Jon Sica, president of Batteries Plus. “By reversing that course, we’re capturing business we were previously leaving on the table, and we’re giving our store teams the ability to devote their undivided attention to the people who walk through our doors. We see this as a multimillion dollar move.”
The tool built to fix that is Edison, an AI voice assistant developed with Synthflow that answers store calls in both English and Spanish, handling common questions about hours, directions, battery advice and product and service inquiries, according to the press release.
The assistant also intercepts spam calls before an associate loses time to one, and listens for specific keywords throughout a conversation, escalating a call to a human employee when a customer needs one, Chain Store Age reported. “We’ve all experienced the frustration of a poorly designed voice agent that doesn’t understand what you’re saying or can’t answer some of the most basic questions,” said Angela Geib-Boland, vice president of technology and strategy at Batteries Plus.
Two Companion Tools Target Growth and In-Store Search
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Wattson, a search tool connected to the company’s point-of-sale system, and Savannah, an SMS-based AI voice agent focused on franchise development, round out the launch, Digital Commerce 360 reported.
Wattson helps associates and customers navigate to the right product faster, stripping away unnecessary questions during a search. Finding the right automotive battery used to require walking through engine size, sub-model and a chain of additional details before reaching an answer; Wattson now skips straight to whichever questions actually change the result, and if the correct battery is identical across a given year, make and model, an associate never sees the extra steps, according to the Batteries Plus release. Wattson launched with the automotive category and is live systemwide, with more categories rolling out through year-end.
Savannah operates on the franchise side entirely. A prospective owner can call in and get answers to any question about the opportunity, and at the end of the call, receives a follow-up email with a company overview, a franchise application and a discovery call already scheduled, Retail Customer Experience reported.
“By the time we get on a discovery call now, we’re speaking with someone who genuinely understands the Batteries Plus franchise opportunity, changing what our team spends its time on and who ultimately ends up in our system,” said Joe Malmuth, chief development officer of Batteries Plus.
Specialty Retailer Betting AI Fits Its Business Model
CEO Scott Williams framed the rollout as distinct from adopting AI for its own sake. “This is not creating AI for the sake of breaking into the world of AI,” Williams said. “This is creating tools that genuinely assist our entire proprietary business model, so that everyone from the corporate level to our store associates can work efficiently and confidently as the Experts in Charge dedicated to serving our customers.”
All three tools were built through vendor partners, consultants and in-house research, with deployment underway across every location and full rollout expected by the end of September, Digital Commerce 360 reported.
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