PlushBeds enhances its product detail pages with AI question prompts. Beyond its conversion rate increase, the mattress brand’s customer service calls have decreased and its SEO ranking increased after implementing the tool.
Product detail pages are one of the most critical pages on an ecommerce site, responsible for educating shoppers with everything they need to know and spurring them to “add to cart.” At mattress brand manufacturer PlushBeds, it’s key to get this page right, as the product is a considered purchase, with mattresses ranging from $1,500-$3,500, said CEO Michael Hughes.
“We have one type of customer: they want to know everything. And then we have the other one that says, ‘I don’t want a PhD in mattresses, just tell me which one is the most comfortable,’” Hughes said. “Finding the balance on a PDP of how you can put all of that together and appeal to every customer is a difficult challenge.”
Like many executives in a ChatGPT world, Hughes turned to generative artificial intelligence to balance having the right information and enough of it to satisfy both customers sets. PlushBeds deployed and tested roughly a dozen AI tools before ultimately selecting Alby, an generative AI shopping tool.
While the other tools PlushBeds tested claimed to be AI, Hughes found the chatbots only followed logical prompts for a set questions that the brand had to input itself. If a shopper asked a complicated question, one tool continually responded, “Sorry, I’m new here.”
How the AI tool works
When PlushBeds installed Alby, immediately Hughes was impressed. It understood the nuances of answers for different products and how to compare one product to another.
PlushBeds installed Alby on all of its product detail pages. Below the add-to-cart button, Alby displays three to five questions, plus a blank question box. This allows shoppers an easy way to find the answer to a question and start engaging with the chatbot without actually coming up with the question. PlushBeds does not provide the questions. Instead, the artificial intelligence populates them from product information, customer reviews, customer service transcripts and manufacturing data specific to that product.
“Then it crunches all of that to then come up with three to five questions as a starting point and then it starts to learn,” said Fayez Mohamood, CEO and co-founder of Bluecore, which owns Alby. “There is a learning layer on top of the large language model that learns what leads to engagement, what did they click on right before they bounce and so forth.”
On PlushBeds’ site, example questions include “How firm is this mattress?” and “How does organic wool benefit sleep?” A shopper clicks on the question and the answer populates in real-time, and more questions are listed underneath the answer.
PlushBeds’ results from using the AI tool
On average roughly 15% of it PlushBeds.com’s web traffic engages with Alby’s prompts. This has far exceeded the brand’ expectations, Hughes said. For shoppers who do click on the AI-generated questions, their conversion rate is on average 2.8%, which is about four to five-times higher than the average rate for shoppers who don’t use the tool, he said.
Answering shopper questions also reduces the inbound calls to it 20 customer service agents by roughly 20%, Hughes said. The reduction in calls allows its agents to spend more time handling complex inquires and can translate into payroll savings, he said.
“This instantly becomes our most efficient, most proficient customer service agent that we have that can virtually answer almost every question that a customer may have about any specific product in real time. And that could be at 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning,” Hughes said.
Softer metric improvements from the generative AI tool
Conversion increase and customer service call reduction alone is a great return on its investment, but the softer metrics are also highly beneficial. For example, because more shoppes are engaging with the questions, shoppers are spending more time on product pages. This helps from a search engine optimization standpoint, as Google measures time on site as a factor for rankings, he said.
“By increasing user time on page, Alby contributes to improved SEO performance, making it a strategic asset beyond just conversion and support,” Hughes said.
PlushBeds’ customer service satisfaction score for Alby shoppers is 75%, which Hughes describe as “solid.” It does not have a comparable CSAT score for non-Ably shoppers during the pre-conversation stage of shopping.
Data from Alby is useful in several ways. For example, if PlushBeds finds shoppers are continually clicking on a certain question for a particular product, it may need to update the page with that information. A few times, PlushBeds has found that the information is there, but further down on the page and shoppers were not scrolling to it. It’s experimenting moving information up higher on the page, based on the data it’s receiving from Alby.
“Alby is helping us capture customer sentiment earlier in the journey, which has been useful in shaping how we think about pre-purchase engagement and which UX/UI improvements to prioritize.
Bluecore acquired Alby in November 2024.
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