AI agents now resolve 70% of Fisher & Paykel’s customer service product troubleshooting queries. The New Zealand-based brand is infusing agents more into the customer experience.
Premium home appliance brand Fisher & Paykel is tapping agentic artificial intelligence to help makes it technicians more effective and to answer its customer service inquiries.
The New Zealand-based company sells in seven markets, including the U.S., which is an increasingly important market for the brand, said Sarah Lukins, General Manager, Digital of Fisher & Paykel.
“We’re starting to make real traction in the U.S. with our brand,” Lukins said. “Our revenue is increasing year on year, and our response from the dealers that we work with in the U.S. (is) incredibly positive about our brand. (They are) giving us more presence in showrooms and dealer locations, wanting to work with us, without us having to push as hard as we had to in the early days.” Dealers are retailers.
Fisher & Paykel has two showrooms in the U.S. — which it calls experience centers — one in New York City and the other it recently opened in Costa Mesa, California. In the centers it has an appointment-based “Mastery of Temperature,” in which professional chefs use the brand’s appliances to cook a three-course meal for shoppers. The stores also have imagery of New Zealand and a traditional welcome tea for shoppers.
Fisher & Paykel Deploys Salesforce AI Agents
For the past 15 years, Fisher & Paykel has used ecommerce technology provider Salesforce. It uses their Commerce, Marketing, Customer Relationship Management and Service clouds. The brand chose Salesforce for the enterprise-level of tooling with many out-of-the-box functions, Lukins said. That way, it doesn’t have to invest internal resources to create and maintain its own unique technology.
This year, Fisher & Paykel deployed Salesforce customer experience AI agents to help its human agents with efficiencies, Lukins said.
It October, the brand debuted an agentic AI bot to assist the technicians who visit a customer’s home to repair a product. Before the appointment, the agent summarizes the customer profile, the products they use, the problem and suggests parts for the technician to bring. This summary before the appointment is key, as its a large drain on resources and a bad customer experience if the repairperson shows up to appointment without the correct parts, Lukins said.
“The right part is huge and a massive cost saving for us and super helpful for the customer,” she said. “That’s going to be quite game changing from a customer experience perspective and an operational cost perspective for us.”
In addition, while at the appointment, technicians have an iPad and they can ask the AI agent questions to help troubleshoot a problem if they are stuck.
Shopper-Facing AI Agents
Fisher & Paykel is already realizing efficiencies from the customer-facing AI agent it rolled out in February. The bot answers basic questions, such as how to make a service booking or about product information. If it gets more complicated or if a customer wants to talk to a human, the bot will hand the shopper off to a human agent.
“At that point, the customer service agent — instead of where they would use to have to try and navigate multiple platforms to get the answer — [the AI agent] will summarize that and bring them the information from multiple platforms for them, so they can answer the question with much more confidence and faster,” Lukins said.
The brand is pleased with the results, Lukins said.
“In terms of self-service, it’s resolving about 70% of product troubleshooting queries,” she said. “We used to have our Einstein bots and they resolved about 30%. So it’s a significant increase on where we were at and we thought the 30% was good at the time.” Einstein bots are Salesforce’s non-agentic AI bots.
Bots for Website Curation
Next up, Fisher & Paykel is creating an agentic AI bot that will help shoppers find the right products on its site, faster. One of the benefits of the manufacturer is that it creates matching products, but that can get confusing on a website if all the products look too similar, Lukins said.
The agent will ask questions to the shopper, such as the style of appliance they like and how many people they typically cook for. The agent can then personalize the website to populate products that match those inputs. It will also email the product list to the shopper.
“The goal for that tool would be that we get people through that research journey faster and then that can aid conversion by leads to our dealers,” Lukins said.
A Website for Bots to Read
Besides infusing AI agents into its website, Fisher & Paykel is also updating its site so AI agents on other platforms can read it easier. This is in response to the growing trend of more consumers searching on agentic AI platforms instead of traditional search.
“We have noticed a drop in organic traffic and an increase in generative search,” she said.
Fisher & Paykel’s website is less selling focused and is more design-forward with large lifestyle imagery. The website is another touchpoint on a shopper’s long journey to purchase its high-ticket products at a retail store.
Fisher & Paykel has noticed, however, that agentic platforms are indexing the brand’s factual content and content that’s easy to digest, such as in a question-and-answer format, more than other content on its site. The brand is now working on adding new content and optimizing the content that is not performing as well to ensure it is accessible to a large language model.
The brand manufacturer has also noticed generative AI traffic is often focused on smart appliances. In response, the brand is going to uplift its web content on connected appliances to cater to that shopper interest, Lukins said.
