Case Study: Product Chatbot - Liebherr Cooling Appliances

Liebherr-Hausgeräte is part of the Liebherr Group of Companies, which was founded in 1949 and today unites eleven product divisions under its roof, employing more than 46,000 people worldwide. Liebherr-Hausgeräte has been successfully manufacturing refrigerators and freezers at its Ochsenhausen site since 1954.

Business Needs

To ensure that all customers are satisfied with their purchased appliance, Liebherr-Hausgeräte has established an internal policy: No sale without a thorough consultation beforehand. This presented them with the challenge of offering online product advice of a quality comparable to that offered by a specialist shop. Therefore mds was commissioned to develop an online product advisor.

Pimcore Solution

In a first step, we brought together Liebherr household appliance specialists from the various specialist areas in workshops, in which initial consultation situations and conversation processes were simulated together. From the results, we built a rough system architecture, which also served as a guideline for the requirements profile for the technology.

It quickly became clear that Pimcore best met the requirement profile due to its good scalability and the multitude of out-of-the-box possibilities. Other advantages that spoke for Pimcore were the high connectivity and the agile and flexible data modelling.

The textual logics and the maintenance of the conversation processes are completely created in Pimcore. In order to guarantee the up-to-dateness of the data available to the product consultant, interfaces to CSV, XML and JSON are implemented. All logics are transferred to OrientDB, a graph database, which is able to display and store highly networked information due to its object-relatedness.

The integration of the product advisor is very easy and done with three lines of code. Liebherr-Hausgeräte uses an integration via Google (Tag Manager) and can therefore use the product advisor specifically where advice is needed. To keep the system efficient and responsive, the Elasticsearch search engine is connected.

Business Results

With the online product advisor, Liebherr-Hausgeräte now has a tool that provides customers with intelligent advice to help them make the right purchase decision. The chatbot enables interactive communication with the customer using a variety of media (videos, animations etc.). Intelligent tracking of user actions makes it possible to continuously improve the quality of advice or to approach potential customers proactively. And thanks to multi-domain use, the conversation can be continued without interruption on different media (homepage, shop, blog etc.). The product advisor not only adapts automatically to the different markets (different product ranges, country-specific regulations, etc.), he also adapts conversation paths independently, so that the consultation is dynamically aligned to the needs of the prospective customer. In addition, new conversations can be easily created via a maintenance interface.