Irvine Company is using Fashion Island as a testing ground for a concierge chatbot that helps shoppers find brands, stores or services offered at the outdoor mall in Newport Beach.
The At Your Service software, introduced last week during the thick of the holiday shopping season, communicates with users via text messages sent to 949-734-7364. It’s powered by IBM Watson’s cognitive computing and designed to produce better answers to shopper inquiries through continued use. Irvine Co. will expand it to other retail or residential properties if it proves effective this holiday season.
The chatbot’s capabilities “can absolutely be expanded,” said Easther Liu, chief marketing officer of Irvine Company Retail Properties. “And that’s really the beauty of us as master planners and owning all of the different asset types within our ecosystem, as I call it. In each of the divisions, we’re all often testing different types of innovation and then translating it into the other divisions.”
For example, Fashion Island’s OC Delivery Express, a same-day delivery service provided in partnership with Irvine-based bringpro, also is available to the company’s office tenants and residents of its Village apartments.
At Your Service launched last week but won’t replace the physical directory kiosks or the concierge desk anytime soon.
“There are still people who want to scout guest services, but sometimes you’re there and you just want to know where’s the restroom,” Liu said. “I don’t have time to look for someone to go find that out, I just want to be able to text and get an answer, and that’s simply what this amenity, or service, provides.”
So far the bot is averaging about 500 inquiries per month. The center, meanwhile, attracts about 16 million visitors a year.
Last week Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., also announced its Experiential List Formulator bot—ELF for short—which shoppers can communicate with via Facebook Messenger or a dedicated website.
New York-based Satisfi Inc. developed both platforms and said Fashion Island is the first U.S. shopping center to use the bot in a text message format.
“It’s incredibly exciting to see this being piloted across a broader retail environment,” said Satisfi co-founder and Chief Executive Don White. “It will really help to create a more personalized experience for Fashion Island shoppers.”
At Your Service is still a work in progress. Irvine Co. supplies the data Watson uses to provide answers.
“We’ve got to feed the engine in order for it to get smarter,” Liu said. “Every day we get to see what questions come in, and the responses that the system provides. And as we see those questions, we’re formulating more detailed answers—we can amend and shape and modify and add to. So it still requires human input … If someone writes ‘what’ instead of ‘who,’ the system gets smart enough to say, ‘Oh, I know they didn’t mean ‘what,’ they meant ‘who,” and I’m still going to provide the same answer as if they asked it in the correct manner.’”
The effort has been in the works since the fall and followed Watson and Satisfi’s success with Macy’s On Call, a mobile web tool the department store chain launched in July that allows customers to ask questions “regarding each participating store’s unique product assortment, services and facilities and receive a customized response,” according to IBM Corp. in Armonk, N.Y.
“We are always looking to improve and enhance and deliver differentiating customer experience, and how do we make sure your shopping trip out to our center the easiest and seamless from your car to the actual shopping experience,” Liu said. “That’s really what is at the crux of all the different types of innovations that we test and roll out, and that’s just what we have been about as a company.”
The chatbot doesn’t have a dedicated support team—duties are spread across Irvine Co.’s IT, marketing and operations departments.
“It’s a pilot right now, “Liu said. “As it continues to progress and we see this kind of traction we’re getting, the response rate, etc., it probably will grow into something bigger.”
Fashion Island, which has about 170 tenants, generated an estimated $700 million in taxable sales for the 12 months that ended on June 30. Irvine Co. also owns and manages Irvine Spectrum Center, which posted $448.6 million in taxable sales, and the Marketplace in Tustin, which brought in $480.7 million.
