H&M Using Nuance Virtual Assistants for Live Chat on Google Search & Maps

Improving customer engagement capabilities has been a critical focus for businesses, especially during COVID-19, with spikes in calls to contact centers and online chat assistance. To take their customer communications to the next level, fashion retailer H&M has announced customers will now be able to engage with their virtual assistant right through Google Maps and search.

This new capability is the result of an established partnership with conversational AI provider Nuance Communications (News - Alert). The new integration offers superb choice and flexibility for online shoppers and extends H&M’s prior investments in live chat and virtual assistant technologies from Nuance.

With more than 50 market online shops, H&M uses virtual and live chat from Nuance to offer customers real-time answers, help with order tracking, details on store locations and hours - and more. These self-service options are available to consumers 24 hours a day and have helped the company improve customer experiences since first implementing it in 2018.

The cross-channel customer experiences help to reduce call volumes and are first being launched for the U.S. market.

“With the explosion of digital engagements, especially in the retail sector, we’re hearing from customers more about the need to optimize better and handle consumer engagements and service requests across channels,” said Tony Lorentzen, Senior Vice President, Intelligent Engagement at Nuance.

“The differentiator with Nuance technology is that we can partner to build one virtual assistant and extend that system to whichever channel an organization wants to leverage for engagement. Google’s (News - Alert) Business Messages is one example where we are further enabling H&M to give customers more convenient options to get their questions answered without ever having to pick up the phone.

Edited by Maurice Nagle