Case Study: How Alibaba Uses AI Chatbots to Serve a Billion Customers
Alibaba Group, China’s largest e-commerce company and one of the world’s biggest companies, has nearly one billion annual active Chinese consumers who make hundreds of millions of transactions daily using its Taobao e-commerce platform.
During Alibaba’s busiest shopping period in 2021 − Taobao’s Double 11 shopping festival − its platforms facilitated 540 billion RMB (US $85 billion) in transactions over a two-day period. The sheer number of customer interactions in Taobao transactions makes it difficult for Alibaba to proactively engage with customers when needed.
Further, Alibaba needs to resolve several million customer service queries each day. The queries can come from end-user consumers or business merchants in Alibaba’s two-sided platform. Consumers may have questions about the Alibaba platforms or were unsatisfied with products they purchased from merchants on the platform. Merchants could have questions about end-user consumers or also about the platforms.
