Far from being an exclusive technology, artificial intelligence (AI) It already coexists in our daily lives. It is not only present when answering queries in ChatGPT or recalculating a trip on the GPS, but now he also sells gas bottles to the residents of La Matanza. Through an official distributor of YPF Gasa robot already serves customers and guides them in the process of purchasing their bottles for their homes and companies.
The company that offers it is B&B Gasdistributor that is in charge of serving the area of The slaughter, from General Paz to Virrey del Pino. The robot has been serving customers through WhatsApp for a year: it answers their questions, provides them with information about prices, and makes sales. At the same time, the robot can recognize the phone number of the person speaking and check that customer’s purchase history to make suggestions.
How does this technology work? In this type of automation there are different alternative solutions. The operating principle is that of a chatbot that, through the construction of keywords or menus, solves the client’s need.
They install a robot that sells gas cylinders and uses AI to serve customers
In addition, interactions through AI are available today. This means that, behind this chatbot, a cognitive engine executes a process based on the customer’s questions. This technology is evolving more every day and, with increasingly affordable costs, it will make interactions more fluid. Instead of talking about menus, it will be like talking to a person.
The robot is there to help the human and make their work schedule more efficient. In no case is the door closed to personalized attention, which remains essential for the buying and selling processes.
“Technology always interested us, but we couldn’t find how to implement it. We always try to look for technological alternatives so that our collaborators have better tools and thus provide the customer with a more efficient service,” explains Nicolás D’Elía, Commercial Manager of B&B Gas. “We wanted to optimize times: here we have the call center sector with two people who answer telephone calls daily and answer customer queries through the networks. “We decided to implement the robot to take orders or answer questions: the typical ones are usually whether we reach the area where they are or price issues,” he explains.
As a result, the two people working in the call center were able to reduce the number of hours dedicated to answering queries from 8 to 5 hours a day, and dedicate the time gained to new strategic tasks. “We managed to work more efficiently and with a better work environment. In a call center, interactions can be demanding and stressful. Now, the robot takes care of those repetitive tasks, allowing the team to focus on other important responsibilities,” explains D’Elía.
There were even other processes that the company used to do manually, which they now delegate to the robot. For example, once a month they took the time to contact inactive clients and try to get them back. Now the robot takes care of those contacts, and the employees can dedicate themselves to serving those who are really interested in the proposal.
In terms of numbers, the robot has served 6,083 customers so far in 2024, and has been able to autonomously resolve 50% of their requests. In addition, 25% of the customers it spoke to were contacted outside of business hours, where there was no one to answer them and they would not otherwise have received an instant response.
On average, 75% of the purchases made by clients were resolved automatically, making 810 sales without the need for a commercial advisor. And 1,073 customers were re-contacted during the year who had stopped purchasing, and they resumed consuming B&B Gas products through the commercial campaigns.
The company behind the robot that sells bottles
Behind the development of the robot there is an Argentine company. This is Redoo, a startup founded in 2022 by Víctor Moure and Gastón García, which was born as a digital solution for the automotive industry. The entrepreneurs started with an automation project for a client and, little by little, they scaled the business until today, where they work with 40 dealerships and process 260,000 messages per month. To give life to the venture, they invested US$150,000 out of their own pockets and their value proposition is based on helping firms leave analog processes behind and convert them into useful data for making decisions.
Redoo’s platform, then, allows for an immediate response, regardless of the day and time, for automatable tasks such as giving a tour, informing about a product or finding out a price, and can be used in different sectors. “Any industry in which there is commercial attention or in which it is necessary to respond to a customer’s spontaneous demand with a certain repetitiveness can be impacted by automation. All industries have the opportunity for transformation, because they all have a vector of repetitiveness that allows them to benefit from this type of technology,” explains Moure.
For example, at Redoo they also developed a virtual mechanic who can be consulted on how to diagnose a car’s fault code and he returns the process flow and explains how to do it, even indicating the references of the sheets in the manual.
The opportunities that come with technology are enormous. The first benefit is seen for customers, who have access to a better purchasing experience, with instant responses even outside normal business hours.
But, also, for the company, these innovations allow us to begin to know the customer better, collecting data and analyzing it to implement business strategies. “We now convert all commercial interactions with clients into data. The data has the capacity to give us information if we process it. We begin to measure everything we do to make better decisions and everything is susceptible to an opportunity for improvement,” says Moure.
Like any change, at first it may generate doubts. However, it is clear that these advances will not displace the human task, but rather will give them tools to make their work easier. “Sometimes we think that AI is that Terminator from the ’80s that comes to destroy us, and we are very far from that. If we understand it intelligently, it generates added value over those things that we do not like to do. But it also requires us as a society to enter into a process of evolution,” concludes Moure.
