Voice Cart

Task

Unilever Food Solutions is a global company which works closely with chefs and distribution partners. Food Collective​ is their ordering platform that closes the loop between product discovery and customer loyalty for UFS brands. This platform strives to increase sales of their brands through Chefs by offering rewards for purchasing. However the orders placed by the Chefs during the working hours are seen to be very low.

Voice is gradually becoming the most widely used user interface. And it is the next big paradigm shift in how humans interact with devices. Voice technology is evolving rapidly and it is going to having an impact on many spheres, including eCommerce.

Foreseeing this trend and the given issue of chefs not placing orders during working hours we decided to build a full-fledged solution based on voice for eCommerce to showcase the possibilities of using voice to increase the number of orders placed by Chefs through the Unilever food solutions platform.

Solution

We developed Voice Cart, a full-stack voice commerce solution to search/order products through voice-controlled virtual assistant (Alexa, Google).
This includes:

• Developing headless eCommerce APIs that interact with the backend to do the heavy-lifting job of querying catalogue, adding products to cart, placing orders, etc.
• Developing Custom Skills for Alexa to enable voice-based interactions with customers and taking necessary actions by invoking the appropriate API’s for performing actions based on voice commands.

Alexa dots are installed on Kitchens were the Chefs can query for products and place orders any time in a seamless way. The platform can interact with end users through voice. Voice messages and notifications are pushed to the end users based on context. This can be notification for replenishing of an item he has purchased earlier. or a personalised message for cross selling or upselling a product.

Results

• This opened doors for a new project with Unilever. We are in the early stage of demonstrations and discussions with them to implement this solution.
• A fully functional prototype of an Emerging trend is ready for showcase.
• New opportunity for business development.