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How Zalando is co-creating its new AI-powered assistant together with customers

November 30, 2023
Technology
A Zalando customer sitting on the floor looking at the Zalando fashiobn assistant on his mobile phone; only hand and part of their legs are visible

As Zalando is opening the Beta version of its AI-powered assistant to all logged-in customers in Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom and Ireland, we have sat down with Tian Su, VP Personalisation & Recommendation to learn more about this exciting new tool and how it will bring value to Zalando’s customers.

It’s been an exciting couple of weeks for you and the team! Can you tell us where we stand with our Zalando Assistant and why we believe that now is the right time to open it widely to our customers?
Of course, happy to! After we developed the first version of the assistant in a sprint of 5 weeks only, we iterated and refined it based on customer feedback from the very beginning. We have tested it extensively internally and with selected customers. We believe that now is the perfect time to open it to more customers. This allows them to benefit from this entirely new conversational experience and at the same time enables Zalando to keep learning and improving. 
 

Portrait of Tian Su in a dark blue dress sittting on a chair and looking at the camera

Tian Su, VP Personalization and Recommendation at Zalando

So you’re saying the product is not final yet? 
Exactly. The Zalando Assistant is still a beta version which means that we are learning and constantly improving its responses to customers' questions. Bringing it to a bigger audience now will be crucial in understanding how customers interact with the assistant and how we can best refine its capabilities. It allows us to determine which features to add based on customer feedback. We’re basically co-creating the assistant with our customers to refine it in a way that is most useful to them.

How can customers co-create the experience? How can they give feedback? 
There are different ways for customers to give feedback. In their conversation with the assistant they can directly tell it if they like or dislike the suggestions and ask it to provide alternatives. They can also give a thumbs up if they found its advice helpful and, if not, a thumbs down to let us know where it still needs to improve. Based on these learnings, we can then understand what improvements are needed to meet our customers’ expectations. 

What’s next in this exciting journey?
We are just at the beginning of exploring all the opportunities that generative AI can offer us in serving our customers. As we develop the Zalando Assistant further, we're dedicated to getting to know our customers better and finding out what they like and what kind of new features serve them best. We're excited to see how generative AI can make their shopping experience even more delightful and engaging. We see that a lot of customers use the opportunity to find outfits for special occasions or seek concrete fashion advice and information. Many of them describe the feeling they want to have when wearing the item and really enjoy the experience the assistant offers them, so we see an opportunity to create even more value for them. We’re excited for what’s yet to come!
 

Zalando SE Boiler Plate EN

About Zalando

Founded in Berlin in 2008, Zalando is building the leading pan-European ecosystem for fashion and lifestyle e-commerce around two growth vectors: Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B). In B2C, we offer an inspiring and quality multi-brand shopping experience for fashion and lifestyle products to about 50 million active customers in 25 markets. In B2B, we are using our logistic infrastructure, software and service capabilities to help brands and retailers run and scale their entire e-commerce business, on or off Zalando. As an ecosystem, Zalando aims to enable positive change for the fashion and lifestyle industry.