Although Alepa grocery stores offer most day-to-day grocery products, the stores are unable to stock every imaginable product in their selection and the absence of single missing product (i.e. the favoured coffee or oat milk brand) can result in losing the customer to other local suppliers.

To tackle this issue, we introduced “Alepa Block Wishes” – a hyperlocal digital initiative and a logistics and production-line turnaround. With the help of a chatbot, customers could request their favorite products to be added on the shelves of their local Alepa straight from their mobile phones Messenger app.

Block Wish is an innovation using existing technologies to enhance the customer satisfaction and sales by mounting automated chatbot to work with logistics and production line systems. The development of the integrations and chatbot started in late 2017. The integrations to product and logistics databases were done in early 2018. During the same time frame the machine learning, metadata and chatbot interface was build.The chatbot went live at 1st of March.

We built Facebook Messenger chatbot with integrations to all S Group SKU level product data and shop locations. Customers could wish any products they imagined from the bot, which then searched matching product from S Group databases using meta data and returned best matching products within milliseconds to the chat.? ?

From these products customers could send their Block Wish to closest Alepa based on their location. If needed they could send the Block Wish to any Alepa based on the name of the neighborhood.? ?

The logistics and product line changes were made automatically. 70% of the wishes were fulfilled within 48 hours.? ? After introducing Alepa Block Wishes, the selection in each neighborhood started to change rapidly.? ? Block Wishes became an instant hit.? ? In a time of retail revolution, the previously prehistoric Alepa store chain managed to evolve into a network of corner stores to hip local shops with unique selections.