SSG case study

SSG

Shinsegae (SSG) is South Korea’s largest and oldest luxury retailer. It also leads the country in online marketplace innovation. Since using Sendbird, SSG connected its marketplace by allowing users and service providers to conveniently communicate in several use-cases: user-to-user chat, buyer-to-seller chat and a customer service chatbot on the company’s online marketplace app called SSG Talk.

Business Challenge

As a rule of thumb, SSG builds its technology internally. But the Platform Planning team at SSG immediately saw the immense amount of time, engineering resources, and maintenance challenges involved in developing a robust chat experience in-house. Given these hurdles, the company decided that Sendbird’s expertise made it the perfect partner to make building in-app chat easy.

“The basic project philosophy of SSG.COM is to internalize product development and systems,” said Young Duck Park, Project Manager for the Platform Planning team at SSG. “However, when it came to developing chat, we chose Sendbird because we needed to imple- ment the service well quickly. Sendbird is the expert in the chat and messaging space.”

When building chat proved to be prohibitively difficult, three factors gave SSG confidence to partner with Sendbird: its evaluation of other chat solutions on the market, Sendbird’s high-quality support, and its excellent API documentation.

“Sendbird’s exceptional support was the biggest factor for choosing it as a partner,” said Mr. Park. “We’ve had other third-party vendors come through our office, but none provided the level of support that Sendbird did. They showed us that commitment and we were sold. Another crucial factor was the quality of the API documentation. Compared to other solutions, it was clearer and more helpful – very impressive.”

Results

The mission of SSG’s Platform Planning Team is to continually deliver new value to their customers on existing platforms. Providing real-time communication for buyers and sellers was one of the team’s biggest priorities. To roll out this feature, SSG released Friend’s Talk, Seller Talk, and Customer Service Talk in three successive phases. As user-to-user and buyer-to-seller chat gained traction among SSG’s app users, the company released a customer service chatbot to streamline its customer service channels.

To improve the customer experience and reduce the overall number of inquiries sent through e-mail and the phone – this was one of SSG’s main objectives for CS Chatbot. After analyzing historical data, they estimated that a chatbot could replace 24% of customer service e-mail and calls.

With Sendbird, they exceeded their projections: “After we launched our CS Chatbot, we reduced our e-mail and call inquiries by 10~25%, while providing a chat experience people already enjoy on consumer messengers like KakaoTalk or WhatsApp.”

With the success of CS Talk, SSG is planning to expand their chat services from mobile to web. The company plans to develop their CS Chatbot and Seller Talk features to address more customer service inquiries and provide an even better shopping experience.

1) Since day one, Sendbird has partnered with AWS to establish itself as a leading conversations platform that enables a secure, global, and scalable in-app conversation experience. Sendbird is an AWS advanced tier technology partner operating 45+ AWSnative services in 9 regions. Thanks to Amazon’s AWS Auto Scaling and AmazonElastic Compute Cloud services, Sendbird manages massive digital traffic sending billions of messages monthly. Using Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route53geolocation functions, Sendbird ensures reliable global traffic distribution. Sendbird also leverages AWS CloudFormation to automate its servers’ management in each region efficiently. Lastly, AWS Elasticache and Amazon Aurora allow Sendbird to achieve millisecond latency and data storage for over 300 million monthly active users. Sendbird’s world-class conversation platform architecture and technical foundations are certified by AWS.