Brewery ShinDigger sees massive boost to home deliveries with chatbot service

Brewer ShinDigger is discovering the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) to increase online sales and improve its customer relationships.

The Manchester brewery teamed up with conversational AI platform HelloDone to improve its home delivery offering - and has increased direct-to-consumer sales by 300 per cent in less than a month.

With its wholesale trade hit during the Covid-19 lockdown - and with Greater Manchester facing more tough restrictions - ShinDigger has turned to automation to get its beers to thirsty customers within the M60 within three hours. 

HelloDone's proprietary AI connects with order management systems and messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Through its technology, three-hour delivery customers are alerted when they reach the top of the queue, can track their driver, and can manage their order with ShinDigger via Facebook Messenger. The chatbot service uses natural language processing to improve its conversations with customers and question answering.

Paul Delamere, ShinDigger co-founder, said: "One of the key elements of on-demand delivery is ensuring customers have up-to-date and useful information about where their order is. HelloDone has helped us achieve that and also allowed us to automatically answer the main questions that our customers have. In turn this has meant we can focus our resources on ensuring a great - and speedy - delivery experience."

Ed Hodges, CEO of HelloDone, said: "We started our business believing that the technology available today can offer customers better and easier ways to 'get stuff done'. Happily, buying delicious beer now fits in thst category. By embracing the future of delivery and customer management, the ShinDigger team have shown what's possible in tough market conditions." 

ShinDigger is one of the UK's most active "ghost" brewers (using other breweries spare capacity to make its beers), producing around 1.5 million pints per year.

22 October 2020 - Bethany Whymark