Liquor retailer saves hundreds of hours on reporting and lifts accuracy

Leading retailer sets sights on innovation

As one of Australia’s leading retailers, the company provides customers with an accessible range of alcoholic beverages across a vast national network of stores and its ecommerce channels. The retailer, who has been in partnership with Probe CX for 15 years, continues to invest in and innovate its online shopping experience. 

A retail partner of 15 years and counting 

The client is one of Australia’s leading liquor retailers known for delivering great value throughout its 900 locations and ecommerce store. Probe CX assists their customers, whether they shop in-store or online, through a high-volume contact centre operating 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. An onshore team answers customer calls while agents in the Philippines provide chat and email support. 

Probe CX has partnered with the business since 2011, acting as both a custodian of the voice of the customer and strategic advisor, helping continually improve delivery and operating costs. 

The compounding effects of manual processes

Data is everything in customer experience. Although the client had deep conversational data, its CX team faced daily challenges in identifying areas to improve interactions with customers.

The reasons for customer contact were captured through the slow process of manual tagging. This involved categorising interactions using a list of fixed categories. Some agents accidentally chose the wrong tags while others forgot, creating unreliable, incomplete data and inaccurate reporting.

Other CX platforms in use provided fragments of insight into sentiment and weren’t connected with other systems. This meant managers lacked a holistic and true understanding of the customer, restricting their ability to confidently make decisions. When a recurrent customer issue required investigation, managers were forced into reviewing a small interaction sample to pin down the root cause, often arriving at a conclusion hours later.

Overcoming these challenges began with Probe CX and the client agreeing on a clear goal:

The goal

Improve the accuracy and depth of customer insight to enable faster decision-making and better customer outcomes by removing manual burden. 

Better quality data without increased workload

Probe CX implemented Apollo Conversation Metrics, an AI-powered analytics capability designed to transform how customer interactions are understood. The solution uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyse all call and chat transcripts, automatically identifying and tagging customer issues. This replaced manual tagging with a consistent, scalable model for insight generation.

Now every customer interaction recorded in the client’s conversational AI and analytics platform is classified using multi-level tagging and integrated into a unified reporting environment. By consolidating data across systems, including voice and chat transcripts, the platform created a single, real-time view of the customer.

A customised reporting module now enables the team to:

• Analyse customer sentiment and trends in one place
• Identify trends across all interactions, not just samples
• Understand customer issues at a more granular level
• Drill into anomalies and root causes with precision

Real-time anomaly detection also enabled teams to quickly identify spikes in contact volume and understand what was driving them. Probe CX Contact Centre Manager Ricky Mutimer, who works with the client to transform delivery, says the efficiency gains are astounding.

‘We used to spend countless hours listening to a sample of calls to understand a specific customer problem, like orders being cancelled by the courier, for example. Whereas now, we can get that data in five minutes and quickly provide affected customers a response,’ says Ricky.

Hundreds of hours of manual work eliminated

The move to incorporate Apollo Conversation Metrics delivered immediate improvements in both operations and customer experience. Data accuracy increased significantly and manual effort also reduced drastically.

More importantly, the team now has access to the right information and can respond to customer issues faster. In one example, a spike in failed deliveries was quickly traced to customers not presenting identification. With that insight, the client introduced clearer messaging at checkout. These types of improvements compound over time, improving operational efficiency.

The results included:

The client continues to build on these capabilities with Probe CX, using customer insight to proactively identify issues, optimise operations and improve customer experience at scale.