YOOBIC, the AI-powered Frontline Employee Experience Platform (FEXP), announced the official public launch of YOOBIC NEO, a revolutionary AI coach that transforms the way organizations engage, train, and communicate with frontline teams. Following months of rigorous real-world testing by top merchant customers, YOOBIC NEO is now available for general use, including previously unannounced conversational AI capabilities designed to enrich and streamline the frontline employee experience.
The retail industry is experiencing a seismic shift, grappling with the complexities of omnichannel strategies and evolving customer behaviors and expectations, while also confronting intensifying threats like shrinkage. Simultaneously, there’s a vast, untapped potential for transformative insights through AI and data analytics, hindered by manual processes, fragmented tools, and legacy communication methods. In response to these dynamic shifts, agility and adaptability are paramount. Retailers must empower their workforce by equipping them with the right tools and knowledge and fostering a culture of rapid learning and flexibility. Enter YOOBIC NEO, ushering in a revolutionary era of AI-enhanced frontline operations, poised to help businesses navigate and conquer these modern retail challenges and enhance their frontline employee experience.
“The rise of AI is rapidly transforming every aspect of retail organizations, and we can’t afford to leave frontline teams behind,” said Fabrice Haiat, co-founder and CEO of YOOBIC. “With YOOBIC NEO, we’re giving employees at all levels the tools they need to work smarter, connect and collaborate more effectively, and reimagine the way they deliver value for their organizations.”
YOOBIC NEO is powered by revolutionary AI capabilities including:
- NEO Assistant, which serves as a personal pocket assistant tailored for frontline employees operating in the bustling retail environment, offers a real-time, self-serve alternative to traditional support lines. Whether they need guidance on store procedures, help with client claims, or any other query, NEO Assistant is readily available to provide instant answers. This conversational AI chatbot is seamlessly integrated into the frontline daily workflows, reducing support line needs. Employees can quickly find the information they need, allowing them to focus on providing excellent customer service. Furthermore, every interaction with NEO Assistant fuels its AI-driven insights, helping to inform strategic decisions at headquarters and improve resource allocation. YOOBIC NEO early adopters witnessed up to a 30% reduction in support line queries and up to 15% gains in resource allocation.
- NEO Moderator, which safeguards peer-to-peer communication and collaboration by using natural-language processing to automatically flag inappropriate posts or comments, helps organizations build a more respectful and inclusive work environment. Retailers can foster open communication with all their employees and build a vibrant employee community while mitigating reputational and legal risks. Meanwhile, frontline teams can engage more openly as part of a safe online community, ensuring that ideas and information flow freely to wherever they’re needed most.
- NEO Creator, a powerful tool for rapidly generating and distributing quality content at scale, helps resource-strapped retailers stay abreast of evolving business requirements and dynamics, whether they are new standard operating procedures, regulations, or product launches and promotions. Using AI prompts and custom commands, retail teams can create new resources and documents or transform existing ones into everything from microlearning content to store closing checklists, all in a matter of minutes. For instance, Internal Communications Managers can effortlessly tailor the tone, format, and length of posts to optimize content for specific subsets of employees, maximizing engagement while ensuring consistency and alignment with strategic communication goals. Meanwhile, L&D Managers can quickly create and launch high-quality training materials by slashing course content creation by 75%, boosting frontline team development.
Many of YOOBIC’s biggest clients, including major global luxury fashion and beauty retailers, have already tested YOOBIC NEO across their operations, allowing over 65,000 frontline employees to benefit from the platform’s powerful AI coaching. The results are striking: one global catering group was able to halve the time needed to create and distribute new content, while a major clothing brand slashed the time needed to create new tasks from three-quarters of an hour to just 10 minutes.
GameStop, the largest gaming retailer in the US, has experienced positive outcomes with the YOOBIC NEO AI suite in enhancing operational efficiency. Specifically, the suite has been instrumental in transforming product videos and documentation into comprehensive employee training courses. “With NEO Creator, GameStop can now generate lessons and quizzes that are 95% complete and ready for deployment within just a few clicks, significantly streamlining the content creation process. In addition, YOOBIC’s NEO Assistant has proven to be highly beneficial for associates seeking quick information. This feature provides instant answers to common queries such as ‘What’s our price match policy?’ or ‘What is the company dress code?’. Consequently, this has led to a reduction in the number of support tickets and requests that we’ve received from associates,”
said Matt Goodfriend, Senior Manager, Learning and Development at GameStop.
“At YOOBIC, we believe that using advanced AI technologies to unlock the full potential of frontline teams is the next frontier for retailers and other customer-facing organizations,” Haiat said. “We’re thrilled to officially launch NEO, and give retailers the ability to upgrade their employee experience, unlock unprecedented productivity gains, and ultimately capture compelling bottom-line results.”
YOOBIC will showcase its NEO suite in New York City later this month at the National Retail Federation’s Retail’s Big Show 2024. Company leaders will join partners from Mattress Firm and GameStop for breakout sessions and will be available at Booth #6045 to answer questions and offer hands-on demonstrations of NEO’s powerful capabilities.
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