- Complexity: Standard
- Deployment: Platform-native
The problem
Retailers selling complex products lose sales when shoppers hesitate on a static website and no sales associate is available to ask clarifying questions. After hours, a shopper trying to choose between similar products has no one to consult, and the retailer has no visibility into what made them hesitate.
- Static product pages cannot ask a shopper about their family size, kitchen layout or specific use case
- No sales coverage outside business hours means lost purchase momentum
- Shoppers abandon carts when comparing similar products without guidance
- Hesitations and unanswered questions are invisible to the retailer under the checkout funnel model
The solution
A voice agent holds a natural conversation with a shopper, asks follow-up questions the way a sales associate would, and recommends products grounded in the retailer's catalog. The shopper makes the final purchase decision.
- Greets the shopper by voice on the online store at any hour
- Asks follow-up questions to surface the actual need, such as family size or kitchen layout, rather than waiting for the shopper to volunteer details
- Retrieves matching products from the product catalog through a retrieval-augmented pipeline
- Recommends a product and explains the reasoning in conversational terms
- Captures the conversation as structured data on hesitations and preferences for later review
Where people stay in control
- The shopper makes every purchase decision, the agent only recommends
- Conversation design encodes the retailer's own sales expertise by product category so recommendations stay within approved guidance
- Staff review captured conversation insights to refine the agent's flows over time
Systems and data
The workflow reads product data from the retailer's product catalog through a retrieval pipeline and writes structured conversation records, including shopper hesitations and preferences, that were not previously visible in the online store's checkout data.
- product catalog
- online store
Results
- Approximately 30,000 users engaged with the agent during a two week public campaign in the documented deployment
- 92 percent of post use survey responses were positive in the documented deployment
Why platform-native
The agent runs as a single voice conversation flow grounded in one product catalog with no persistent case state across sessions, so it fits directly on the model platform with Altivus providing monitoring and governance.
Frequently asked questions
Does the voice agent complete the purchase for the shopper?
No. It recommends products through conversation and the shopper makes the purchase decision and completes checkout themselves.
What happens to the data from these conversations?
The workflow captures structured data on shopper hesitations and preferences that staff can review, which is not visible in a standard checkout funnel.
Is this only for electronics retailers?
No. The same voice plus retrieval architecture applies to any complex purchase category where buyers benefit from guided discovery, such as appliances or industrial supply.