- Background
Boosting efficiency with AI automation
As a leading UK retailer, this organisation is committed to the delivery of seamless digital experiences that deliver speed and convenience for users. Its range of over 70,000 products can be ordered over the phone, online, or from a local store, 7 days a week.
With over 1,000 stores across the UK and Ireland, the retailer’s award-winning click and collect service, 60-minute delivery service, advanced AI-driven search capabilities and real-time stock updates enable customers to get the right products, when and where they need them.
However, expansion of the store network combined with a rapid growth of its customer base meant contact channels were under significant operational pressure. To reduce customer wait times and streamline high-volume contact scenarios, the retailer wanted to initiate intelligent self-service automation that could resolve common customer queries without human intervention.
To elevate customer service, the retailer took the decision to deploy NiCE CXone Autopilot, an advanced virtual agent based on the NiCE cloudbased customer experience platform that supports robust omnichannel interaction management.
To ensure a smooth adoption, however, the retailer needed to find a specialist implementation partner that could customise and configure the solution for its unique operating environment.
- The requirement
Redefining customer experience with smart automation
The company knew that NiCE had a powerful platform to bring intelligence into their customer service operations. The challenge was accelerating time to value and ensuring successful adoption in order to support growth and maximise CX.
Working in partnership with NiCE, Bell was engaged to help the retailer accelerate its adoption of CXone tools. Responsible for enabling a high-performance CXone Autopilot deployment, Bell was tasked with:
- Designing and building automation flows across 12 user-defined use cases.
- The delivery of AI training to the retailer’s internal teams.
- Ensuring the retailer acquired the skills needed to sustain and expand the solution independently. As NiCE’s preferred European delivery partner for CXone, Bell’s deep technical and implementation expertise would prove pivotal for enabling the automation of repeatable customer journeys in multiple channels.
All of which would enable customers to receive fast, accurate resolutions without any need to escalate to human contact centre agents.
- The solution
Overcoming Technical Challenges
A specialist cross-functional team was assembled to lead the deployment programme. Combining expertise in automation development, conversational design, project management and technical integration, the Bell team was able to automate multi-channel interactions and elevate the self-service capabilities of the retailers contact centre operations.
Bell’s specialist team had to overcome a number of challenging integration and resource hurdles. These included building tailored AI agents trained on company-specific data and ensuring that the conversational AI that would replace basic chatbots engaged in truly ‘human like’ and nuanced interactions.
Three implementation challenges in particular demanded significant partnership collaboration and out-of-the-box thinking to achieve an optimised solution.
- WhatsApp Integration
Since Bell did not directly control the WhatsApp gateway, it had to utilise some highly creative engineering approaches, which included:
- Crafting payloads in precise constrained formats.
- Using empty questions, controlled ‘back-jumps’ and branching logic to replicate native behaviour.
- Conducting extensive debugging sessions with the CXone team to ensure correct rendering and performance.
- Web Integration
The web channel posed a number of challenges that had to be overcome. These included:
- JSON payload requirements differed significantly from WhatsApp.
- CXone restraints included single question delivery, timeout behaviour, conversation closure rules, and restricted intent switching.
Overcoming these constraints required continuous collaboration with front-end developers to align logic, payload structures and expected behaviours. Through iterative refinement and daily syncs, Bell was able to successfully stabilise and unify the customer experience across channels
- Expert-NiCE CX Autopilot Integration
Integrating Expert with NiCE CX Autopilot was essential for enabling AI-powered self-service that leverages the retailer’s verified knowledge base to provide accurate, conversational answers across digital and voice channels.
Something that was mission critical for generating the accurate and specific responses needed to resolve customer queries. Requiring rigorous experimentation and technical refinement, the Bell specialist team was responsible for:
- Developing and validating new integration scripts.
- Testing Expert outputs against AI-agent generated conversational flows.
- Ensuring the new logic enhanced, rather than disrupted, existing architectures.
- Designing a scalable, maintainable structure for the retailer’s future flow enhancements.
The outcomes Delivering Measurable Impact The successful implementation of NiCE CXone Autopilot has transformed CX delivery for the retailer. Automating a wide set of repeatable customer journeys has made it possible to enhance the customer experience and deliver personalised service at scale. Allowing for faster and more accurate resolutions, Autopilot maintains context across multiple channels, so customers don’t have to repeat themselves. ©Bell Integration 2026 Generating significant operational efficiency and delivering frictionless self-service digital interactions, the results speak for themselves:
- 260,000 customers have been handled by NiCE CXone Autopilot in the year-to-date.
- 140,000 customer contacts have been fully retained and resolved.
- Automated handling has scaled from an initial 1,000 contacts to 9,000-10,000 contacts per week.
- The retailer is achieving a 53% contact retainment rate across automated journeys.
- A high NPS score of 70 confirms that customers are responding very positively to the AI-driven service
As NiCE’s preferred European delivery partner for CXone, Bell’s deep technical and implementation expertise would prove pivotal for enabling the automation of repeatable customer journeys in multiple channels.
–Martin Mersey Bell Integration AI Automation Director
- Key takeways & metrics
- 260,000 customers handled by the platform
- Automated handling of 9,000-10,000 contacts per week.
- 53% contact retainment rate across automated journeys
