drukomat

Seamless and
guided client journey

From Overwhelmed Support Teams to 24/7 AI-driven assistant: How the company scaled customer assistance and boosted conversions for a complex offering.

The Challenge

Drukomat, part of the Colours Factory group, which operates dedicated printing stores across multiple European countries, serves the Polish market with a comprehensive B2B printing offering.
Despite their strong presence, Drukomat faced a pressing challenge. Their customer support was overwhelmed by a high volume of basic queries coming through live chat, phone, and email.

The scale of this problem was significant, with the team managing over 15,000 incoming messages and over 8,000 outgoing emails each month.

These interactions often involved simple questions about product specifications, prices, and configuration options, which could be easily handled by automation.
However, the assistant’s capabilities were designed to extend far beyond this, handling a wide range of inquiries from an integrated FAQ, such as questions about delivery methods, user profile settings, account creation assistance, and an explanation of printing terminology.

In addition, the company's website featured an extensive product catalog, making it challenging for customers to quickly find the products they needed without assistance. Drukomat.pl offers over 330 core products, with a product structure that results in over 38 million possible variants. This overwhelming complexity, combined with domain-specific language, often confused users, reinforcing the need for a solution to improve the overall user experience.

The challenge was clear: Drukomat needed a solution to alleviate the strain on their support team while improving the overall user experience for their customers.
15,000+
Incoming Messages
Monthly
8,000+
Outgoing Emails
Monthly
330+
Core
Products
38M+
Possible
Configurations

Our Approach

Vazco was brought in to develop a solution that would optimize Drukomat's customer support operations and improve the overall user journey on their website. Our goal was to build an AI assistant capable of handling the majority of simple customer inquiries and guiding users through the complex ordering process.
Instead of deploying a basic model that can be prone to "hallucinations" and difficult to control, we designed and implemented an agentic architecture built on our proprietary Nautilus platform. This approach creates a structured workflow where the assistant operates like a team of specialized agents, each with a specific role and access to carefully curated knowledge and tools.
The workflow itself is comprised of multiple steps, and the agents guide the user through this process, semantically evaluating the situation at each stage to ensure all business-defined conditions are met before moving forward. This semantic evaluation – a soft, AI-driven assessment rather than a rigid, data-based check – is a core capability of the Nautilus platform, setting it apart from other frameworks and enabling a more human-like, flexible interaction. The entire process was executed with a lean delivery methodology, focusing on fast, iterative development and continuous feedback.

Key Deliverables

AI-UX Driven Interactions & User-Centric Flow Design
We created a hybrid AI experience that seamlessly blends natural conversation with powerful microtools, a core part of our AI-UX design philosophy. This approach allows the assistant to guide users from a conversational flow to specific actions, such as real-time product configuration and dynamic pricing. This not only boosts user confidence and streamlines the buying process but also subtly achieves key business goals, unnoticeable to the user.
From Blueprint to Product: A Structured Development Approach
A key part of our Discovery phase was creating a Service Blueprint to map out the entire customer journey, identifying key pain points and opportunities for automation. This blueprint showed how a simple customer question often led to a lengthy manual process involving human agents. The assistant’s microtools were then designed to automate these exact steps. Following this extensive discovery, the project moved through a structured Proof-of-Concept, followed by MVP development, testing, and refinements, with each stage involving close collaboration with the client's team.
Precision, Control, and Security
To ensure accuracy and build customer trust, we implemented a system focused on tight control and reliability. The assistant's knowledge isn't based on general, open-source data; instead, it is grounded in a structured, curated internal knowledge base that automatically updates. This approach is crucial for hallucination mitigation, giving us precise control over the assistant's context and responses. We also added a hidden layer of control through an internal FAQ mechanism, which allows us to override the model's natural response with a predefined, unchangeable answer. We continuously refine the model through iterative testing to guarantee reliable performance.
Intelligent Escalation & Human-in-the-Loop Integration
We designed an intelligent escalation system that ensures a smooth handover to a human agent when needed. The system not only recognizes non-standard inquiries but also detects user frustration or a lack of progress. This model increases su pport efficiency by focusing the human team on high-value tasks and provides explainability for a better customer experience.
Cost Optimization
We optimized costs by carefully balancing model quality and price. We achieved this through several key strategies: optimizing queries to leverage caching, implementing a sophisticated Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system to limit the model's context, and integrating external tools for cost-effective answers. Additionally, we configured the agent to adjust the length of its responses and created different persona-based agents, each with its own set of instructions and tools, to handle queries in the most optimized way possible. We also implemented a flow divided into over 20 separate steps, which directly contributes to lowering costs.

The result: AI-Driven Assistant

The Drukomat AI Assistant is a sophisticated conversational agent designed to streamline the complex B2B printing journey. It's built on an agentic AI framework that goes beyond a simple Q&A bot. The assistant adopts a dual-persona approach to meet users where they are in their buying journey: a sales-oriented "Concierge" for product discovery and a direct, instructional "Navigator" for guiding users through the initial stages and helping them understand key concepts. It features specialized microtools – interactive UI elements that boost engagement and UX—such as real-time product configuration and dynamic pricing updates, which builds user confidence.
This system is powered by a structured, automatically-updating knowledge base that provides accurate, contextual responses and ensures the assistant avoids common errors. By design, the assistant manages routine queries and intelligently escalates complex requests to human agents, balancing the efficiency of automation with the necessity of personalized service.
The assistant helped streamline the product discovery and ordering process by guiding users step-by-step through various options and configurations. It effectively reduced the workload on Drukomat's customer support team by addressing frequent, low-complexity questions.

Microtools

Expected Impact

Following a successful go-live, the assistant is now operational on Drukomat's website. While it's too early for a full data analysis, early indicators are promising. We're now closely monitoring these key strategic metrics:
Support Efficiency
The assistant is designed to help handle routine queries.
Guided Customer Experience
Intended to walk users step-by-step through product selection.
Conversion Potential
Could increase customer confidence in their choices.
Scalable Knowledge Base
Built to remain accurate and easily updated as products change.
feedback

The client’s opinion

“Working with Vazco on the AI assistant has been very collaborative. They took the time to understand how we work and what our customers need, and helped shape the assistant to fit our processes. The team’s guidance during the discovery phase gave us confidence that the solution will support our customers effectively once it’s live.”
Agnieszka Grochowska
Head of Marketing @ Drukomat

What’s Next?

As the project progresses, Drukomat is keen on further enhancing the assistant’s capabilities, particularly with AI-driven features such as product recommendations and voice-based interactions.
We are exploring opportunities to make the assistant even more intuitive by incorporating machine learning to personalize customer experiences.

A key next step is leveraging insights from existing support channels, specifically by allowing the assistant to learn from transcripts of past conversations from the customer service (BOK) and call center. By analyzing this historical data, the assistant will be able to better understand common customer needs, identify recurring issues, and offer more nuanced and effective support, further streamlining the B2B buying process.

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