This article spotlights artificial intelligence empowerment in retail. A recent interview with Victor Hernandez Saldana, manager of workforce management at ALDO Group, shows how industry aspirations for the practical application of AI are translated into action and into clear, measurable results that drive further investments in AI technology.
ALDO Group is a Canadian multinational retailer specializing in footwear, handbags, and fashion accessories. Founded in 1972, it operates 1,500 stores (300 in North America) across more than 100 countries. Before partnering with Five9, Aldo Group was like many other global companies that developed over time into environments with a mix of on-premises and cloud, multi-vendor, and legacy applications, offering significant opportunities to upgrade, replace, and modernize with new AI-powered capabilities.
The Challenge and Journey
ALDO Group's challenge was having a fragmented, outdated customer experience (CX) landscape with separate providers for interactive voice response, telephony, chat, workforce management, quality assurance, and agent dashboards. The on-premises systems were costly, slow to update, and inflexible. Applications were siloed, scheduling was time-consuming, and agents couldn't check or change scheduling remotely.
As a recognized thought leader in WFM and contact center operations, Victor understands how improving employee experience can positively impact CX, which helped drive the decision to invest in tools to streamline operations and assist both administrators and agents. Five9's unified CX platform provided the answer with omnichannel CX (voice, chat, and email) and a completely redesigned intelligent virtual assistant experience. Agents benefited from AI-powered assistance, insights, summaries, and transcriptions. Significant operational improvements were achieved through new workforce engagement management, quality monitoring (QM), and web-based CRM integration.
When I asked Victor what it was like when the new AI capabilities were introduced to agents, he said, "Introducing Five9 was the easiest transition ever," and then gave several examples. For instance, he noted that it was a game-changer for voice-only agents to switch to chat without managers having to manually switch them, as was the case before when channels came from different vendors. Similarly, the new summarization features were equally impactful, allowing agents to easily copy and paste into the post-call wrap-up, which significantly improved average handling time (AHT).
Scheduling became easier, with clear benefits for agents and supervisors. Switching from a premises-based system to an AI-powered application lets him plan schedules six weeks in advance. Agents who previously had to be on site to view their schedules can now check them through a secure, compliant mobile app, with automatic change requests and approvals. This speed and flexibility save time, improve work-life balance for agents (who are often students), reduce part-time attrition, and lower hiring costs.
Victor also highlighted Five9's AI Insights as another excellent example of AI, noting that it has significantly reduced inquiry time with executive management. Now he can filter by topic and respond to a trend in 15-20 minutes, whereas pulling, cleaning, and analyzing data from different systems sometimes takes up to a day.
The Proof Is in the Pudding
As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. The ALDO Group has achieved significant results with the implementation of Five9. This includes a 12.7 percent decrease in abandonment rate, a 24 percent increase in average speed of answer, and a 20 percent reduction in agent attrition. Agent downtime has been reduced from five hours per week to just 20 minutes. Post-call wrap-up time has been reduced with AI summaries automatically populated into the CRM, and average handling time decreased by 100 seconds. Additionally, the Ease Score (customer loyalty) has improved from 60 to 80.
Building on this initial success, the company is working to improve the consumer-facing aspects of its agents, such as expanding self-service capabilities to handle simpler interactions and allowing agents to focus on more complex cases. Additionally, they are progressing in implementing automated QM.
Nancy Jamison is founder and principal analyst of Jamison Consulting, bringing more than 40 years of experience in contact centers and customer experience. Her career spans many years, each at ROLM, Gartner, Jamison Consulting (1.0), and most recently 13 years at Frost & Sullivan as a senior industry director in ICT with a specialty in the retail and healthcare sectors.