Boozt swims in the most challenging of retail waters. As a digital department store selling everything from running shoes to bed linen to women’s fashion, the Malmo-based business faces an intimidating lineup of online competitors. Each day it faces off against global hyperscalers, local independents, and specialist-owned brands.
Despite these challenges, or perhaps because of them, Boozt is now established as one of the leading e-commerce sites in the Nordics. It has done so through a relentless focus on service, speed, and the development of a unique corporate culture. Slack plays a key role in facilitating all of this.
Slack is part of daily life at Boozt. Slack helps connect a regionally dispersed workforce, accelerate decision-making, and simplify the adoption of new ideas.
“Slack simplifies our early exploration of generative AI. We don’t need to switch between different apps. It makes sense to build our AI experience in an app where everyone is already working.”
Creating a unified gateway to innovation
Increasingly, Slack is viewed as the home for all work. As Boozt seeks new ways to improve customer service and reduce response times, it wants to use Slack as the gateway to new applications and new ways of working.
For example, it became clear that some team members were experimenting with generative AI. The marcomms team was using different gen AI tools to help with copywriting, the finance team was creating summaries of rivals’ financial reports, and developers were testing code. Boozt didn’t want to dampen employees’ curiosity, but it did want to bring a degree of control and consistency.
Using a Slack software development kit, an engineer in one of the Boozt offices created a user interface to connect Google Gemini with Slack. He had a working model in place within two weeks. The result is Bolt, a unified, compliant, companywide entry point for all gen AI use cases, that launched in May 2024. It means colleagues don’t need to open a second app to start their gen AI journey.
“Slack simplifies our early exploration of gen AI,” said Steffan Mølbæk Andersen, the Data Intelligence Director at Boozt. “We don’t need to switch between different apps. It makes sense to build our AI experience in an app where everyone is already working.”
Consistent user experience is key to progress
Bolt can already pull content from a user’s Slack thread and build contextual awareness; Google Gemini can assess text documents, images, or spreadsheets. But this is only the first step.
The eventual goal is to train an in-house AI using 15 years of Boozt source material. This will accelerate response times and set new standards in customer service. The AI assistance may help service teams find reliable fixes to common issues, or work from a summary of a customer’s entire history. Threads can be shared between colleagues, democratizing corporate knowledge. Ultimately, the company’s vast library of content will inform its AI with the unique voice of Boozt.
“Slack,” said Andersen, “is key to establishing a consistent user experience,” something that Boozt sees as vital in the take-up of all new ideas. “User adoption is everything. If you’re having a hard time explaining what you’re building or why you’re building it, stop building.”
“Culture is the reason your customers choose your business rather than your competitor’s. It’s your competitive advantage. Slack helps personalize our business.”
Culture as a competitive advantage
Boozt continues to grow steadily. The business was founded in 2011; today it has 3.5 million customers and stocks more than 1,000 brands. Revenues were up 15% through 2023.
“The business thrives because it has created a unique culture: care why,” said Jakob Frisenette Kristoffersen, the Director of Customer Service at Boozt. “Expertise means nothing if you don’t care. We want all employees to demonstrate trust, freedom, and responsibility.”
This culture helps bring cohesion to a growing workforce; in a crowded field, culture also creates a point of difference for customers and partners. “Culture is the reason your customers choose your business rather than your competitor’s. It’s your competitive advantage,” he said. “Slack helps personalize our business.”
The business has more than 1,200 employees in Denmark, Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden. As with many retail businesses, turnover of customer service staff can be high. Slack ensures individual knowledge remains with the business. Calls from customers to the helpdesk usually take less than two minutes; Slack helps improve rapid access to account details and service responses. If needed, reps can share tasks across one customer service interaction, with everything conducted on a central platform.
For Boozt, Slack is the everyday productivity platform. It is the company’s water cooler and the place where quick decisions are made.
“We’re a growing business and it’s not always possible to be on first-name terms with every colleague. Slack is a great way of finding out who people are, what they’re doing, and what they’re interested in,” said Kristoffersen. “We work best when we build up a little personality.”
Bringing expertise together quickly and effectively
In business, perfection can sometimes be the enemy of effectiveness. Boozt succeeds when, in Kristoffersen’s words, it can “make quick learnings and find quick wins.”
The priority for Boozt, in a fast-moving retail environment, is to prevent issues from affecting the customer and to enable skilled colleagues to do their jobs. Delay and the business could be overwhelmed. Between Black Friday in late November and the post-Christmas sales, the customer service team handles more than 1 million customer contacts. A dedicated Black Friday channel, for example, ensures that all service issues, outages, and events are captured in one place. Alerts are automatically sent to the correct response teams, enabling Boozt to keep pace with this important trading period.
The business has an innovation hub in Copenhagen, a data science team in Aarhus, and tech offices in Vilnius and Poznan. Slack channels help bring multidisciplinary teams together quickly, and with focus. There are recaps of meetings for those who couldn’t attend and summaries of project progress. The speed of communication across Slack, with dedicated user groups quickly in place, is key to gauging feedback to new applications or systems.
“Solving a complex problem requires bringing expertise together, quickly,” said Kristoffersen. “Essentially, that’s why we use Slack.”
