AskSid has strengthened its retail AI offering for south Asian customers by integrating with Vietnamese app Zalo, used by more than 80% of smartphone users in the country.

This move should help global retail brands succeed in Vietnam by being available on the country’s most popular messaging channel.

With its retail-specific digital shopping assistant, Indian company AskSid has helped global retail brands automate their customer support, discover insights and enhance shopping experiences with a full-stack vertical AI.

With live implementations of its AI running in markets such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, the move to integrate with Vietnam’s app Zalo is indicative of AskSid’s vision of ensuring a global and local approach, by linking with another popular messaging channel.

Currently live in 23 countries and supporting 15 international languages, on channels including web, Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and Microsoft Teams, AskSid can help retailers create a serious mark in the Vietnam market by adding Zalo to its arsenal.

Zalo has made a name for itself by giving global apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Viber stiff competition with its UI-rich elements such as cards, buttons, stickers and a range of features that extends to paying bills, booking a cab or doctor’s appointment, and even applying for a loan.

Through AskSid’s digital shopping assistant deployed on the Zalo channel, retail brands can now engage with customers on their channel of choice, enabling more conversions and engagement.

Dinesh Sharma, CTO of AskSid, said: “Natural language is going to be the new user interface of retail ecommerce and our Zalo integration is just one among many such channels we have as part of our exciting product roadmap.”

AskSid has launched its digital shopping assistant for a paints and coatings brand through Zalo in Vietnam, enabling customers to browse paints and coatings, discover colour palettes, ask queries, and engage live with the brand, from the app.

The combination of AskSid’s retail AI capabilities, including conversational AI, round-the-clock live chat and AI analytics, with Zalo’s features could transform the quality of online customer support available in Vietnam.

AskSid is an AI-enabled virtual advisor built to meet the needs of global retail and CPG brands. It is designed to manage customer support and customer experience end to end. The virtual advisor leverages the power of conversational AI, backed by retail AI models that extract consumer insights from conversations, most of which are undiscovered by the brand. Delivering seamless conversations across a multitude of channels including web sites, mobile apps, social media channels and in-store, AskSid helps retail brands automate customer support. Brands can now deploy self-learning conversational AI across channels, meet customer needs, identify business opportunities, and engage proactively and intelligently round the clock.