Welcome » Case Studies » iD17 – Inventory availability | an AI Case Study
AWS CASE STUDY
Executive Summary
iD17, a boutique home staging company specializing in transforming properties for sale, was looking to streamline operations and improve client interaction through technology. Cloudar assisted in developing a chatbot solution that leveraged iD17’s inventory of interior staging items. The chatbot provides real estate agents and homeowners with real-time inventory checks, personalized staging suggestions, and automated booking options. As a result, iD17 improved its customer engagement and operational efficiency, allowing it to scale its business while maintaining a personalized touch.
CUSTOMER:
iD17
PROJECT:
FIRST LAUNCH:
September, 2024
Customer Profile
iD17 is a dynamic home staging and interior styling company founded in 2017, with a focus on transforming spaces to create welcoming, stylish environments. Specializing in interior styling, real estate staging, showroom styling, and event styling, iD17 helps clients enhance both residential and commercial spaces. The company tailors its services to meet individual needs, whether clients are looking to stage a property for sale, revamp their home interiors, or create a visually striking showroom or event space.
In addition to its core styling services, iD17 offers a unique handyman service, Klussen in Style, which executes interior projects with professional precision. iD17 prides itself on working closely with clients, ensuring that each project reflects their personal style while maximizing functionality and appeal.
The Challenge
iD17 faced several challenges as its home staging business grew:
- Manual Processes: Checking inventory, making recommendations, and managing bookings were time-consuming, requiring significant staff effort.
- Limited Availability: Clients often faced delays due to the manual nature of inventory checks and booking, resulting in missed opportunities.
- Scaling Issues: With increasing demand, iD17 needed a solution that could manage a higher volume of customer inquiries and streamline workflows without requiring additional staff.
- Customer Experience: Real estate agents and homeowners often needed immediate responses regarding availability and suggestions, which were difficult to provide in a timely manner.
iD17 sought a technology-driven solution to automate client interactions and manage its growing inventory more effectively.
Partner Solution – Context
Cloudar, as a trusted AWS partner, designed and implemented a chatbot solution tailored to iD17’s business needs. Key elements of the solution included:
- AWS-Powered Infrastructure: The chatbot was built using AWS services, providing a scalable and secure platform that could handle real-time queries and deliver fast responses.
- Inventory Integration: The chatbot was connected to iD17’s existing database of furniture and decor items, ensuring up-to-date information on availability. This allowed clients to instantly check if specific items were available.
- Personalized Staging Recommendations: Using natural language processing (NLP) and AI, the chatbot could interpret client preferences (e.g., style, budget, room type) and suggest appropriate staging options. This created a more personalized, interactive experience for customers.
- Booking and Scheduling: Cloudar integrated an option within the chatbot that allows clients to reserve items and schedule deliveries, streamlining the home staging process with minimal human intervention. Currently, reservations are handled via email, but in the future, an automated booking system will be integrated into the chatbot to further streamline the staging process.
Partner Solution – Techical
The solution is based on Cloudar’s Claude Chatbot (more info: https://cloudar.be/awsblog/claude-chatbot-on-aws/) which is an architecture built on AWS managed services, eliminating the need for infrastructure management. Utilizing Amazon Bedrock, there’s no need to communicate with APIs outside of AWS. This enables deploying scalable, reliable, and secure applications.
AWS Services used:
- Amazon DynamoDB: NoSQL database for conversation history storage
- Amazon API Gateway + AWS Lambda: Backend API endpoint (AWS Lambda Web Adapter, FastAPI)
- Amazon CloudFront + S3: Frontend application delivery (React, Tailwind CSS)
- AWS WAF: IP address restriction
- Amazon Cognito: User authentication
- Amazon Bedrock: Managed service to utilize foundational models via APIs. Claude is used for chat response and Cohere for vector embedding
- Amazon EventBridge Pipes: Receiving event from DynamoDB stream and launching ECS task to embed external knowledge
- Amazon Elastic Container Service: Run crawling, parsing and embedding tasks. Cohere Multilingual is the model used for embedding.
- Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL: Scalable vector store with pgvector plugin
- Amazon Athena: Query service to analyze S3 bucket
Results and Benefits
The integration of the chatbot, powered by AWS and implemented by Cloudar, provided numerous benefits for iD17:
- Operational Efficiency: The chatbot automated many of the manual processes involved in checking inventory and managing bookings. This allowed iD17’s team to focus on high-value tasks, such as client consultations and creative staging work.
- Improved Customer Experience: Clients, including real estate agents and homeowners, could now receive instant responses regarding product availability and tailored staging suggestions, greatly enhancing their interaction with iD17.
- Increased Scalability: With Cloudar’s solution, iD17 was able to handle a higher volume of customer inquiries and staging requests without needing to scale up its staff. The AWS-powered chatbot ensured that the system could grow with the business.
- Faster Conversions: Real-time inventory checks and the ability to instantly book items allowed clients to make quicker decisions, reducing the time it took to close staging deals and resulting in higher conversion rates.
- Cost Savings: By automating client interactions and booking processes, iD17 saved on labor costs and was able to operate more efficiently without compromising the quality of service.
Overall, iD17 was able to provide a more dynamic, responsive service while scaling its operations, positioning itself as a forward-thinking, tech-enabled home staging business in the competitive real estate market.