Welcome » Case Studies » iD17 – Inventory availability | an AI Case Study
AWS CASE STUDY
Executive Summary
iD17 is a boutique home staging and interior styling company that specializes in transforming properties for sale with a focus on personalized, stylish design solutions. Facing challenges associated with traditional, manual processes for inventory checks, booking management, and client interactions, iD17 partnered with a trusted AWS partner to deploy a generative AI chatbot solution. This solution utilizes AWS-managed services to streamline operations, integrate real-time inventory data, offer personalized staging suggestions, and automate scheduling processes.
CUSTOMER:
iD17
PROJECT:
FIRST LAUNCH:
September, 2024
Customer Profile
Established in 2017, iD17 has quickly become known in the real estate market for its innovative approach to home staging. The company offers a comprehensive range of services including interior styling, real estate staging, showroom styling, and even event styling.
In addition, iD17 provides a distinctive handyman service, known as “Klussen in Style”, which brings professional precision to interior projects.
The business’ ethos is built on delivering tailor-made solutions that combine artistic design with functional efficiency, ensuring that spaces are both visually appealing and market-ready.
The Challenge
As iD17’s reputation grew, it encountered several operational challenges that are common in the traditional approach to business management:
- Manual Processes: Administrative tasks such as checking inventory, making recommendations, and managing bookings were time-intensive, demanding significant staff hours.
- Limited Availability: The manual nature of these processes sometimes led to delays, causing missed opportunities for clients needing immediate responses on availability and suggestions.
- Scalability Concerns: With increasing demand, the scalability of the existing manual system became a concern, as expanding the workforce was not feasible without impacting operational efficiency.
- Customer Experience: Real estate agents and homeowners often experienced sluggish response times, impacting the overall customer satisfaction and engagement.
To overcome these issues, iD17 sought a technology-driven solution that would not only automate these processes but also impart quantitative improvements in operational and financial performance.
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
Utilizing natural language processing and artificial intelligence, the chatbot interprets client preferences such as style, budget, and room type to offer bespoke staging suggestions. This feature greatly enhances the customer interaction experience, delivering information tailored to each client’s specific needs.
Automated Booking and Scheduling
The integration of a booking system within the chatbot allows clients to reserve staging items and schedule deliveries directly, without the need for intermediary communication. This not only accelerates the turnaround time for customer requests but also minimizes human error.
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.
