Meet Our Customer
Riviana Foods Inc., America’s leading rice company, holds a distinguished position as the most extensive marketer of wild rice in the world. As a subsidiary of Ebro Foods, a global leader in the rice sector, Riviana benefits from the extensive expertise and resources of its parent company, which operates across over eighty countries in Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa. This global presence allows Riviana to offer a comprehensive selection of rice products, meeting diverse market demands through an expansive network of subsidiaries and brands. Riviana’s commitment to quality, innovation, and sustainability has positioned it as a trusted choice for consumers and a leader in the rice industry.
In addition to its diverse product portfolio, Riviana operates with a deep-rooted commitment to social responsibility. Through initiatives like “Jars of Hope,” in partnership with the California Association of Food Banks, and collaborations with Mercy Chefs to support vulnerable communities, Riviana is dedicated to giving back and making a positive impact. Riviana’s rice brands offer a range of options to meet various culinary needs, from nutritious meal solutions to quick and convenient options, making it easy for families to enjoy quality rice-based meals at home.
The Challenge
In an increasingly complex customer service environment, Riviana Foods faces the challenge of scaling its support operations to handle a high volume of inquiries from diverse stakeholders, including consumers, manufacturers, and retail partners. Traditionally, these inquiries are managed by support agents through web forms, emails, and phone calls, making the process both time-intensive and costly. As the company continues to grow, the need to efficiently streamline customer support has become more pressing to keep up with rising demand without sacrificing quality or responsiveness.
To address these challenges, Riviana Foods aims to harness the power of AI by implementing a chatbot solution to provide instant support and reduce dependency on human intervention for routine inquiries. However, Riviana requires a robust solution that can handle the complexities of its multiple brands and meet rigorous operational standards. The goal is to create an AI-driven support system that can not only answer frequently asked questions but also direct customers to live agents for more complex issues, ensuring a seamless and efficient experience for all users.
This chatbot solution must be capable of adapting to each brand's unique requirements, managing large data sets, and integrating with existing support systems, such as Salesforce, for ticketing and escalations. Riviana’s partnership with NorthBay Solutions aims to transform customer support operations through generative AI, optimizing response times, reducing operational costs, and ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction.
The Implication
Implementing an AI-enabled chatbot solution offers Riviana Foods a significant opportunity to enhance its customer support efficiency and deliver a more streamlined, responsive experience to its diverse audience. By automating responses to routine inquiries, the chatbot reduces the volume of inquiries requiring human intervention, allowing Riviana’s support agents to dedicate their efforts to more complex cases. This shift not only improves operational efficiency but also accelerates response times, ensuring a quicker and more satisfying experience for consumers, manufacturers, and retail partners.
Additionally, the solution’s integration with Riviana’s existing systems, such as Salesforce, provides a seamless escalation process for cases that require human attention, complete with conversation history and context. The chatbot’s built-in feedback mechanisms and knowledge base refinement also allow Riviana to evolve its support capabilities over time, aligning responses with evolving customer needs. By deploying this AI-driven system, Riviana Foods is positioned to scale its support operations in a cost-effective way, enhancing customer satisfaction and reinforcing its commitment to service excellence as the company continues to grow.
Solution
NorthBay Solutions, an AWS Premier Partner, crafted a comprehensive AI-enabled chatbot solution to transform Riviana Foods' customer support experience. This solution employs generative AI to deliver efficient, brand-specific responses, improving engagement and operational efficiency for Riviana's multiple brands. By integrating directly with Riviana’s existing workflows, the solution enhances response times and reduces agent workload, allowing customer support teams to focus on complex inquiries while routine questions are handled instantly by the chatbot. The chatbot’s branded interface offers users an intuitive experience, providing responses tailored to each brand’s unique tone and guidelines. For inquiries that require human assistance, the chatbot escalates with conversation history intact, streamlining the handoff to live agents.
The solution’s core components include:
- User-Friendly Chatbot Interface: The chatbot interface allows users to submit questions in real time, branded in line with Riviana’s design standards and providing instant responses. It also includes escalation options triggered by keywords or rules defined by the Riviana team.
- Admin Interface: The role based admin portal provides an intuitive platform for managing chatbot knowledge bases, users and roles, and chat feedback collection. Administrators can update knowledge base documents, manage access with role-based controls, and monitor conversation logs and telemetry data.
- Knowledge Base Management and Feedback: The chatbot includes mechanisms for knowledge base updates, allowing periodic manual improvements based on customer feedback, which ensures ongoing enhancement of the chatbot’s responses.
- Salesforce Integration: Integration with Salesforce enables seamless creation and management of support cases, allowing automated case generation, escalation, and tracking within Riviana’s support ecosystem.
- Scalability and Monitoring: Built on AWS, the chatbot solution is scalable to handle varying volumes of inquiries, with application logs maintained in Amazon CloudWatch for performance monitoring and troubleshooting. Non-production environments are spun up as needed to optimize cost.
By leveraging AWS services such as Amazon Bedrock, ECS, CloudWatch, Amazon Aurora Serverless PostgreSQL and others, Riviana’s AI-enabled chatbot solution operates within a secure and scalable environment. This system significantly enhances customer engagement and operational efficiency, reducing manual support tasks, optimizing response times, and delivering a consistent, brand-aligned customer experience across all of Riviana’s brands.
AWS Services
The following is the list of core AWS Services used by Riviana:
Benefits
Implementing the AI-enabled chatbot solution provides Riviana Foods with several significant business benefits:
Enhanced Customer Support Experience: The generative AI-powered chatbot enhances the customer support experience by providing rapid and accurate responses to frequently asked questions. With instant assistance available around the clock, Riviana’s customers experience improved satisfaction, strengthening brand loyalty and engagement.
Operational Efficiency: Automating routine customer inquiries with the chatbot significantly reduces the manual effort required from support agents. This efficiency enables Riviana Foods to allocate resources strategically, allowing agents to focus on complex cases while maintaining a high quality of customer service.
Scalability: The solution’s ability to handle inquiries across multiple brands and channels makes it highly scalable. As Riviana Foods expands its customer base and product lines, the chatbot solution can easily be scaled to meet increasing demand without proportional increases in staffing.
Continuous Improvement: Feedback from customer interactions is collected and used to update the knowledge base periodically, ensuring that responses remain relevant and accurate. This iterative improvement cycle keeps the chatbot’s performance aligned with evolving customer needs and expectations.
Data-Driven Insights: The solution provides valuable insights into customer interactions, allowing Riviana Foods to refine support strategies, identify common issues, and improve product offerings. Leveraging these insights helps Riviana to make informed, data-driven decisions that enhance customer satisfaction and operational effectiveness.
Cost Savings: By automating a substantial portion of customer interactions, Riviana reduces the need for extensive human resources in its support operations. These cost savings can be redirected to other strategic initiatives, promoting growth and innovation.
Improved Brand Consistency: The chatbot ensures a consistent, brand-aligned experience across Riviana’s various brands, reinforcing a cohesive customer journey and strengthening brand identity.
By leveraging the power of AWS and the expertise of NorthBay Solutions, Riviana Foods has successfully implemented an AI-driven chatbot solution that elevates customer support, enhances operational efficiency, and provides actionable data-driven insights for ongoing optimization.
About NorthBay
NorthBay Solutions is a leading provider of cutting-edge technology solutions, specializing in Generative AI, Cloud Migration, ML/AI, Data Lakes and Analytics, and Managed Services. As an AWS Premier Partner, we leverage the power of the cloud to deliver innovative and scalable solutions to clients across various industries, including Healthcare, Fintech, Logistics, Manufacturing, Retail, and Education.
Our commitment to AWS extends to our partnerships with industry-leading companies like CloudRail-IIOT, AI21 Labs, and Snowflake. These collaborations enable us to offer comprehensive and tailored solutions that seamlessly integrate with AWS services, providing our clients with the best possible value and flexibility.
With a global footprint spanning the NAMER (US & Canada), MEA (Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, KSA & Africa), Turkey, APAC (including Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Philippines and Vietnam), NorthBay Solutions is committed to providing exceptional service and support to businesses worldwide.
We hold the following competencies, specializations and programs of AWS:
- Generative AI and Machine Learning
- Data & Analytics
- DevOps
- Mobile
- Education
- Migration Competency
- MSP Partner
- Public Sector Partner
- Database Ready
- Database Freedom
- Solution Provider Partner
- Well Architected
