Winery marketing teams are in overdrive these days—accelerating efforts to attract younger consumers, growing wine club membership and elevating tasting room and online interactions for prospective visitors and buyers. In the end, effective communication to meet these goals is a must.
Many small and mid-sized wineries have staffing limitations that make providing quality tasting room experiences and handling call-ins while also attending to texts, emails and online orders a daunting challenge.
Evgeny Bazhutov founded WineSpot AI to help wineries fill this gap. “Before launching our automated support app, we spent eight months researching the U.S. winery market to assess automation levels in business processes, customer support structures and the key pain points wineries face. Through over 100 interviews with winery employees and business owners, we found that wineries producing up to 5,000 cases annually rarely have a dedicated support team—or even a single employee assigned to customer service.”
Their research determined that limited staffing meant most webpages can’t offer customers live chat sessions to answer their questions, instead relying on emails and phone calls—what Bazhutov calls “old-fashioned communication channels.” This lack often leads to a response lag, which can be frustrating, especially for the young generation.
Says Bazhutov, “The young generation doesn’t want to wait twenty-four hours for a reply or use texting because of spam. To involve them in the process, you must be able to provide instant answers reliably.”
While some wineries offer chatbots on their website, they are typically older-generation models restricted to giving “baked-in” answers that can’t provide answers to questions outside of those parameters.
WineSpot AI’s ‘AI Agent’ gives wineries a unified system with a Helpbox, an Email Bot and an AI Chatbot. This AI-powered solution connects to customers across communication channels, including email, web interfaces and social media, gathering all customer messages in one easy-to-manage system. The result is a unified omnichannel customer support experience.
Helpbox organizes frequently asked questions into easy-to-navigate tabs, which allows customers to locate answers quickly. “AI Agent currently handles over 60% of customer inquiries without human involvement,” says Bazhutov, and its capacity is expanding. When customers need human assistance, AI Agent collects the details and seamlessly passes the information to the winery’s support team, notifying them via email or SMS.
WineSpot AI’s platform is powered by generative AI. “With natural language processing (NLP), the AI Agent understands and responds in a natural, conversational way,” Bazhutov explains, “It’s flexible rather than strict like older chatbots. Customers don’t need to go through as many questions to get an answer.”
This capability makes it a game-changer. Like a human, it can recognize and accurately answer customers’ questions and follow customized dialogue flows, like proactively promoting wine club memberships, handling concerns or suggesting cross-sells.
AI Agent uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and all responses are based strictly on the winery’s official information and automatically adjust when the winery updates its website.
By leveraging AI-driven automation, Winespot AI helps wineries streamline their customer service process to save time and reduce labor costs. This dual benefit of improving customer experiences and increasing profitability can provide a valuable asset for winery owners.
To learn more, talk to WineSpot AI at the Wine Sales Symposium on May 14 at the Hyatt in Santa Rosa.