Castorama France Launches Hello Casto: The First DIY Voice Assistant

After several months of research, carried out with thousands of customers and employees, Castorama has launched Hello Casto, the first DIY voice assistant. This new feature, which can be found on the Castorama mobile app, revolutionises DIY learning, thanks to video tutorials which are fully voice controlled. Hello Casto combines artificial intelligence and voice recognition, which illustrates the brand's commitment to offering innovative ways tohelp customers with their home improvement projects.

Hello Casto, a unique innovation that simplifies the lives of DIYers

While the French are increasingly likely to make improvements to their homes, some give up on their projects out of apprehension or lack of knowledge. Taking this into account, Castorama has provided its customers with a practical and innovative tool, which offers an unprecedented ease of use: the search and control of video by voice. To develop this service, Castorama has partnered with Razorfish, experts in user experience, technology and value creation.

Integrated into the Castorama Android app, the Hello Casto voice assistant guides and encourages users throughout their home improvement projects using voice operated educational tutorial videos. Once on the app, saying the two magic words "Hello Casto" will start your journey to find your tutorial. You can also use voice recognition to adjust the volume of the video, review or pass a step and pause. The 53 videos already available cover floor, wall and bathroom projects; categories which are in high demand by customers today. New content and functionalities will be added to Hello Casto over the coming months.

With Hello Casto, Castorama strengthens the range of support solutions already available to its customers, whether that is its 92 stores (more than 11,000 expert advisors, free castostages, etc.) , on its e-commerce site (more than 750 buying guides and tutorials) or through its online magazine 18h39.fr (more than 10,000 tutorials step by step) or Youtube channel (more than 300 educational videos).

Customer experience at the heart of the new services strategy

Castorama is the brand that supports its customers in France during all the changes in their lives in a positive and responsible way. For many years, Castorama has listened to the people of France to better understand them. This knowledge of customer needs has given rise to the innovation projects developed by the company. This is how Castorama is modernising itself through the digitalisation of its services, and offers solutions to simplify the lives of diyers and allow them to easily carry out their projects.

Still in this process of testing and learning, the brand recently launched several new services for its customers:

• The implementation of remote kitchen projects with a dedicated team
• The rental of motorised vehicles offered online
• The cutting of keys becoming 100% digitised
• Augmented reality with Meta to help our customers project themselves

Romain Roulleau, Marketing, Digital and Customer Director at Castorama said: "The customer is at the heart of our service strategy. A true innovation of use, the Hello Casto app  was developed with the aim of democratising DIY and improving the customer experience. Simplicity is the best word to use to describe this tool. With Hello Casto, we are once again demonstrating the innovative capabilities of the brand and our teams who are committed to supporting our customers through all the changes in their lives”.

To discover the Hello Casto voice assistant, visit: https://www.castorama.fr/hello-casto.

Source : Kingfisher

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