TechLab by Bol

In this episode, we talk with Daniel and Emiel, software engineer and product owner in the customer support domain. In this domain, the focus is to help our customers in the best way possible. But what if we can prevent the customer to feel the need to contact bol.com in the first place, they asked themselves.

What this episode covers

They realized this can be possible using the analyses of the various customer interactions we have via the Chatbot "Billie", live chat, phone and email.

For these analyses, they introduced techniques from the Data Science and Machine Learning domain. Natural Language Processing is needed as well as Comprehender Techniques. As a team, they investigated models available in the open source community. In the podcast, we talk about how we adapted them for this purpose followed by the training of these models.

We talk about the four steps to get from idea to the usable information for the product specialists. The product specialist can use the information provided to enhance the product details and descriptions to a level where a minimum of questions from customers is needed.

One of the first deliverables was the introduction of so-called unhappy products report. Products which cause relatively much customer interactions. It presents these products but even more important, possible causes.

Guests

Daniël Heres; software engineer

Emiel Ubink; product owner

Notes

Design sprints as part of the way of working to increase the speed and shorten the feedback loop:design sprint

Determination of the important words in the text is done by the use of TF/IDF which stands for term frequency-inverse document frequency. It's part of the Natural Language Processing and to determine the Smart Word Clouds. TF/IDF

BigQuery is used to store the data to be analysed later on.

Predictive Models are being used to improve the shop which should result in a better customer journey with a lower number of customer questions.

Unsupervised Learning is discussed as the way the models are being trained and verified

Clustering Topic Modelling; finding out the latent thems (topics)

Update 4th June 2021:

We received a mail from one of our listeners providing us with a link to more up to date info on unsupervised learning

In this episode, we talk with Daniel and Emiel, software engineer and product owner in the customer support domain. In this domain, the focus is to help our customers in the best way possible. But what if we can prevent the customer to feel the need to contact bol.com in the first place, they asked themselves. They realized this can be possible using the analyses of the various customer interactions we have via the Chatbot “Billie”, live chat, phone and email. For these analyses, they introduced techniques from the Data…

In this episode we talk about GO. Go is not a language that is used the most at bol.com. That’s is Java, together with Kotlin.

What this episode covers

In 2014 it was introduced for the first time and reached a steady but not so big user group. Recently, along with the move to the cloud, we experience a second wave of adoption. When you listen to the stories our two enthusiastic guests share in this episode, you might even believe Go is the future.

Guests

Rogier Lommers

Tom Stoepker

Notes

The starting point for Go

Learn go by diving into the library of examples

The github library with the opensource code from uber referred to

How to learn Go? Take the tour and you are ready to go

The funny project mentioned to improve the images

As long as retail exists, people tried to predict the future. An accurate forecast makes it much easier to buy the correct amount of products from suppliers, know what you need to keep on stock and even know what the sales will do with specific promotions.

Over the last couple of years, this domain changed dramatically because of the introduction of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. In this episode, we chat about this changing playing field to share our experiences with you.

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Guests

Harmen Prins

Erick Webbe

Notes

In this episode we talk about GO. Go is not a language that is used the most at bol.com. That’s is Java, together with Kotlin. In 2014 it was introduced for the first time and reached a steady but not so big user group. Recently, along with the move to the cloud, we experience a second wave of adoption. When you listen to the stories our two enthusiastic guests share in this episode, you might even believe Go is the future. Guests Rogier Lommers Tom Stoepker Hosts Peter Brouwers Peter…

As long as retail exists, people tried to predict the future. An accurate forecast makes it much easier to buy the correct amount of products from suppliers, know what you need to keep on stock and even know what the sales will do with specific promotions. Over the last couple of years, this domain changed dramatically because of the introduction of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. In this episode, we chat about this changing playing field to share our experiences with you. Guests Harmen Prins Erick Webbe Hosts Peter Brouwers…

Kotlin was first used by our teams a couple of years ago. It had an interesting start that shows how we adopt technology in general. In different feature teams a group of software engineers explored their own use cases for Kotlin.

What this episode covers

Some very enthusiastic, some a bit more skeptical and eventually they found each other. A new community in bol.com was born, the Kotlin community. In this episode we talk about this journey, the use cases, the adaption and the impact on frameworks that we use in our feature teams.

Guests

Anastasija Efremovska

Mykola Gurov

Notes

The survey mentioned is the Stack Overflow Survey 2019, In particular this section: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology

Kotlin was first used by our teams a couple of years ago. It had an interesting start that shows how we adopt technology in general. In different feature teams a group of software engineers explored their own use cases for Kotlin. Some very enthusiastic, some a bit more skeptical and eventually they found each other. A new community in bol.com was  born, the Kotlin community. In this episode we talk about this journey, the use cases, the adaption and the impact on frameworks that we use in our feature teams. Guests…

"Welcome to the bol.com Tech Podcast. In this podcast we share our experience with you to learn and entertain. Peeking behind the screens of IT and Tech in general at bol.com. Showing you our approach to IT, e-commerce and retail platforms."

This is our opening sentence of the upcoming episodes of the bol.com Tech podcast.In this introduction episode we like to share with you:What is this podcast about, why did we start it and why should you listen to it?

We hope that you enjoy the podcasts as much as we enjoy the creation of it.

What this episode covers

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“Welcome to the bol.com Tech Podcast. In this podcast we share our experience with you to learn and entertain. Peeking behind the screens of IT and Tech in general at bol.com.  Showing you our approach to IT, e-commerce and retail platforms.” This is our opening sentence of the upcoming episodes of the bol.com Tech podcast. In this introduction episode we like to share with you: What is this podcast about, why did we start it and why should you listen to it? We hope that you enjoy the podcasts as…