From Call Trees to Agentic AI - How Kingfisher Is Winning Back Employee Time for Customers

Why It Matters

By automating routine IT requests, Kingfisher frees frontline staff to focus on sales, boosting productivity and customer experience across its multi‑brand retail network.

Key Takeaways

• Vita v1 handled 200k interactions, deflecting calls.
• Vita v2 uses ServiceNow Now Assist generative AI.
• Data quality identified as primary barrier to AI success.
• Touchless resolution agents aim for autonomous issue fixing.
• 500 employee hours saved, redirected to customer service.

Pulse Analysis

The retail giant’s AI evolution mirrors a broader shift in enterprise IT service management, where legacy ticketing systems are being replaced by conversational assistants. Kingfisher’s early adoption of a structured virtual agent demonstrated the value of call deflection, but the real breakthrough arrived with ServiceNow’s Now Assist, which turns a simple decision tree into a ChatGPT‑style experience. This transition not only accelerates issue reporting for store associates but also centralises knowledge across B&Q, Screwfix and other brands, creating a unified digital workplace that scales across languages and regional terminology.

A critical lesson emerged from the upgrade: data quality is the linchpin of generative AI success. Kingfisher’s multilingual environment—English, French, Polish and more—exposes inconsistencies in device naming and outdated knowledge articles, prompting a SWAT team to cleanse and enrich the repository. Industry research corroborates this, showing that only about one‑fifth of organisations achieve AI success rates above 80 % when data hygiene is neglected. By prioritising accurate, current content, Kingfisher ensures that its AI can reliably surface the right answers, reducing the risk of misinformation and building employee trust in the new tool.

Looking ahead, the retailer is piloting “touchless resolution” agents that automatically diagnose and remediate incidents without human intervention. Expected within six months, these agents will evaluate change quality, cross‑reference incident histories and execute fixes, aligning with ServiceNow’s Autonomous Workforce vision of handling 90 % of internal requests autonomously. The tangible payoff—500 reclaimed employee hours—highlights a shift from cost‑avoidance narratives to productivity gains that directly enhance customer service. As more retailers chase similar efficiencies, Kingfisher’s roadmap offers a practical blueprint for integrating generative AI, governance, and data stewardship at scale.