How OBI leverages voice AI agents to handle 1,500 calls daily and shape the future of retail customer experience

OBI is one of Europe's largest home improvement retailers, with more than 660 stores across 10 countries. It has a clear growth strategy designed around innovative products and services for the home that are consistently tailored to customer needs.

Challenge

OBI's service team fields an enormous volume of calls every day. With over 60,000 products spanning DIY, home, and garden, the team is constantly answering questions about opening hours, products, services, promotions, and online orders. The phone lines are always busy, but in the spring, call volume triples. Attempting to manage that surge while maintaining fast, personal service can push the team's capacity to its limits.

Knowing the peak-season surge stress, OBI wanted to find an automated solution that would cut wait times, improve the customer experience, and ease the workload of human employees while freeing them up to focus on bigger customer experience initiatives.

Solution

OBI deployed Parloa’s AI agents to support its service team on the phone lines. The agents handle calls in natural language, resolve what they can autonomously, and route to the right human expert when needed.

In Germany, AI agent "Paul" handles general inquiries around opening hours, promotions, services such as a garden planner, and the heyOBI app. When a customer has a more complicated question, such as how to build a garden terrace, “Paul” connects the customer to the right human agent to answer the question. Operating just in Germany, “Paul” handles an average of 1,500 calls a day.

During a pilot in Poland and Hungary, AI agents "Marek" and "Balász" answered questions around product availability. By connecting to OBI's inventory management system, the AI agents could automatically inform customers of product availability based on the stated product number and reserve the item via phone or web for in-store pickup within two hours. “Marek” actively encouraged customers to reserve or order online during the call, helping increase OBI’s shopping-by-phone volume by 30%. Over the course of the pilot, “Marek” handled more than 100,000 inquiries.

"OBI is committed to the belief that anything is possible, and that there’s a fast and tailored solution for every customer request. Bringing AI agents into our customer service opens up new ways to handle the many customer inquiries we receive. The AI agents are always available without long wait times. At the same time, customers can still be transferred to humans as they wish."

Sabine Zöllner, Advanced Expert, Customer Care Management, OBI

Why Parloa?

OBI evaluated several AI solutions before choosing Parloa. Ultimately, the company was drawn to Parloa’s powerful voice-first technology, international scalability, enterprise-grade security standards, and the flexibility to continuously evolve the solution over time, combined with its smooth pilot implementation process.

"Parloa combines powerful AI technology with deep expertise in enterprise implementation. That combination empowers us to achieve measurable impact that helps us reach our business goals while staying ready for what's next."

Matthias Quirmbach, Head of Customer Care Management, OBI

How a complex implementation came together

Working alongside integration partner MUUUH!, Parloa implemented its AI solution quickly and methodically. As OBI's tech stack spans inventory management, e-commerce, CRM, and logistics systems, Parloa needed to connect all of the systems through standardized APIs into its AI Agent Management Platform (AMP). In doing so, it consolidated the data so that the AI agents had easy access to all of the information that would enable them to reliably handle inquiries. Built-in monitoring, governance, and testing capabilities gave OBI the control to roll out carefully and optimize continuously. The architecture is built to scale globally across use cases, languages, and countries.

Results

Parloa provides comprehensive transparency into conversation history, inquiry reasons, recurring contact patterns, and seasonal peaks. These insights directly feed into ongoing development of the platform, so OBI can identify optimization opportunities early and strategically scale the AI based on customer value and business impact. 

• 45,000 monthly inquiries handled by AI agents

• 89% customer satisfaction (CSAT)

• 20% automation rate (calls resolved end-to-end by AI agents)

• 99% routing accuracy for context-based transfers

• Zero wait times for frequently asked questions

With AI agents absorbing routine volume, human agents have more time to take on complex, high-value conversations and deliver more personal, individualized service.

What's next

OBI is continuing to develop the agentic solution in step with its growth strategy. In Germany, “Paul” will help customers track the delivery status of online orders – a technically demanding addition due to OBI's complex data structure across direct supplier deliveries and third-party sellers.

Later, “Paul” will take on more end-to-end case resolution and help unlock cross-sell and upsell opportunities, but sensitive situations and high-touch consultations will remain with human experts. This balanced approach to automated service and value-add advice will earn trust, deepen customer relationships, and deliver tangible business impact.