Total Wine gave every shopper a store expert. Conversion went up 4x

An AI agent that asks the right questions and points each customer to the right bottle.

The store moved online. The expert didn’t.

Total Wine & More is the country’s largest independent retailer of fine wine. 294 superstores across 30 states and the DC, each stocking roughly 8,000 different wines. The company stands on three things: price, service, and selection.

Online, two of them come for free. A site can show every bottle and beat anyone on price. Service is the one that doesn’t follow. In a store, service is a person, an expert you can walk up to and ask. On a website, there is a search bar, and a search bar returns what you typed, not what you meant.

Vikas Chawla, the SVP of digital product and strategy, set out to close that gap: bring the in-store experience online, in one omni-channel place, so a customer browsing on their phone gets the same guidance they would get walking the aisles.

Matt made a different bet.

Matt Vorcheimer, the VP of Product Management, ran the project, and he started in an unlikely place. The obvious build was the sales agent, the one that drives revenue. He built customer service first.

For a while the agent did the unglamorous work, answering questions, managing orders, handling promotions. It resolved 64% of customer conversations on its own, and CSAT rose. Only once that was solid, and customers clearly trusted talking to it, did the team turn to sales. The service agent had earned the right to sell.

The recommendation is the hard part.

Selling wine well is more than order-taking. The sale comes down to the recommendation, and a good recommendation is a small act of expertise: reading what someone is really after, knowing the catalog, knowing which bottle is worth it. In a store, that lives in the staff. The team’s job was to give the agent the same instinct.

They did not have to build that ability from scratch. The sales capability came with the platform, what Zowie calls Sales Skills, so the team spent its time on the part only Total Wine could supply: its own expertise. They fed the agent the judgment of their buyers and category experts, the people who know which bottles are worth standing behind.

With the foundation already in place, the team moved fast, refining the agent instead of building one, and the results followed quickly.

Customers leaned in.

Sarah Zuck, the Senior Manager of Customer Care, expected some hesitation when the agent went live. Customers leaned in instead. They stayed in the conversation longer, asked follow-up questions, and explored further into the catalog than they would have clicked to on their own.

Then the numbers came in.

4x conversion. Shoppers who engage the agent convert at four times the rate of a traditional session.

20% higher order value. When they buy, they buy more.

The hard cases too

The agent is not only there for the easy moments. The service side of the business runs on defined processes, and Zowie’s Decision Engine follows them exactly. When an order arrives damaged, the agent gathers everything a resolution needs, the order, the product, a photo, the customer’s details, before a person is ever involved. The customer gets the same careful handling every time, and the fix comes faster. It feels like talking to someone who knows what they are doing.

The part they didn’t expect

The conversion lift was the goal. The surprise was quieter, and it is the thing Cole Lillie, the Director of Digital Product Management, keeps coming back to: