KoreaRetail (department stores, marts, eCommerce)Scale · $100K
Lotte Shopping

One retail group, five formats, one frontline — agentic service economics for Lotte Shopping's turnaround

Lotte Shopping's turnaround math is operating leverage — profit growth squeezed from flat-to-falling sales — and service operations spread across department stores, marts, e-commerce and home shopping are exactly where duplicated cost hides; a single agentic frontline that handles orders, deliveries, memberships and returns across every format converts scattered service desks into one measured, shrinking cost line.

Entry use case
Order and delivery service desk (Lotte ON and mart fulfillment)
Expected outcome
Resolve order-status, delivery-change and return inquiries in-conversation across formats, cutting contacts per order while the e-commerce unit narrows its losses.
Recommended next step
Cross-format service audit with group CX leadership: map current desks and volumes by format, then pilot the order-and-delivery workflow on Lotte ON ahead of the next seasonal peak.
What we understand

Lotte Shopping's operating reality

Lotte Shopping operates department stores, Lotte Mart, e-commerce (Lotte ON), home shopping and cinema businesses, and has spent recent years restructuring — closing underperforming stores and cutting costs to restore profitability.

Public fact

Lotte Shopping's 2025 results showed operating profit rising double-digits on slightly falling sales, with e-commerce losses narrowing sharply — a turnaround driven by cost discipline rather than growth.

Public fact

Korean retail is squeezed between Coupang's logistics dominance and Naver's commerce platform, forcing incumbents to compete on curation and omnichannel service rather than delivery speed alone.

Public fact

Service volume spans formats — department-store memberships, mart delivery slots, Lotte ON orders, returns across all of them — likely handled by separate teams with separate systems.

Reasoned inference

L.POINT/L.PAY membership questions cut across every format, making cross-format context the recurring service failure.

Reasoned inference

Seasonal gift-set peaks (Chuseok, Lunar New Year) likely multiply contact volume against fixed staffing.

Seller hypothesis — validate

Validate with the account team before outreach: Actual service volumes and desk structures by format · Lotte Group AI initiatives (Lotte Innovate) and any group-platform mandates · OMS and logistics-system integration readiness across formats · Seasonal-peak volume multiples and surge-staffing costs

Build vs buy

Why we have a right to win here

Buy-led target

Limited internal ability or appetite to build the core platform — strong candidate for the packaged solution

Evidence: Lotte Shopping is a restructuring retailer whose technology runs through group IT affiliates without any public conversational-AI platform program; a turnaround P&L funds proven cost-out tools, not infrastructure builds — this is a clean governed buy with group-IT integration partnership.

Why they won't build the full stack: A retailer cutting its way back to profitability cannot fund a multi-year AI-platform build against Coupang's scale; every quarter of internal development is a quarter of duplicated format-level service costs the turnaround math cannot afford — buying proven capability converts service cost to usage pricing now.

What management is signalling

Lotte Shopping's 2025 results showed operating profit up double-digits to the mid-500-billion-won range on slightly declining sales, with e-commerce losses narrowing more than 60% — a cost-discipline turnaround the market has begun rewarding.

Reported factFY2025 results · Feb 2026

GTM implication: Pitch service consolidation as the next line item in a cost story that is visibly working — operating leverage the group already knows how to celebrate.

Lotte Shopping continues restructuring underperforming domestic formats while growing overseas (notably Vietnam) operations.

Inferencerecent investor communications (validate) · 2025-2026

GTM implication: A consolidated service layer scales down with domestic rationalization and extends to overseas formats — matching both directions of the strategy.

What already exists (don't pitch this)
  • Lotte ON e-commerce platform and app
  • L.POINT loyalty program spanning formats
  • KakaoTalk service channels and format-level call centers
  • Group IT affiliate (Lotte Innovate) supporting systems
What customers still can't do end-to-end (pitch this)
  • →Cross-format service context — each format's desk starts from zero
  • →Transactional delivery reschedules and returns in-conversation
  • →Elastic capacity for gift-season peaks
  • →Contacts-per-order measurement and reduction discipline
Opportunity map

Where agentic communications pays off first

WorkflowWhy it matters hereValueComplexitySpeedChannels
Order and delivery service desk
Status, reschedules and returns resolved in-conversation with live OMS data; contacts per order fall measurably.
Delivery-exception and order-status contacts are e-commerce's structural volume, and Lotte ON's loss-narrowing depends on cost per order falling.
Friction today: Status questions span Lotte ON, mart fulfillment and third-party sellers; reschedules need logistics handoffs; peaks melt queues.
KakaoTalkApp chatVoice
Membership and L.POINT service line
Membership servicing resolved once with cross-format context; the loyalty program feels like one company.
The loyalty stack spans every format; membership friction erodes the cross-format shopping the group's strategy depends on.
Friction today: Point balances, tier questions and pay issues route differently per format; context is lost between them.
App chatKakaoTalkVoice
Seasonal-peak surge desk
Elastic absorption of seasonal peaks at consistent quality, without surge-hire economics.
Gift-set seasons compress a quarter's contact volume into weeks; surge hiring costs peak exactly when margin matters.
Friction today: Chuseok and Lunar New Year peaks force temporary staffing that degrades quality when volume is highest.
VoiceKakaoTalkApp chat
Watch the change

Order and delivery service desk (Lotte ON and mart fulfillment): today vs the agentic model

Scenario: Two days before Chuseok, a customer's gift-set delivery to her in-laws shows no movement; the agent traces it across mart fulfillment and the carrier, confirms the regional-hub delay, reroutes to guaranteed pre-holiday delivery within policy and applies the approved delivery-fee credit — one KakaoTalk thread at the exact moment the brand is being judged.
Today
same interaction, two worlds
Agentic layer
Contacts per delivery incident
3–4 across channels
1 proactive thread
Platform capability
Cart abandonment context
~70% average
recoverable via consent-based outreach
Benchmark
Cost per contact
$13.50 median assisted
$1.84 median self-service
Benchmark
QA coverage
1–2% sampled
100% scored
Platform capability
Sources & assumptions
  • · Contacts per delivery incident: Process design: exception detected before contact
  • · Cart abandonment context: Baymard Institute meta-analysis
  • · Cost per contact: Gartner customer service cost benchmarks, 2024
  • · QA coverage: Platform capability: every interaction logged and evaluated
  • · Gartner, customer service cost benchmarks (2024): $13.50 median assisted vs $1.84 self-service per contact
  • · McKinsey, digital-first collections research: 20–25% NPL reduction among leaders; up to 40% opex reduction with gen AI
  • · Baymard Institute: ~70% average cart abandonment (meta-analysis)
  • · IAMAI–Kantar via IBEF (2025): 900M+ Indian internet users; 98% consume Indic-language content
  • · LeadSquared and vendor funnel studies: 78% of students choose the first institution to respond (directional, vendor data)
  • · HDI / ITSM operator benchmarks: $15–25 per L1 ticket; 40–60% of L1 volume is resets/status (validate per customer)
  • · Conventional-flow wait times and volumes are typical operator patterns — assumptions to replace with the customer's own baseline
  • · Agentic-flow behaviors (context retention, 100% logging, in-line policy checks) are platform capabilities, not projections
Recommended solution

One integrated stack, opinionated for this account

Channels · Tilicho Labs
KakaoTalkApp chatVoice

Voice & channel orchestration, telephony, conversational execution, session/state, routing, integration build. Capability coverage validated during implementation.

Intelligence · Google Cloud
Gemini reasoningEnterprise groundingWorkflow agentsMulti-agent orchestrationGoverned actionsEvaluation & analytics
Systems · Lotte Shopping
OMSLast-mile logisticsPaymentsLoyalty platformCRM

API access to these systems is the critical-path dependency.

Trust & languages
KoreanEnglish

Identity-bound sessions, policy-bounded actions, 100% audit logging, human approvals at defined points, in-tenant intelligence.

Business case

The economics, with your numbers

Addressable monthly interactions1.5M
Seller assumption — replace in discovery
Current cost per interaction ($)$3.0
Industry benchmark scale — validate
Automation / assistance rate (%)55%
Seller assumption — pilot proves this
$4.5M
Current operating cost / mo
$26.2M
Modelled gross benefit / yr
0.0 mo
Payback on Scale
749%
3-yr ROI (modelled)
Automated/assisted interactions per month825K
Modelled AI run-cost per month (usage + cloud, system estimate)$289K
New monthly operating cost$2.3M

All figures are modelling estimates from the labeled inputs above — nothing here is customer-provided yet. The pilot's first job is replacing these assumptions with Lotte Shopping's measured baseline. Package price covers implementation only; recurring usage billed separately.

Recommended package

Scale — $100K implementation

Scale · $100K · A multi-channel production deployment10–14 weeks to production across priority workflows

Why this package for Lotte Shopping: Order/delivery service plus membership servicing span the group's formats over shared OMS and CRM integrations — Scale scope with clear consolidation economics for a restructuring retailer.

Included
  • 4–6 channels
  • 2–3 priority workflows
  • Multiple enterprise integrations
  • API credential & security setup
  • Advanced orchestration
  • Multilingual support
  • Agent Assist / human escalation
  • Production analytics
  • Expansion roadmap
Not included
  • ✕Usage & consumption (billed separately)
  • ✕Enterprise-wide governance build-out
  • ✕Multi-BU rollout
Recurring costs (separate from the package)

Packages cover implementation and integration only. Recurring costs are billed separately: Tilicho Labs platform usage (~$0.15/call-min indicative, usage only), Google Cloud consumption, telephony/carrier charges, managed operations, and support & optimization. No package includes unlimited usage.

Customer resources required
  • · API access + credentials for: OMS, Last-mile logistics, Payments
  • · A named business owner for order and delivery service desk (lotte on and mart fulfillment)
  • · Security review counterpart and policy sign-off (OMS scope)
  • · Baseline metrics for the pilot's success thresholds
Executive messages

What to say to whom

CEO

“The turnaround is a cost-discipline story; consolidating five formats' service operations into one measured frontline is the next restructuring chapter — visible in the operating-profit line the market is finally rewarding again.”

CIO / CTO

“One governed agent layer above OMS, loyalty and logistics systems serves every format — replacing scattered format-level service stacks with an architecture the group can actually consolidate on.”

COO

“Seasonal peaks and format-duplicated desks are your structural inefficiencies; elastic cross-format capacity removes both without another round of headcount surgery.”

Head of eCommerce (Lotte ON)

“Loss-narrowing lives on cost per order; cutting contacts per order and resolving the rest automatically is the service-side contribution to the breakeven path.”

Chief Risk / Compliance Officer

“PIPA-aligned handling with full logging across formats — customer-data governance actually improves when five service stacks become one governed layer.”

CFO / Procurement

“The pilot measures contacts per order and cost per contact against your own baselines by format; consolidation savings compound as each format migrates.”

Outreach

Pre-built offer emails for Lotte Shopping

Written from this account's own research — the strategic signal, the capability gap, the entry workflow, and the modelled economics — not a mail-merge template. Pick the moment and the persona, edit anything, then copy or open in your mail client.

Moment in the deal
Cold outreach — no prior conversation
Who it's addressed to
Cares about: The workflow itself and its daily failure modes
Register
Length
Draft — edit freely before sending
Open in mail client

Customer-safe by construction: drafts are composed only from customer-facing fields. Account tier, build-vs-buy classification, priority score, internal routing, and partner-commercial detail are not inputs to the composer, so they cannot appear in a draft. Money figures are always framed as modelled from the customer's own volumes. Read before sending — you own what goes out.

The pursuit

Tier 2 — high-potential incubation

Why this tier

Korea's retail conglomerate is mid-turnaround — profitability restored through restructuring while sales still shrink — running department stores, discount marts and the loss-narrowing Lotte ON e-commerce arm, with service volume spread across formats and a P&L that rewards every removed cost.

Recommended next step

Cross-format service audit with group CX leadership: map current desks and volumes by format, then pilot the order-and-delivery workflow on Lotte ON ahead of the next seasonal peak.

Entry: Order and delivery service desk (Lotte ON and mart fulfillment) · Scale package · 10–14 weeks to production across priority workflows. Human fallback throughout; success thresholds agreed before build.

Start the pursuit

Research-based priority-account universe assembled from public information, market scale, communication volume, and solution fit. This is NOT an authoritative list of top Google Cloud customers; existing Google Cloud relationships are noted only where publicly reported. Validate every account with the account team before outreach.