Winning with AI
The retailer’s generative AI tool offers on-demand answers and a real-time training boost.
Mattress Firm’s in-store employees—known as Sleep Experts—are a key differentiator for the brand, playing a vital role in both delivering an exceptional customer experience and driving sales. Recognizing generative AI’s potential to improve time management, productivity, and job satisfaction among its frontline staff, Mattress Firm sought to harness this emerging technology. However, they first needed to establish a clear business case, define desirable features with Sleep Experts, and build the necessary technical infrastructure.
To bridge that gap, Mattress Firm collaborated with Google Cloud for its generative AI and cloud storage infrastructure. They also partnered with Bain to build two custom agentic AI tools designed to enhance sales strategies and elevate customer interactions.
Together, they helped Mattress Firm unlock the full potential of AI by combining Google Cloud’s leading technology with Bain’s strategic expertise.
The partnership with Google Cloud helped Mattress Firm overcome its technical limitations and significantly reduce the delivery time of minimum viable product. In just 12 weeks, the team built and deployed SleepExpert.AI, a generative AI–enabled conversational tool that provides on-demand access via chat or voice to a vast knowledge base and realistic customer training scenarios.
Revolutionizing Training with Drill Mode: SleepExpert.AI’s Drill Mode transforms what was once a manual and time-consuming process. The training simulates critical customer interactions using role-play with over 2,000 synthetic personas representing key segments. Driving this innovation is a new agentic AI Drill Builder, which enables the store training team to rapidly build, edit, and manage the most relevant training scenarios. The tool significantly improves training simply by giving experts more sales “at bats” with infinite drills.
Empowering Sleep Experts with Chat Mode: Chat Mode provides real-time, relevant answers to critical product information questions (including comparing products), promotions, store operations, and technology troubleshooting. By drawing from a large pool of collective knowledge, this feature means fewer calls to a help desk, faster upskilling of newer Sleep Experts, and rapid responses to consumer questions. All of these improvements drive greater efficiency, freeing Sleep Experts to focus on helping customers find their best sleep solutions.
Mattress Firm’s Sleep Experts and the retail learning team have enthusiastically embraced SleepExpert.AI, citing its ability to streamline their day-to-day work while significantly enhancing both sales conversations and training efforts. Associates report feeling more confident and better prepared due to the tool’s fast, reliable access to information and realistic training simulations. SleepExpert.AI has further empowered the field team and better equipped them to deliver exceptional customer experiences. As one Sleep Expert remarked, “Such an amazing training tool! I never imagined there would be a day where I could train with a virtual customer, and now here we are!”
With SleepExpert.AI up and running, the team set up guardrails for success. This included beta-user tests for continuous iteration and improvement, a product backlog for ongoing enhancements, a Knowledge Council for continuous data updates, and clear KPIs such as NPS®, sales productivity, and conversion rates. In a phase two focused on scalability, Chat Mode was expanded from 35 to 330 Sleep Experts and SleepExpert.AI was rolled out to over 6,000 employees across 2,300 US stores.
Bain collaborated with Google Cloud to equip Mattress Firm with cutting-edge capabilities in generative AI, product management, data intelligence, and performance optimization—ensuring the company kept unlocking value from its new tool.
Our Sleep Experts are at the heart of what makes Mattress Firm unique, and empowering them with a custom, real-time, AI-driven tool is a game changer. This innovation is helping our teams work smarter, respond faster, and ultimately deliver an even better experience to our customers. With this technology, we’re not just enhancing efficiency—we’re investing in the success and satisfaction of our people.
Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks, and Net Promoter Score℠, NPSx℠, and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
