International Telecommunication Company

In just 10 months, this European telecoms operator used virtual chat to deflect more than 100,000 calls from its contact center, handle more than 350,000 customer interaction on its website and solve nine out of 10 customer issues in a single interaction.

The company provides fixed and mobile telephony, broadband, 3G and data storage services mostly to the European market. With this broad product portfolio, the company has a significant market share in different central European countries and is now expanding in to east European markets.

Increasing market saturation in the European region led the company to look for new ways to retain and attract customers, thereby maintaining and increasing market share.

Customer service is a vital differentiator in the telecoms market and the company realized that the optimization and automation of its services would give them a competitive advantage. The specific objectives were:

• Make customer service more accessible
• Significantly reduce inbound calls
• Drive users to web chat as the preferred point of contact
• Cut costs by optimizing and automating routine services
• Increase the number of problems solved with a single contact
• Provide round-the-clock service to customers
• Increase customer satisfaction

The solution: help customers to help themselves!

Artificial Solutions implemented a 10-month trial project focusing on:

• Reducing number of inbound calls in the initial period by routing customers from more expensive phone contact to the more cost-efficient chat channel
• Improving customer satisfaction by providing better self-service solutions and analyzing customer feedback and behavior

The initial solution was a combination of a Virtual Assistant and Agent Based Chat. The Virtual Assistant was designed with a fresh and young personality, providing helpful and accurate answers for all business areas from mobile and fixed telephony to broadband and TV. The solution also included handing over any issues that could not be dealt with by the initial knowledge base to specialist agents.

The success of the project led to a full deployment to further improve customer service and cut service costs. The project easily reduced calls to the contact center by 100,000 calls for the 10-month period. The company is now discussing plans to implement Teneo Easy Reply - our Email Management System (EMS) as a further step towards customer service optimization, as well as further opportunities to cut costs and improve service by extending the model to other European markets.