AI in the customer experience: Going beyond bots

Artificial intelligence is allowing Latin American companies to save costs and improve the efficiency of their customer service, although maintaining the quality of digital communications with clients requires a balancing act.

According to California-based customer service company Zendesk, 81% of Brazilian consumers would not hesitate to abandon a brand if they received poor service.

Given this scenario, companies need to constantly seek for tools that help them stay competitive, ensuring the satisfaction of users by recognizing their service area as key for business transformation.

“Companies are increasingly looking for artificial intelligence solutions, especially startups, as they look to do more with less, to have more productivity at lower cost,” Zendesk Brasil sales director Marcelo Rocha told BNamericas.

Zendesk provides customer services solutions to 145,000 customers in over 30 languages. It has 17 offices in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America.

One of Zendesk’s clients is Elotech, a Brazilian software company focused on the public sector. With a new AI solution provided by Zendesk, Elotech was able to reduce incoming calls by 40%, customer satisfaction reached 96.1% and the net promoter score (NPS) was 84.2%.

With the new customer service platform, Elotech brought to a single interface all the data from its customer communication channels – chat, email and telephone.

Through the chat, the user is initially served by an answering bot which is trained to respond to the most frequently asked questions that the company receive from customers. If the information provided by the bot is not sufficient, the client is directed to a human customer service representative.

Thus, the customer service team is focused on solving more complex problems while the robot handles the simplest and most repetitive consumer-related demands.

CONTACT, CALL CENTERS

Contact and call center companies worldwide are having to reinvent themselves as apps and digitalization spread throughout society.  

For Brazil’s Atento, the greatest challenge is to balance innovation with customer satisfaction. 

“At the end of the day, it's not about using AI across the board, it's about generating the best results and delivering the best experiences,” Maurício Castro, the company's director of marketing and transformation, told BNamericas.

Atento is the largest customer relationship management and business process management company in Latin America. It is also one of the world’s five biggest in revenue terms.

The company operates in 13 countries and has over 150,000 employees and 400 customers, mainly multinationals in the telecommunications, banking and retail sectors, among others.

Atento recently created a data science unit that develops models and solutions employing various technologies - including AI.

“We have technologies that allow us to know the profile of each individual consumer and help us predict the next best action,” Castro said.

Since 2017 Atento owns a stake in Keepcon, a provider of semantic technology in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking markets.

This platform has natural language processing (NLP) capability in Portuguese, English and Spanish, combined with a data analysis module that allows for a better understanding of customer comments and even interpretation of their feelings, according to Castro.

With that, the tool classifies and moderates content, responding automatically and in real-time to interactions.

Workforce-intensive Atento does not believe human customer service channels will disappear.

In Castro’s opinion, while automation and self-service solutions are important and cost effective for businesses, many customers still prefer to talk to person.

In some contexts, consumers seek digital channels and in others they prefer human support, she added.

There are also stages in the customer-service journey where human interaction is necessary. “In these cases, the service is initiated by a bot and directed to a human, who will bring more proximity to the customer and the ideal solution for that contact," said Castro.

At Atento, the customer service channels are divided as 100% digital, digital assisted by humans, and 100% human.

Another example of the call center business being alive and well is Brazilian company AeC.

The company opened a new office in São Paulo this week to serve fintechs and startups that have specific customer service requirements.

AeC said it invested 45mn reais (US$10.8mn) in the new facility, which has the potential to house 2,000 people.

In addition to São Paulo, AeC is present in nine other cities in Brazil. The company expects revenues to grow 15% this year.

FROM THE INSIDE OUT

The third largest contact center firm in Brazil, Italy's AlmavivA, is shaping processes with AI internally.

The investments in new technologies are helping the company strengthen the internal management process and leading to gains in productivity, while also improving the customer experience.

AlmavivA, which has 30,000 employees in Brazil, recently implemented a platform that gave more agility to how supervisors monitor the performance of attendants and it is now preparing a platform update.

Called scientific supervisor, the tool has a series of statistical concepts to improve automation and real-time inputs, monitoring the qualitative and quantitative indicators of a supervisor's team on a single platform, according to the company.

The solution also scans call center agents’ performances and recommendations on calls, allowing the manager to hear and step into chats during the call if necessary.

"The system provides the supervisor with an up-to-date real-time information dashboard to streamline management and give greater data accuracy, offering a holistic view of service positions," AlmavivA Brasil operations director Domenico Rossi said in a statement.

According to Rossi, the solution has contributed to improve customer experience and customer loyalty, ultimately increasing the net promoter score.

In the coming months, AlmavivA will add a speech analytics feature to the solution that is pattern-driven. The objective is identifying intentions in a customer's language and tone in order to automatically alert a call center supervisor when intervention in a call is needed.

CRITICAL FOR TELCOS

Telcos have always made large investments in call center operations, either in their own units or external centers, to respond to customer grievances in a sector that is known for high levels of complaints.

Digitization and automation have changed this logic and AI now has the power to take it to the next level if properly employed.

This month, for example, market leader Telefônica Brasil announced that its AI-powered chatbot Aura will be used in interactions with customers via WhatsApp.

Since its launch in February 2018, Aura has made over 70mn customer interactions, Telefônica said. The solution performs more than 15mn interactions per month in about 20 service channels.

According to the company, the technology has had a constant and significant evolution over time and reached an assertiveness level of about 90%.

Furthermore, tests conducted with customers served by Aura on WhatsApp showed that 90% rated the interaction as “good or very good” and nearly 80% rated the interaction as “human and clear”, according to Telefônica.

At Telefônica’s rival TIM, a broad internal digitization and automation project involving AI in areas with people-intensive workforces is due to be up and running next year.

“We think we can improve even further in this regard, so next quarter we should detail a project called Megaspin to increase our digitization capacity,” CTO Leonardo Capdeville said at the company's Q2 earnings call.

In Q2, the number of unique users in TIM’s self-service Meu TIM app grew 33% year-over-year while human interactions declined by 10%.

This month, the company announced the expansion of invoices delivered by digital channels, which had grown by 66% in the second quarter. From now on, customers with postpaid and controlled plans can be invoiced directly to WhatsApp in PDF or barcode format.

To receive the PDF invoice, the customer must save the TIM WhatsApp number in their contacts, open a conversation on WhatsApp and send a message with the word INVOICE. For security reasons, a password is required to open the file

According to TIM, the number of customers paying their bills digitally increased 31% y-o-y in Q2.