Telecommunications Provider Reduces Misroutes and Improves Security

Challenges

The company faced a high number of call misroutes because its current solution couldn’t keep up with the growing number of intents and product classifiers. Customers and call center agents were frustrated. To avoid losing customers, the company needed a solution that would:

• Accurately recognize hundreds of intents for millions of calls per year.
• Scale intents with its growing product offering.
• Improve self-service capabilities.
• Increase its customer experience (CX) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
• Reduce agent Average Handling Time (AHT).

Additionally, the company needed a solution to help with PCI compliance in the call center. They needed to ensure that sensitive customer data communicated to call center agents could not be accessed or stolen.

Solutions

The company partnered with Interactions to implement an Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) that could better understand natural language requests and caller intent. Before rolling it out company wide, Interactions tested the technology on one line of business. The new IVA eliminated most of the misroute issues within a short time. From there, Interactions successfully rolled out the IVA across all divisions, including wireless and home solutions.

On the heels of that, Interactions added its newly developed Curo™ AI suite, including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding. The intent capabilities of Curo AI brought further improvement to CX and self-service.

With the routing issues solved, the company implemented a real-time call transcription and redaction service from Interactions for 30,000 call center agents. The solution redacts sensitive information from live calls in real-time so agents don’t hear or see sensitive information such as credit card or bank account numbers. It also creates redacted call transcripts in real time that can be used by agent assist tools to improve agent performance, and redacts call recordings for storage and future reference.

Results

A long-term partnership with Interactions solved the immediate routing and security concerns and improved CX. A better customer experience enabled the company to stay competitive with other major telecommunications companies and build brand loyalty.

• 98.90% intent capture & route rate. That includes 300 intents and 1700 intent/product classifiers, understanding more than 30,000 unique combinations.
• IVA answered over 300 million calls annually. Interactions IVA with Curo AI has an uptime of 99.999%.
• 92% containment rate for all self-service transactions. The increase in IVA-only calls enabled a savings of over $46 million a year.
• A savings of $39 million due to a reduction in AHT. Passing accurate intents to live agents led to minimized agent churn and contributed to this savings.
• 9% improvement in CSAT Overall Net Score. This increase is the highest the company had seen in several years.
• 95% success rate for redaction of sensitive information. Successful redaction protected the brand, the customer, and the agent. Real-time redaction resulted in an AHT reduction of 60-120 seconds compared with alternatives, and protected millions of credit cards and bank accounts annually.