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Vodafone’s subsidiary in Greece enhances customer service with a Natural Dialog Interaction solution from Omilia, improving the Customer Experience and boosting productivity of the Contact Center.
Background
Vodafone Greece is a member of Vodafone Group Plc., one of the world’s largest mobile communications companies. Voda- fone Greece has a technologically innovative telecommunica- tions network, providing top quality communication, reaching 100% population coverage, as well as high speed mobile internet access. Furthermore, it has a robust commercial retail network nationwide comprised of Vodafone branded shops and commercial partnerships with other distributors and retailers. Having set as a priority the satisfaction of its customers’ demands for integrated communication, Vodafone provides a range of quality leading and innovative products and services, while applying Corporate Responsibilities principles to all aspects of its operation.
The Challenge
Intense competition and high levels of customer churn in the telecoms market mean that delivering excellent customer serv- ice is an essential differentiator. Vodafone Greece has a very complex Customer Care Contact Centre with million incoming requests per year from both its customer base and employees that assist customers in Vodafone shops around the country.
As an incoming call can be one of over 180 different enquiry types, trying to qualify what customers need in order to direct enquiries to the correct agent or automated service can be very difficult. Vodafone Greece’s DTMF system did not provide the flexibility it needed to effectively route and serve these diverse calls. As a result customers had to navigate complex layers of menus to find the service they needed. Customers often pressed random buttons to speak to any agent, to then be re-directed to the appropriate person. Vodafone Greece needed a new solution that would filter calls accurately and remove unnecessarily complex routing options, so it could process calls more quickly and efficiently while improving the customer experience. The end goal was to provide a cost effective, yet simple way to interact with its customers and improve the first call resolution rate by directing the caller to the correct agent in the first transfer.
The Solution
Vodafone Greece selected Omilia and DiaManT®, an innovative Natural Dialog platform by Omilia, which lets customers have a complete dialog in natural language. The Dynamic Language Modeling technology understands what the customer wants and routes them to the right agent or automated service, while the dialog management platform makes sure that customer experience remains at high levels throughout the call. This is the first Natural Language Call Steering implementation in Greece. DiaManT® played a key role in the delivery times and per- formance of the solution. By completely separating the linguistic development from the development of the business logic, DiaManT® allowed rapid development and testing of the services, facilitating Natural Dialog interaction. This platform automatically understands Natural Language responses at any point in the call, and dynamically plans the next steps in the dialog. If it is unclear what the caller is asking, it can provide disambiguation steps to ensure the call is handled correctly. Through this application, Vodafone Greece has also been able to use the natural dialog technology to automate other more simple services so customers can now serve themselves quickly and effectively. These self service functions include checking balances or the latest bill, confirming a remaining balance and enquiring about tariff bundle options.
The ease and speed of the implementation has been impres- sive. The solution was up and running in less than eight months for Vodafone Greece’s pre-pay and post-pay customer base. The self service functions are due to be extended to allow customers to check whether their balance is overdue and pay their bills with their credit card.
The Benefits
The solution has exceeded Vodafone’s expectations while improving customer service efficiency, reducing costs and boost- ing productivity within Vodafone Greece. Since the service was launched Vodafone Greece has seen:
- reduction in the number of unnecessary internal transfers
- reduction in the number of customer hang-ups
- reduction in the average call handling time
“At Vodafone Greece we strive to deliver exceptional customer service and constantly seek innovative, leading edge technolo- gies that enable us to do so. This project supports that value proposition. We selected Omilia for their truly innovative technology and its unrivalled experience is this area. We’re delighted with what the solution has helped us achieve in such a short amount of
time and are looking forward to exploring other ways to embrace speech recognition and natural language interaction to deliver an improved experience for our customers.”
John Bouzios, Customer Care Senior Manager, Vodafone Greece
 Vodafone Natural Dialog Interaction Case Study-sen.pdf | [ ] | 174 Kb |