Artificial intelligence isn’t about replacing our jobs, explains Jon Shaw, Commercial Operations Director at Vodafone UK. It’s about helping people do those jobs better, for the sake of our customers.
30 November 2022 – the day much of the world was introduced to the first generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. It’s now just two years on, but we’re already seeing how impactful a day that is proving to be.
No more so than in the world of customer service, where AI technology is increasingly featuring alongside people to deliver the best possible experience.
The key word here is ‘alongside’. This isn’t a scare story of robots replacing humans. Far from it. At Vodafone UK, it’s simply another tool – albeit a very advanced one – that agents can use to improve their customer care.
And, really, this has always been the goal, especially at a tech-centric company like Vodafone UK. Because blending digital innovation with human interaction continues to be the key to delivering greater customer service.
AI is simply allowing us to take this concept to a new level.
How AI has quietly changed our society
The evolution of chatbots
As our society becomes increasingly digital, the importance of connectivity grows in turn. For most people, it’s now as essential as electricity or heating.
Customers therefore need, and expect, us to respond quickly to any issue or question they have. While that’s never an easy expectation to live up to, what’s so exciting about AI is that it offers a unique means of overcoming this challenge.
Take our AI-driven chatbot TOBi, for example, which processes around 1 million interactions per month – 70% of which are solved at the first time of asking.
Or VOXI Mobile, Vodafone mobile network for young people, which this year launched a large language model (LLM) generative AI chatbot to improve user experience – a tool that was recently awarded ‘Innovation of the Year (Product and Service)’ at the Mobile Industry Awards.
Where less interactive Q&As were once the standard, now, LLM-based AI is helping to provide more targeted knowledge to match specific customer queries. This is thanks to its predictive capabilities, having been trained on extensive datasets based on Vodafone’s large repository of services.
While this can support customers directly and instantly, however, it doesn’t replace the role of our existing agents – it assists them.
For complex use cases that require human interaction, the chatbot simply streamlines the customer service journey by summarising interactions, allowing agents to seamlessly continue conversations from where the bot left off.
This eliminates the need for agents to manually review previous conversations, saving them time to focus on more important, nuanced asks.
Vodafone youth brand VOXI launches large language model generative AI chatbot to enhance customer experience
Quantity meets quality
This isn’t just a numbers game, though. Another task that AI can help with is checking the quality of customer interactions. As such, Vodafone UK is now building out a trial that combines AI and other linguistic techniques to evaluate how successful these call interactions are at solving queries.
With these results, we can not only support agents in more accurately understanding customer service behaviours, but also inform future training to ensure any necessary changes can be adopted across the entire business.
With that being said, there are some things that AI isn’t able to do. All complaints continue to be checked by a human on a weekly basis, since this requires detailed knowledge of our systems, products and customers in order to respond quickly and appropriately.
Likewise, our people still form a crucial part of the care we provide for vulnerable customers, whether that’s due to age, mental health, physical wellbeing or other personal circumstances. And, while technology may play a bigger supporting role over time, this will always remain the case.
So important is this human interaction with customers that, this year, we invested £2 million in behavioural training for all 12,500 of our customer care colleagues – both in the UK and other markets.
Our TRUST framework training ensures that all our employees feel supported when responding to difficult enquiries, while our customers are met with an empathetic human voice on the other side. Our teams have truly embraced this, with 85% already completing the training, and first call resolution rising to 77% as a result.
This is how call centres can simplify their tech
Artificial intelligence, real interactions
The solution, therefore, is to ensure AI is used as part of what the industry often calls a ‘co-piloting’ model, which has humans and technology working in unison.
Fittingly enough, as part of its 10-year strategic partnership with the company, Vodafone has recently rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot AI software to around 68,000 of its employees right across the globe, with aims to support innovation, productivity and digital efficiency.
Looking ahead, this can help us create what we are terming ‘super agents’. While we already view our staff as superheroes, this upgrade will see customer care agents have AI built into their day-to-day actions, enhancing their capabilities every time they speak to a customer.
Live transcription will play a significant role here. For instance, when a call takes place, the system will not only record and transcribe that call, but also search our library of knowledge articles for relevant information. Eventually, these AI-powered tools will be able to generate potential prompts or responses for our agents to share in real time.
This would replace the current situation, where agents are forced to search through our library of knowledge articles as they speak to customers. While this method has served us – and most industries – well for a long time, it’s exciting to imagine how AI can improve the process bit by bit.
Once our systems are at this level, we could even explore using AI as an imagined customer in training situations. Informed by our vast customer interaction data, this could become an invaluable tool when preparing our agents for a variety of real-life situations.
In short, by providing agents with intelligent interfaces, we can help make complex processes simpler and quicker, delivering consistent customer outcomes as a result.
Welcome to our Stoke Centre of Excellence, where the customer always comes first
The customer comes first
After all, customer experience is the most important thing to Vodafone. We are literally nothing without our customers, which is why we invest so much energy into understanding their reasons for contacting us.
To do this, we rely on the expertise and experience of our excellent customer care teams. These agents are the frontline of our company. They do an amazing job, every single day, of talking to our customers, understanding their needs, and helping them get the best possible outcomes.
Our challenge as leaders is to look at how other industries or technologies can help equip and empower them with the tools they need to do their jobs better. And, in turn, improve our customers’ experience.
AI can do exactly that. Now, it’s up to us – as a business – to ensure we are using it effectively, efficiently and ethically, in support of a more beneficial customer journey.
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