Intelligent Virtual Agents Drive Telecommunications Support
by Jessica Cody, Marketing Manager
Telecommunications plays a pivotal role in most aspects of our lives today. Cell phones, Internet and cable are tools that are relied upon consistently by the population, both for business and pleasure. It is, therefore, extremely important that high quality customer service to support these services is available 24/7 across all channels. For these reasons, intelligent Virtual Agents from Creative Virtual have established a strong presence in the telecommunications industry.
Intelligent Virtual Agents provide an instant response to telecommunications customers for issues such as billing inquiries, repairs or troubleshooting. Creative Virtual can link their natural language processing engine to a company’s backend systems, allowing users to ask questions and process transactions easily. This enables the Virtual Agent to collect personalized information about the user from behind log-in screens and assist them in completing tasks
such as checking their account balance or upgrading their mobile plan.
This technology has become a huge success at Verizon, one of Creative Virtual’s biggest clients in the telecommunications industry. Ask Verizoncan be accessed from the Residential Help pages, support landing pages and in My Verizon on the website. The Virtual Agent can also be accessed from the Verizon FiOS Facebook page. Other features of Ask Verizoninclude escalation to Live Chat and a mobile installation. Conversational transaction processing allows the Virtual Agent to complete transactions for customers such as signing up for paperless billing instead of directing the customer to another screen to fill out the form for themselves.
O2’s Virtual Agent Ask Lucy has been a valuable resource for customers since she was implemented in 2008, and by 2010 had answered over one million questions on the O2 website. According to Richard Clarke, Head of Self Service at O2, “About two-thirds of people that speak to Lucy on our website do not have to go anywhere else for support.” Creative Virtual’s integration of Lucy with Live Chat from LivePerson landed them anEconsultancy Innovation Award shortlisting. Lucy is able to identify when live assistance is required and provide the option of Live Chat to the user in the same window. For more tier 2 support, she is also able to escalate users to an O2 Guru if needed. Recently, Lucy went live on O2’s Facebook page as well.
In 2009, Creative Virtual implemented an intelligent Virtual Agent for Virgin Media, another popular telecommunications company located in the UK. They have deployed their V-Person™ Ask Jenny to provide online assistance for both National and Cable Broadband customers. One interesting feature of Jenny is her ability to sense if the user chatting with her is asking about an existing service or sales inquiry, and switch the context as needed to better serve the customer. Ask Jenny’s avatar was modeled after one of Virgin Media’s top-performing call center agents, who is also named Jenny. The Virtual Agent has even taken on the real Jenny’s personality when asked questions pertaining to topics such as her favorite food or drink.
To enable a quicker and easier implementation for telecommunications clients, Creative Virtual has a telecommunications Virtual Agent knowledge pack that provides about 80% of the content needed. This allows the client to focus on providing accurate answers to those questions for the knowledgebase, instead of having to come up with all of the questions themselves.
Creative Virtual is an established provider of Virtual Agents (VAs) with over 40 deployments of our V-Person product. Our clients include HSBC, Intuit, Verizon, CA Technologies, E*TRADE, Lloyds Banking Group, O2 and Virgin Media. Our V-Person technology functions as a virtual employee, trained as an expert in all necessary aspects of the company, so they can provide website users with the information they need, available 24/7 when they need it. Delivering accuracy of over 90%, and call deflection of up to 50%, V-Person is one of the most compelling self-service products in the world today. Our solution is used for the purposes of customer support, sales, marketing and call center assistance, and streamlines the workflow of self-service information across Mobile, Web, and Social Media channels.
