“When you talk about AI, contact centers and customer experience, I think this is the best use case to illustrate the return on investment,” said Luiz Domingos. Every few seconds an agent saves documenting call outcomes and every minute saved collecting customer data and transmitting it to the agent represents value.
Domingos is CTO at Mitel, a half-century-old Canadian communications company. He previously oversaw Unify communications software and services at Atos and joined Mitel when it acquired Unify last year. We had already met Eric Hanson, marketing director of Mitel. He gave us an overview of today’s business of providing personalized communications capabilities, across all channels, for complex businesses.
It’s not just a standalone suite, Mitel’s solutions also connect to other communications tools. For example, it recently announced a partnership with Zoom. “It’s very integrated,” Domingos said, “and we’re developing applications and solutions that will create what we call a hybrid solution. In other words, we’re connecting Zoom to Mitel’s more traditional unified communications because our customers have invested heavily in that infrastructure and are happy with it. They’re not looking to replace them with a Zoom phone. We have agreed to create a common client application that will be hosted under Zoom Workplace. Basically, telephony will be handled by a Zoom client connected to our PBX system.
The key term here is “unified communications,” the integration of a company’s customer (and employee) engagement channels. Unified communications has been described as a business and marketing concept, but simply put, it provides the technological context for the customer experience.
When we asked him about the role AI plays, he directed us to Domingos.
Mitel’s AI journey
“We’ve done a lot in this area,” Domingos said. “At Mitel, we have implemented what we call “virtual agents”. These are essentially combinations of AI assistants (helping customers) and AI co-pilots (helping salespeople). “They answer some calls, collect data and ensure the call is resolved without speaking to a live person,” Domingos explained.
Mitel has been looking for this type of result for some time now. “We started this in 2019 with Google CCAI [Contact Center AI]. It was a bit difficult to use and required a lot of programming. According to Domingos, generative AI has transformed everything. “It becomes much easier to have an agent who can walk the rep through the call and through the engagement. The assisting agent can resolve simple cases or expedite resolution.
Mitel’s current virtual agent solution is called Talkative and occupies the front end of the contact center. “So we have that in our products now. We have a solution called Talkative that does just that, on the front end of the contact center call,” Domingos said. “It’s omnichannel, so not just voice but all the other conversation channels like chat.” It provides responses to the chatbot or Speechbot. Contact centers love this, Domingos said, because it means human staff can be more specialized.
Talkative for Healthspan
Healthspan is a UK provider of longevity protocols, helping to maintain health throughout the aging process. Much of its business involves providing vitamins, minerals and dietary supplements. We spoke to Rob King, IT and Facilities Manager, based at Healthspan’s headquarters in Guernsey, one of the UK’s Channel Islands. Healthspan was already a Mitel customer and used MiVoice Business, a suite offering voice, messaging, mobility, conferencing and other capabilities.
Healthspan was interested in the virtual agent to help with its contact center challenges. “It’s a big part of our business,” King told us. “We have a 55-seat customer service center in Gosport on the south coast of England. It has always been a very busy operation. We have a department that handles customer orders that arrive by telephone; Customer service is another important aspect: we really pride ourselves on our customer service, so it’s very important that our customers have many channels to communicate with us.
Previously, the company had a voice-only inbound contact center, but that slowly evolved. “We now have Talkative, so we have a live chat service on our website for customers to contact us,” King said. Human agents were already working in a Mitel environment to handle voice calls. “Talkative is integrated into this Mitel platform to provide live chat and AI capabilities on our website,” King explained. “A bubble gives customers the opportunity to chat live with us. These chats go through the back end of the same Mitel system that our agents use to answer voice calls.
The chatbot performs three functions. “This gives customers the ability to chat live with contact center agents. It gives customers the ability to search order status based on an order number. The other option that we have just implemented over the last few months is the AI functionality. This part was quite exciting for us. It automatically searches for answers in a database that we control and retrieves this information to provide to customers. We sell over 300 products; a client might ask what they should take for joint problems; it will automatically look at the information repository we created and give answers to customers.
ChatGPT runs in the background, but answers come from Healthspan’s own knowledge base. The advantage? “This helps avoid repetitive questions that are normally asked of agents, freeing them up to handle live voice calls. »
And it’s doing so at an impressive rate, with Talkative resolving 90% of product queries after its first month of operation. Note that this is not 90% of all calls, but specifically product queries, answered by a Talkative-powered chatbot, Healthspan, called Product Professor. “That’s the name of the chatbot, something we came up with internally. We let our customers know at the end of the conversation that this is an AI-generated response,” King said.
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Meeting the Knowledge Base Challenge
Using AI virtual agents to automate contact center responses could prove disastrous if the AI is not trained on a reliable, comprehensive and up-to-date knowledge base. As we all know, if AI doesn’t have a good answer to a question, it is capable of inventing one.
Mitel addressed this challenge internally. “We built a support app that learned from our products,” Domingos said, “and now whenever our service teams or channel partners have issues, they don’t call a hotline nor write a ticket; they turn to this chatbot and often get the answers they need. We continue to evolve it; we are now nine months into release.
Mitel sought to translate this experience into what its customers need. “When you create a contact center, the idea is to deploy the [AI-powered] chatbot then offer a training option to customers. Give us your data and we will train it. If our client feels comfortable, we offer them a toolbox where they can train themselves.
As a provider of health-related products and services, Healthspan takes responsibility for its own knowledge base. “Everything in the knowledge base was written by a regulatory team employed directly by Healthspan,” King said. “Because we sell supplements and vitamins, there are regulations on what we can and cannot say. That’s why we have an internal team that constantly checks that information is accurate and up to date before it goes live. The database is completely controlled by Healthspan, so the AI response only looks at certain URLs from our own website; it doesn’t extend to the entire web. I am in charge of uploading the correct URLs to the Talkative platform. It’s all teamwork.
It took eight weeks before Talkative went live. “It went really well,” King said. “It was simple to implement and a lot of people use it. “
Employee and customer experience
An improved employee experience is one of the desirable outcomes of implementing AI assistants in the CX space. For Domingos, there is a return on investment in reducing the size of your human representative base by using AI as an agent to handle the simplest cases. Human salespeople can spend more time solving complex problems. But it’s not necessarily about AI stealing jobs. Working in a contact center can be stressful, churn is high, and as a result, some say contact centers are understaffed in the first place.
When it comes to customer experience, it seems clear from Healthspan’s data that their customers rely heavily on Product Professor. Of the more general use of Talkative, Domingos says: “It promotes the contact center towards greater visibility in customer support and assistance. For the customer experience: my cases are resolved faster, I don’t have to wait in line for 30 minutes, I don’t need a follow-up call.
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