It goes without saying that customers want to have their queries answered quickly and correctly. This is the main challenge for customer support functions in most industries, given the individual nature and unique set of circumstances of the enquiries that come in. Customer care agents have always had to work hard, not only to understand the nature of the enquiry, but also to locate, and communicate, the most accurate and relevant information at speed.
Eight years ago, we started investing a lot more in technology to help our employees in our call centre, social media teams and in our retail outlets. The resources and information we have available through various online systems, coupled with the dedication of our team have resulted in consistently high customer satisfaction for Melita. While this is something that I am incredibly proud of, it is also clear that there is always room for improvement. This is where Artificial Intelligence is already proving its worth.
The latest addition in our efforts to offer the best possible customer experience is Billy. Billy is an AI platform developed in-house by Melita to support our customers with queries about their bills. Billy has only been on the team for a few months but is already able to quickly and efficiently handle more than 60 per cent of billing enquiries which come in through the Melita website or the MyMelita platform. What’s more, when it comes to customer satisfaction on our billing enquiry handling, Billy is consistently being scored very highly by our customers.
How are we making Billy so effective? The key to this is not just the technology but also the collaborative approach we have taken to the introduction of AI in our customer support teams. This has included input from AI, UX and UI experts who have helped us harness this technology in a safe and secure way while also creating the right user experience. Billy’s development would also not have been possible without the work of our developers and data engineers who created the solution and integrated it with our existing infrastructure. Of course, the customer care team itself has been pivotal providing continuous feedback, based on their experience and expertise, to ensure Billy continues to improve.
The same technology is also being used to support our agents in answering billing queries when customers contact Melita over the phone. The support and answers provided are personalised to the specific customer the agent is assisting, and we are actively seeking feedback from our colleagues to identify where AI technology is being most useful, and where improvements are needed. Our focus is on making sure AI is a great assistant to our colleagues. This also means delivering the right training to our employees to enable them to make the best use of this technology when dealing with customers’ questions. Ensuring that the development and deployment of AI tools is done with the active collaboration of our teams not only improves outcomes but also means our agents enjoy using AI to make their lives easier while delivering a better standard of service.
The introduction of AI tools means that our customer care agents can increasingly focus on, and respond to, more complex customer enquiries, which are now also being dealt with faster and better; for the last six months we’ve been answering our customers in under 45 seconds.
Our use of Artificial Intelligence to further improve our customer service is still in its infancy, but we have already begun to map out how Billy will continue to support our customers’ experience going forward. This includes the ability to tackle ever more complex and technical enquiries and to offer more personalised support – all on a 24/7 basis. As AI’s ability to communicate in Maltese also improves, we will reach a point where enquiries can be dealt with by Billy in Maltese as effectively as those which are in English.
In the long run, as Billy learns and develops, our customer support teams will be able to deliver a faster, better service. Human intervention will always be required for specific, specialist cases. This means that we need to give our customer teams the skills they will need for this more specialised role. For those of us with a career in customer care it will mean a more challenging and rewarding experience.