At the start of the project, Service Desk handled about 1,500 calls monthly, but as the restaurant chain developed, the number of calls more than quadrupled by 2020. To cope with the increased demand, it was possible to proportionally increase the Service Desk team, but there was an idea of a more efficient and cost-effective solution than simply increasing the number of employees on the first line.
ICL Services proposed a technological solution that was to implement a voice assistant that automates the receipt of calls from users.
Key Challenges
- Automate the reception of calls to the Service Desk using a voice assistant that will be able to process requests from users during periods of high workload on operators of the first line of support
- Do not increase the cost of the service, even taking into account the increase in the number of requests
- ICL Services has its own experts who specialize in the development and implementation of voice assistants. Using open libraries and dialogue systems, our developers have created a bot that can recognise speech and translate it into text. The model was trained using datasets from the Service Desk, so the system successfully copes with the recognition of specific terms. It took a week to implement the voice assistant.
How the voice assistant works:
If a call comes to the Service Desk, but all the operators are busy, then after 25 seconds the call from the general queue is forwarded to the voice assistant. All statements and responses are recorded in advance: the voice assistant greets the user, introduces itself, informs that all employees are currently busy, and invites the user to describe the problem.
If the user refuses, the call returns to the general queue and waits for the operator to answer. If the user agrees, the voice assistant accepts the request.
Then the dialogue is translated into text, and the request in the form of an e-mail enters the queue for the resolution by experts. The email contains the time and date of the call, the user number, the transcribed dialogue, and a link to the record of the telephone conversation.
The voice assistant can handle thousands of calls at the same time, which is very important in case of wide-scale outages, when many users want to report a problem and get feedback.
In a normal situation, it handles up to 10% of the total number of calls that remain unanswered for 25 seconds.
The voice assistant helps the Service Desk register every call, even if the user did not tell about the problem and immediately ended the call. In this case, the letter contains only a phone number, after which the employees of the first line call the subscriber back and register the request.
It should be noted that the voice assistant from ICL Services guarantees the security of user data through its own solutions, rather than off-the-shelf technologies form third-party vendors.
Results
- ICL Services has developed and implemented a voice assistant, with the help of which up to 10% of incoming calls are now processed without increasing the cost of the service for the Customer.
- 10-15% of users who are forwarded to the voice assistant tell about the problem and leave a request.
- The voice assistant ensures 100% registration of requests during peak loads or large-scale disruptions.
- Telephone SLAs remained in the green area despite the increased workload on first-line support staff due to the development of the customer's restaurant chain.