Customer first

In 1972, no one had heard of a cell phone, the Internet, or online shopping. Fifty years later, the digital experience touches every aspect of our lives, from work to leisure and everything in-between. Customer expectations and customer care have evolved alongside this transformation, and successful businesses have learned to keep up with ever-changing technologies to maintain their world-class customer service.

Our partner, an enterprise telecommunications company, is no different. Serving over 100 million customers per year, they have made innovation in customer care a guiding principle of their multi-billion-dollar success. This customer-obsessed focus has kept them an industry leader for over 20 years.

Providing immediate assistance across messaging channels

Although excellent customer service is central to our partner’s core philosophy, their digital customer experience was struggling to meet customer needs for efficient, personalized, and responsive care. Slow response times and limited touchpoints had CSAT scores declining—and our partner’s customer-first reputation (and revenue) at risk. They set out to deploy a self-service option that would meet their customers’ evolving standards—as well as their own.

The goal was to improve the customer care experience for everyone. Our partner needed to be readily available on social and SMS messaging channels, then provide an efficient, enjoyable experience where customers could get questions answered, feel heard, and leave happy. Care agents, on the other hand, needed time to focus on more complex cases—and easier access to relevant information.

If all of this could be done, satisfaction for customers would improve, and care costs would decrease as customers self-served on channels that met our partner’s world-class standards. We expected retention to go up across the board. 

Achieving best-in-class customer service using AI-driven chat

Logic20/20 delivered the strategic, architectural, and development expertise to create AI-driven capabilities and new a self-service platform for customers.

First, we laid the groundwork for CI/CD, microservices, and AI/ML capabilities. Our use of microservices and DevOps experience increased the speed of application development and set the stage for automation, which would be essential in many processes to come. We were the first team in our partner’s history to deploy to the cloud.

With the groundwork in place, we constructed new platforms for social media and messaging channels. They used real-time AI (specifically sentiment analysis and topic modeling) to provide faster access to customer account activities, 360-degree views of customer conversations, and dynamic routing between automated and human agents. The AI driven customer-facing virtual assistant handled simple questions, allowing agents to focus on more challenging inquiries instead. The cherry on top? Agents also had the option to personalize their digital personas, helping conversations feel more authentic for everyone.

Though the AI-assisted chat tools were an improvement, lasting success required us to integrate these features where customers wanted to served. Our team was integral to deploying Apple Business Chat (ABC), making our partner available on yet another high-traffic channel. Customer care would also be available on iOS devices and across social channels like Facebook and Twitter. Over the course of six weeks, we used microservices, agile DevOps best practices, and the AWS cloud infrastructure to help our partners be one of the first enterprises in the nation to integrate ABC into their ecosystem. We also connected these channels to our partner’s major business systems (billing, CRM, services management, etc.), ensuring that whenever a customer contacted our partner, their entire history would be easily accessible to their care agent.

Our solutions used Kubernetes, Kafka, and a wide range of AWS services, including EC2, ElastiCache (Redis), Route53, S3, ELB, Gitlab using EC2 brokers, Lambda, RDS, KMS, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager, and AIM.

The initial deployment of these tools (and their robust, scalable technical architecture) enabled an ambitious service roadmap for our partner’s future improvements. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, they could pivot quickly, deftly handling the surge in customer care requests. At that point, we also added another self-service feature to the chat functionality, enabling customers to delay or break up their bill payments as needed.

Over $100 million saved

Our partner’s AI-driven customer care platforms successfully handled over 20 million conversations in 2021 and contributed to dramatic improvements in NPS and CSAT scores. Employees are happier, too; attrition in the customer care center has decreased considerably.

In total, our partner generated massive savings in their bottom line—over $100 million to date—by lowering the cost-to-serve, partly due to automated insights that would have historically been handled manually by customer care agents.

Looking ahead

The success of this project and our knowledge of this partner’s processes, technology, and long-term strategy have made us a trusted advisor for the years ahead. We continue to advise our partner on both their technology platform and customer engagement strategy.