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How could we use artificial intelligence, in a practical way, to transform our relationship with Customers?
This was the question I asked myself at the beginning of 2020.
The scenario at TIM Brasil, one of the LATAM largest telecommunications company with more than 60 million customers, was DTMF IVRs, limited to few options, with low resolution, and the analytics of calls and contact reasons completely manual and dependent on people.
Before thinking about technology, I was concerned with creating a purpose capable of motivating and engaging the company. I created the mantra “Allowing our Customers to relate to TIM Brasil, as they relate to their friends”. Quality relationship, not prone to churn, high trust and strong recommendation power.
The role of artificial intelligence would be to make this dream a reality.
I established a strategic partnership with IBM to transform our DTMF IVRs into Conversational IVRs, using IBM Watson Assistant. After all, friends don't communicate by choosing options in a menu. I understood that the first step was to make our conversation with Customers something natural.
We named our AI: TAIS (TIM Artificial Intelligence System). It was a huge success, increasing resolution rates by more than 50%. AI allowed us to automate new services, integrating TAIS with new APIs.
I changed the IVR voice, form an human announcer to Microsoft Neural Text-to-Speech. In the biggest project using Portuguese in the world. By doing this, TAIS could speak information coming directly from the CRM, without previous recording. Speaking impromptu refers to the common intimacy between friends. Improving time to market and making possible to change characteristics such as speed and pitch in real time. This makes TAIS more empathetic, being able to speak more slowly with elderly people, for example.
I noticed that the share of self-service messaging was very small and nowadays friends relate much more through messages than voice calls. Therefore, we implemented TAIS in several text channels such as Apple Messages for Business, Google Business Messages, Whatsapp and Google RCS. We have increased the share of messaging by more than 1,000%. Currently, around 30% of our self-service are messaging and we intend to reach over 50% soon.
All the ability to understand the Customer in IVR and messaging, made our partnership with IBM expand to a Speech and Text Analytics solution. We quit manual classification and currently have several PowerBI dashboards, which accurately show everything that is said in the Contact Center. We have 30% of the calls processed in Speech Analytics and that is enough to analyze the traffic, but we will continue until a 100% of the calls analyzed, guaranteeing that all conversations follow the procedures established by the company and both Customers and Employees are being respected and that in the event of a single unwanted case among the millions of calls, it will be possible to act promptly.
I launched in Brazil an Israeli technology capable of intercepting voice calls to the Contact Center and converting them to more than 180 millions of digital calls, reducing our Customer's effort. We have become a world reference in the use of DialMyApp and recently we are the blueprint for the implementation project at TIM headquarter in Italy.
In the last 3 years, all this work has yielded many awards and recognition, inside and outside Brazil.
For having implemented one of the biggest cases of Watson Assistant in the world, I was recognized as an IBM Creator, appearing on the cover of the biggest newspaper in Brazil and interviewed by CNN on IBM THINK.
DialMyApp case was finalists at the Engage Awards UK 2022.
With DialMyApp, I received a Gold Stevie Awards 2023 for Achievement in Customer Service Automation.
With the Cognitive IVR case, I received Gold Stevie Awards 2023 for Best use of Technology in Customer Service.
We have already handled more than 120 million calls on our cognitive IVRs.
Nomination Title: Mr. Olimpio Fernandes
