Chatbots to relieve
customer services

In a Call Center, a chatbot service is a powerful tool that reduces the volume of calls and provides quality answers, thus saving considerable investment and workload.

context

For any company with a direct connection to the public, customer support services can be a serious struggle that directly impacts customer satisfaction and may produce peaks of overloaded support staff.Inspire IT was approached by one of the largest companies in Portugal in the energy distribution sector to create a chatbot service in order to reduce the volume of calls made within the company, saving the company investment and vastly decreasing staff FTE. More than 100.000 contacts are received monthly, with more than 25% of them being considered low priority and basic information that could be answered by an automated response system, namely a chatbot service.

Reduce call volume, enhance customer satisfaction and provide faster and more accurate responses

solution

Implemented a new Chatbot service that simply and intuitively initially provided solutions to the most common questions and operations in three different channels (Mobile, Web Portal and Intranet). In addition of reducing call volume, greatly enhanced customer satisfaction by providing faster and more accurate responses without holding periods.Initially, the bot is expected to respond to 2 themes, namely:
- Invoices;
- Assessments ESG

To reduce even more the operating costs, it was implemented a navigation menu for the user that allows simple and easy selections, avoiding text treatment by the machine learning solution.

This type of approach has several advantages:
- Guides the user on what the robot can do / respond to.
- Reduces the need for the user to type. The less you write, the fewer mistakes you make. The fewer errors it gives, the better the robot realizes what the user really wants. So, we avoid answers from the robot like "Sorry, I didn't understand what you meant" or, at worst, the robot answers a different question than the user asked.
- Reduces costs by minimizing the need for a language interpretation platform (LUIS).

However, in a second phase, a hybrid model could be developed that allows the user to navigate the conversation through menus or writing through LUIS. As an example, a user could type "I want to know the latest invoices for NIF 522456321" and then had that answer.

technology

The chatbot was developed using Microsoft technologies, can be integrated into websites via direct channel or in some of the various channels that bot framework has integrated such as Microsoft Teams, Facebook Messenger, etc...In this solution we used the following technologies:
- Microsoft Bot Framework v4.5;
- Microsoft LUIS (Language Understanding)
- Azure (Bot Service, App Service, SQL Database);
- .Net Core 2.2