As the largest integrated telecommunications provider in the Czech market, O2 operates close to eight million mobile and fixed accesses, which ranks it among the market leaders in fully converged services in Europe. It is also the largest internet protocol television (IPTV) provider in the Czech Republic with its O2 TV. The company has always used state-of-the-art technology to bring innovative services and solutions to its customers.
In its customer service operation, O2 representatives respond to incoming requests from their customers 24x7. The variety of requests is very wide and ranges from reporting internet outages to processing new orders, upgrades, billing inquiries, operational instructions and general questions. The representatives also handle customer requests that have been routed to them automatically from mobile users of the O2 app. As with any organization’s customer services operations, managing a high volume of customer requests most efficiently and effectively can be challenging at times, so O2 decided to address this with advanced technology.
O2 decided to engage AI experts from IBM® and AddAI.Life, a Czech company that is focused on the creation of conversational AI with advanced natural language processing technologies. Together, they used IBM watsonx® Assistant to create a virtual assistant, which they named “Eva,” that could help answer incoming customer questions and requests. Then they trained Eva to understand various customer inquiries and provide relevant assistance to the customers in return. They also built the virtual assistant technology into the O2 mobile app, which now greets users with, “Hello. I am Eva, your virtual assistant. How can I assist you?" Moreover, in cases where user requests cannot be addressed completely in the mobile app, the virtual assistant automatically redirects the requests to the relevant page on the company’s website or matches them with an operator who specializes in the particular area.
"We work closely with the O2 team to train and improve Eva so that she stays up-to-date in terms of both technology and customer experience (CX). A great help to us are the tools we have developed for analyzing customer journeys and frequently addressed topics we can incorporate into the solution so that it remains relevant and updated at all times. I hope Eva will have as many satisfied clients as possible," says Jindřich Cromý, Co-founder and CEO of AddAI.Life.
Unlike many other assistants on the market, Eva communicates directly with the O2 customer support system, which enables the virtual assistant to target answers more effectively and purposefully. "The watsonx Assistant running on IBM Cloud is, so to speak, Eva's brain, which drives the whole interaction with the user. Eva is trained to interpret a wide range of users’ intentions and provide them with answers or lead them through required actions. By communicating and exchanging data with other components, the software instantly informs clients about billing, order status or roaming data," says Martin Švík, IBM Vice President and CTO for Northern, Central and Eastern Europe.
No doubt the addition of Eva to the O2 customer service operation has had a positive impact on the O2 customer service business and its customers as it addresses many incoming questions automatically and accurately.
The virtual assistant has been trained on nearly 1,000 different scenarios, and that number is growing daily. This helps alleviate the volume of requests for the customer service representatives to handle themselves. In the O2 mobile app alone, Eva currently answers more than 250,000 questions a year. In addition, about 30% of O2 customers now can communicate exclusively by voice with EVA, thereby making their overall experience easier and faster.
Eva also has become more personal for customers. “She has her own defined personality and is ready for various customers' emotions. Our partner AddAI.Life personalized the assistant with a small talk module, so Eva can entertain our customers with a joke or two as well,” explains Roman Křivka, Digital Care Manager at O2. As for Eva’s voice, O2 collaborated with Microsoft in synthesizing the voice of Kateřina Winterová, a leading actress from the Czech Republic, for its virtual assistant. "Studio recording of the voice samples from the famous actress took nine hours. Then we spent dozens of hours programming and training the synthetic voice through a neural network. The foundation of success was Ms. Winterová’s flawless vocal performance and good direction. We are still continuously working on the voice so that Eva can grasp new concepts and pronounce new tariff names," explains Křivka. Now, the virtual assistant's voice is heard in the O2 mobile app, on the customer support line and in TV commercials.
O2 (link resides outside of ibm.com) is the largest integrated telecommunications provider in the Czech market. At present the company operates close to eight million mobile and fixed accesses, which ranks it among the market leaders in fully converged services in Europe.
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