smart Europe GmbH’s transition to a direct-to-consumer (D2C) business model, which allows customers to purchase vehicles entirely online, places greater emphasis on the role of the customer engagement center (CEC) in guiding customers through the sales and after-sales journey. The move brought exciting opportunities to enhance the customer experience (CX), but along with the surge in customer interactions came a new challenge: managing them.
smart Europe’s Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system is used by over 150 agents in the CEC daily. However, the highly manual workflows within the system led to longer processing times, increased risk of human errors and overall inefficiency. Therefore, smart Europe sought to implement an automated solution for customer service workflows to streamline processes, increase employee workflow efficiency and effectiveness, and improve customer satisfaction in the long term.
Without the right technology in place, smart Europe encountered hurdles such as inconsistent categorization and routing of inquiries. The company needed robust tools to promote seamless request handling and gain valuable data insights to improve service quality and maintain customer satisfaction.
smart Europe recognized an opportunity to level up its customer care with generative AI (gen AI). smart Europe, IBM Consulting® and IBM Client Engineering defined the gen AI minimum viable product (MVP). smart Europe handles case management for customer support tickets, and the IBM team helped create a user interface (UI) component in Salesforce that informs agents of all system-generated decisions.
The team integrated IBM® watsonx™ and Salesforce to automatically prioritize and classify incoming customer cases and provide streamlined response support. Based on IBM Cloud®, the system works on the ticket before any human action, eliminating laborious work such as summarization, ticket classification, and prioritization. The system answers and automatically resolves standard queries using IBM Watson® Discovery to save agents’ time and help ensure that their answers are consistently on brand and customer focused.
The MVP demonstrated:
- 30% improvement in the accuracy of case categorization and prioritization
- 3 times faster resolution time for recurring issues
- 60% increase in first contact resolution
- 97% agent acceptance rate
The system can easily be scaled to incorporate additional languages, allowing it to serve multiple markets. Moreover, it can seamlessly integrate additional use cases and is compatible with various systems, such as ServiceNow, Adobe and more. This openness is one of the primary reasons smart Europe chose IBM watsonx™. The system enables a smooth deployment across various departments, such as e-commerce, sales, marketing, after-sales and product management.
“At smart Europe, we believe that technology should always elevate the experience of our customers,” says Aymen Ismail, Head of Customer Engagement Solutions. “Partnering with IBM allows us to not only streamline our operations but also bring a new level of individualization and precision to every interaction. With the power of generative AI, we’re striving to solve challenges more efficiently while making each customer engagement more personalized and meaningful.”
Founded in 2020 in Leinfelden-Echterdingen, near Stuttgart, smart Europe GmbH (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a wholly owned subsidiary of smart mobility International Pte. Ltd. smart Europe’s international team is responsible for all sales, marketing and after-sales activities for the next generation of smart vehicles, products and services of the brand in the European market. The international smart joint venture was established between Mercedes-Benz AG and Geely Automobile Co., Ltd. smart positions itself as a leading provider of intelligent electric vehicles in the premium segment.
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