In order to maintain its position as a global leader in telecommunications, Vodafone is always exploring new opportunities to optimize its digital strategy and deliver exceptional customer service.
In collaboration with IBM® Technology Expert Labs, Vodafone Ireland recently conducted an assistant modernization of its virtual assistant TOBi, which is powered by IBM watsonx™ Assistant, a platform designed to help deliver consistent and intelligent customer care. The firm had been pleased with the impact of the assistant so far, but, since it was running on an earlier version of the solution, there were many capabilities included in the latest version that the team had not yet taken advantage of. This meant the containment goals the team had set for the assistant were increasingly difficult to achieve and the resolution rate of the assistant was stuck at 35%.
Thus, Vodafone Ireland worked with Expert Labs to redeploy TOBi on the latest watsonx Assistant platform, which contains generative AI capabilities. These new features leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), designed to generate accurate, conversational answers grounded in Vodafone’s content. The solution also includes a natural language understanding (NLU) engine that uses a new foundation model based on transformer architecture to better understand human language and classify requests with a fraction of the training effort. It’s also self-learning, which means it employs algorithms that automatically learn from past interactions how best to answer questions and improve conversation flow routing.
Once the migration was underway, the team conducted a comprehensive rebuild of all TOBi conversational journeys and executed necessary adjustments in their own application infrastructure. The migration led to compelling results:
- 3x improvement in the turnaround time for creating new conversational journeys
- A significant jump in containment rates—up to 20% in certain areas
- An 80% reduction in misunderstood customer utterances despite a reduction in NLU training data
These improvements are just the beginning. Vodafone Ireland is engaged with IBM Client Engineering and IBM Consulting® to continue maximizing the company’s adoption of the new platform and explore where generative AI can further augment its efforts.
Vodafone (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a European and African telecommunications company. Vodafone’s networks and technology keeps family, friends, businesses and governments connected. Its technology enables access to financial services, education and healthcare. The company has 323 million mobile customers across 21 markets and 48 partner markets around the world.
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