Introduction
With over 16 million subscribers, Cell C is one of South Africa’s leading mobile operators. The company has consistently increased its subscriber base year on year by providing their customers with new solutions that were different to anything the local market had seen before.
The Mission of Cell C has been to have the highest levels of Customer Success by being –
– Customer-focused
– Improve process efficiency
– Empower people as the primary asset
Challenge:
Cell C call center system was struggling due to disparate applications, siloed data, and time consuming manual processes. With manual interventions and digital channels that were not resilient enough to provide their customers with a seamless and timely service, Cell C was unable to provide a connected digital interaction to their customers across all channels.
Solution:
Nuacem AI partnered with Cell C to design and implement a next-generation Conversational AI-powered customer engagement system to deliver a seamless customer experience across all channels using Nuacem AI’s Cognitive Customer Engagement Cloud platform. With the implementation of Nuacem AI’s intelligent virtual assistant, Cell C’s call center team found the customer service and support aspects, coupled with customer self-service technology, to be much more user-friendly for both Cell C customers and customer care teams. It quickly became a key building block within the digital transformation program called Peppa.
After selecting Nuacem AI as the conversational AI framework for their virtual assistant, Cell C launched an MVP version in Sep 2021. The virtual assistant can customize experiences for users that qualify for self-service. Customers are automatically qualified by starting a messaging conversation with an intent that matches a topic the virtual assistant can handle. From there, the virtual assistant acts as a way finder, pointing the customer in the right direction. Some transactions can be fully resolved by the assistant, without transferring the customer to another channel.
Working alongside Nuacem’s Customer Success team, Cell C’s full-stack team built an API integration to customize the user experience. The team also integrated with Cell C’s chat platform built by the Nuacem Engineering Team and rapidly assessed market changes and model updates. Taking an iterative and agile approach, Cell C continually releases improvements to the assistant, sometimes shipping updates two to three times per week.
Result:
Since launch, Cell C’s virtual assistant has reached 20% of Messaging customers, with a goal of serving 40% of customers with seamless, personalized conversational experiences by the end of 2022 on different digital channels.
The AI at Cell C team continues to expand the capabilities and scope of their virtual assistant, looking ahead to launching new self-service options and expanding to RCS for Android users in 2022 and beyond.
Few tangible benefits after implementation were –
• Enhanced customer experience by 45%
• Enhanced agent productivity by 23%
• Reduced operating costs by 33%
