When new leaders stepped into manage operations at our Canadian Telecom customer’s team, they were tasked with taking over this major telecom’s chatbot (virtual agent) program. The expectation, devise a plan to significantly reduce contact center costs while giving customers a better overall experience.

Together, the new managers set three aggressive KPIs for their chatbot program:

• Grow the contact center’s “containment” rate—how many customer problems were successfully resolved without including a live agent—from 24% to 50%
• Increase the contact center’s customer message understanding rate by 10%
• Increase the contact center’s rate of positive customer feedback by 50%

First, managers used Calabrio Bot Analytics (formerly Wysdom Managed Chatbot Operations) to analyze past conversations between customers and the telecom’s virtual agent. After discovering within those conversations 370 content gaps—i.e., instances when a chatbot *could have* answered the customer question if it had been pre-programmed to respond—they leveraged 75,000 phrases from the Bot Analytics Exchange quickly expanding their chatbot program, with +200 new intent-driven actions.

They then connected these customer experiences to key internal systems, so the new-and-improved virtual agent could independently resolve a greater number of more advanced customer inquiries, like providing personalized information, checking account balances, topping up data plans, and extending payment deadlines, without involving a live agent.

Once all that was done, the telecom heavily promoted its upgraded virtual agent capabilities across its websites, apps, and social media channels.

By enabling their chatbots to handle many of the most difficult, day-to-day tasks previously handled by live agents, the telecom saves more than $13 million annually!

Even more importantly, now that the virtual agent can better understand what they’re trying to accomplish, perform more sales and customer service duties, and intelligently hand them off to the right live agent, when necessary, customers are happier with—and more informed by—the service they receive.

But the proof is in the numbers:

• Virtual Agent conducted chat volume has grown by 125%!
• 16% increase in customers comprehension of Virtual Agent messages
• Positive customer feedback rate per review of Virtual Agent increased by 53%!
• Containment has grown by 62%!

And the managers aren’t stopping there. They plan to train the virtual agent to perform even more sales functions and to recommend other products and services to customers after analyzing their behavior in real-time. Plus, they’re going to empower their virtual agent to perform additional advanced functions by connecting it to more internal systems.