A telecommunications company received 400,000 customer requests per month. The customer care staff were spending 60% of their time reading/sorting inbound messages, as there were often duplicate or triplicate claims for the same issue in the system, a consequence of customers not receiving a response fast enough and submitting through multiple channels.
The department was operating at full capacity but turnaround time to manage claims was slow and often exceeded the maximum time promised to customers. The company employed 250 full-time staff members, yet still wasn’t able to scale appropriately to meet such influxes in claims as those during a service disruption.
Applica was deployed to divert 60% of the inbound requests away from customer care representatives. Applica also issued appropriate automated messages to notify customers if the response time would be longer than normal.
Applica’s AI was able to fully automate replies for 35% of the messages, remove the 10% of duplicate messages, and partially automate the remaining 55% of messages requiring staff member review, leading to their more rapid processing. E.g.: Applica extracts and classifies relevant content so that an agent no longer has to read through an entire request to understand the issue, this speeding claim resolution by 30%.
The implementation of Applica resulted in $5.5 million in cost savings for the 250-person customer care department and led to a complete transformation with how representatives spent their time, greatly increasing customer satisfaction due to much quicker response times. Additionally, Applica helped the company identify the most pertinent requests requiring expeditious handling, avoiding potentially costly legal and/or regulatory issues.
