Optimizing Customer
Service Through Intelligent
Virtual Assistants
TAIGER
SUCCESS STORY
HDB
ORGANIZATION
HDB
www.hdb.gov.sd
CUSTOMER BASE
3 million
COUNTRY/REGION
Singapore
INDUSTRY
Government
BUSINESS NEED
NLP-powered
virtual assistant
services, such as money transfer, airtime top-up, and bill payment. It also sells
smartphones and tablets. Additionally, the company provides hosting and cloud
services, including fully managed hosting solutions, as well as cloud computing,
co-location, server and website hosting, storage, and security. It serves
approximately 404 million customers worldwide, 17 million of them in Spain.
The company sells and distributes its products through approximately 15,000
Vodafone branded retail stores, a network of distribution partners and third
party retailers, as well as the Internet. Vodafone Group Public Limited Company
was founded in 1984 and is based in Newbury, United Kingdom..
response time, while reducing the bottom line costs of its operation. To effect
dedicated customer service telephone channel and into the Web channel.
Doing so required installation of an intelligent piece of software able to handle
and correctly respond to all customer requests, mimicking a human-to-human
written interaction.
to cope with a large number of clients. Customer service is one of the corporate
departments that receives the largest share of customer complaints, and one
uirement.
SUCCESS STORY
HDB
THE NEED
The Housing & Development Board (HDB) is Singapore’s public housing authori-
ty, overseeing the planning and development of Singapore’s housing estates.
Established in 1960 during the housing crisis of Singapore, the HDB replaced
slums and squatter settlements with apartments, building 54,000 flats in a span
of 5 years. Currently, the HDB has provided housing to over 80% of Singapore’s
resident population, with more than 1 million flats completed in the country.
CUSTOMER PROFILE
As a housing authority, customer service is an important and major part of the
HDB’s day to day activities. However, many of the needs of residents were often
not met by the traditional static FAQs found on the HDB website, leading to
increased pressure on the customer service department. Further, the terminolo-
gy that residents would normally use may not be found verbatim in the FAQs,
making it difficult for residents to find the answers they were looking for. In order
to improve customer service efficiency and response time while still reducing
the bottom line costs of its operation, HDB decided to install an intelligent virtual
assistant, capable of mimicking human-to-human written interaction.
HDB’s need is common amongst large organizations that need to cope with a
large number of clients, especially where the clients tend to all ask the same
thing, just in different variations. For instance, “how much is season parking at
my area” is one of the most common questions posed to the customer service
department of HDB.
FAQ, therefore greatly reducing the number of telephone calls.
Upon implementing this solution, customers can interact—using natural (human)
written language—with Vodafone´s virtual assistant in the following way:
cable.”
iConverse: “No problem. Where do you live?”
User: “In Madrid, in the Chamberí neighborhood.”
iConverse: “Perfect. In 7 days a technician will drop by your house and install the
.
THE ADVANTAGES
the information they need through the corporate website´s NLP-powered virtual
assistant, reducing the number of telephone calls, increasing the success rate
and improving the customer experience. From the internal business perspective
In summary, by means of the iConverse solution Vodafone has greatly improved
customer service performance while it has achieved a long-desired operational
cost decrease, without having to incur any additional new investments.
TAIGER SOLUTION
iConverse
FUNCTIONALITY
Query expansion
Ontology engineering
Natural language processing
Semantic technology
Advanced text analysis
Automatic tagging and notation
LANGUAGE
English
TECHNICAL INFORMATION
Platform
Linux
Type of content
Internal, external, and user-gene-
rated content
Content in English
Textual content.
SUCCESS STORY
HDB
The customer writes his/her request in natu-ral (human) language.
iConverse interprets the query and interacts with the customer to re-
quest any missing data.
iConverse answers the customer’s
request.
“I have a question about...”
For more information please visit: www.taiger.com
THE SOLUTIONThe optimal solution for HDB to meet this need and provide top quality customer
service came in the form of Taiger’s iConverse. iConverse is an intelligent trans-
actional virtual assistant built on a proprietary AI core that is able to interact with
customer in writing, using natural language. This shifts traffic away from tradi-
tional phone-based customer service channels, reducing costs and saving time.
iConverse allows residents to interact using natural (human) written language
with Judy, the digital manifestation of HDB’s virtual assistant, in the following
way:
User: "how much is season parking"
Judy: " Season parking charges vary, depending on the type of vehicle, type of
car park, and the car park location. Would you like to check season parking
charges for a particular parking location?"
User: "yes"
Judy: "Please tell me the block (e.g. "123")."
User: "107"
Judy: "Please tell me the street"
User: "Teck Whye Lane"
Judy: "Please tell me the vehicle type."
User: "Car"
Judy: "Please tell me the month."
User: "Sep"
Judy: "Thank you again. The monthly rate is $65.00 for the following car parks:
CK1, CK2, CK3."
AskJudy is able to recognize colloquialisms and slang ("how 2 buy sp"), and
retain contextual memory for more effective communication (understanding that
'it' in "how much is it" refers to the price of season parking.
The implementation of iConverse means that HDB’s key stakeholders, the
residents, will find the information they need through the NLP-powered AskJudy
virtual assistant, reducing the number of telephone calls and improving the
overall customer service experience. One of the significant indicators of the
success of iConverse is the high call deflection rate of the virtual assistant: over
80% of all queries were solved without the resident having to call the HDB’s
customer service department.
In summary, the iConverse solution has greatly improved HDB’s customer service
performance while concurrently reducing costs.
THE ADVANTAGES