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