Swisscom is introducing its own AI chatbots for its customer services. Pascal Jaggi, the head of Customer Care at Swisscom, has presented the operator's own artificial intelligence (AI) system Cosmos, which can distribute written enquiries from customers to the right employees. From 2018, the operator plans to launch a chatbot for processing voice communication.
Swisscom's service centre processes 30,000 - 40,000 written enquiries per month. Cosmos, developed by Swisscom, can process and forward enquiries with an 85 percent reliability. In contrast, employees distributing the enquiries show a high fault rate, with two thirds of the enquiries are forwarded to a wrong person.
Cosmos can also reply automatically, but only to 3 percent of enquiries, which can be re-directed to Self-Care. The reply is marked as a robo-reply.
Cosmos is based on a Deep-Learning technology and it includes 800,000 written enquiries. In addition, 100 employees currently spend two hours a day developing the AI system.
The development of the system took Swisscom two years from the original idea to the launch in March. Initially it worked only for German language, making up 70 to 80 percent of the enquiries. French and Italian will follow.
Beside Cosmos, in 2018, Swisscom is preparing another AI system, namely a chatbot to be connected with Cosmos. Initially, the chatbot will be deployed for simple administrative tasks and later, it will be able to resolve technical issues, too. The aim is to use the chatbot for customer consultations in the future as well.
Swisscom is now conducting internal tests with the Roboadvisor. At the beginning of 2018, it will be offered to the first selected clients. Based on their responses, roll-out will follow.
Swisscom has experience with AI in customer service. In 2016, Swisscom introduced the Voiceprint speech recognition to call centres. Swisscom bought the system from Israeli company Nice Systems and integrated it into its Call Centre, with a positive feedback.
