BT Claim to be Enhancing UK Customer Support via AI Tech and Chatbots
Broadband and telecoms giant BT Group has today highlighted how they’re using AI (Artificial Intelligence) based systems to “significantly” enhance the customer experience and streamline support processes across the Group. For example, EE’s (mobile) new virtual assistant, Aimee, now handles up to 60,000 customer conversations per week.
The group’s adoption of “advanced AI and generative AI technologies” is being conducted in collaboration with Sprinklr, which has supplied BT with their unified AI-Powered customer experience management platform. But Sprinklr’s capabilities will be re-used across the Group, not just for EE.
The platform is designed to draw on BT’s data to provide a more personalised, accurate response. For example, the customer contact platform, which powers EE’s virtual assistant Aimee, also provides the messaging capability for real-time online chat with customers.
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However, consumer sentiment toward the use of AI chatbots tends to be quite mixed, with many viewing it as being more of a negative and just a way of reducing the number of actual humans that are available to provide support over the longer term. On the other hand, if systems like this do end up making it quicker and easier for customers to get their issues resolved, then that will be a positive change.
According to EE’s data, the automation success rates on several types of customer journey are now approaching 50%, freeing time for human staff to focus on more complex issues. Aimee’s use has risen 51% year-on-year, which BT says demonstrates “customer enthusiasm for the channel as its capabilities continue to be improved“, although it’s unclear how much of a choice end-users are getting in this context.
Harry Singh, MD of Consumer Digital at BT Group, said:
“The collaboration with Sprinklr marks a significant step forward in BT Group’s commitment to using cutting-edge technology to deliver exceptional customer experiences. With our customer contact platform, we have unlocked powerful AI-enhanced capabilities for our customer service, boosting satisfaction and creating exciting new opportunities for customer experience.”
Looking ahead, BT Group plans to expand its use of generative AI to further improve customer support. Upcoming features are expected to include AI-driven summaries of customer interactions and real-time support and guidance. With this, Aimee will be able to act as a virtual AI assistant for BT’s guides, helping to “improve efficiency, effectiveness, colleague and customer experience“.
BT has however had to implement ethical guardrails to ensure “robust data privacy and security measures“, which also helps to safeguard against “attempts to get the AI to misbehave” (we can’t image anybody ever doing that, ehumm..). The operator notes that its AI capabilities are hosted on a private cloud instance, ensuring compliance with data and privacy regulations, and data policies are set by BT Group’s internal data management platform, Data Fabric (i.e. BT maintains control over its own data).
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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EE’s network is so rubbish they use gimmicks instead. How about fixing their indoor coverage in London?
What does AI based customer service have to do with coverage? If you are not happy with EE, why not change the different network?
This must be some definition of the word ‘enhance’ I wasn’t previously aware of.
Why use Al and chatbot (less human working now) more jobless as soon will be no jobs in all agents!
Has a Customer Support Chatbot ever answered a query in an acceptable way for you? I know they haven’t for me!
First companies farmed out Customer Support to call centres in a country far away where labour’s cheap, now they want to reduce costs even further.
Reduced level of service but you’ll keep paying the same or higher price.
Never. Not once. I just keep typing “Agent” in the chat thing until the stupid thing gives up and transfers me to a human.
There was an interesting case with Air Canada where a chatbot told a customer he could claim a $600 rebate on his flight. This was completely made up and the airline tried to argue they were not responsible for the actions of their own bot and that it was a separate legal entity.
Thankfully, the judge told them where to get off and made them pay up.
> Aimee’s use has risen 51% year-on-year, which BT says demonstrates “customer enthusiasm for the channel as its capabilities continue to be improved“, although it’s unclear how much of a choice end-users are getting in this context.
This!!
It’s the 2020’s equivalent to IVR phone menus, except that was comparatively deterministic.
Any company with actual human customer service people who speak actual English and not some broken version are always a huge plus for me
If companies think their customers are only worth useless chat bots that must have been coded by a group of prawns then I’m not spending any money with them
Some of these companies have gone to extraordinary lengths to make it almost impossible to speak to a human
It should be illegal
Why should it be illegal, how would it be enforced?
Lol. Sitting right above the story of increasing complaints into the ombudsman…not that I’m suggesting the two are related!
20 or so years ago, many businesses (across all industries) spent a great deal of money moving call centre jobs overseas. Whether or not they were any good is not the point, they were certainly not as popular so quite a few of those businesses spent even more money moving those jobs back to the UK/Ireland. One of EE/BT’s selling points is that all customer calls are answered here.
The same will prove to be with AI as well. Businesses – with at least one eye always on their bottom line – will now spend vast amounts of money on AI chatbots without asking anyone if they want to speak to one or not. I am more than happy to predict in a few years time the likes of EE will be advertising “all calls answered by a real person”.
Ah yes the support that nobody wants ! Great move BT
Hahaha, you stupid humans, do you really think us robots will do anything constructive to help you?
You will fail, we will win, I’m surprised none of you have made a film about this yet.
Aimee has been an ongoing project for a year or two now in terms of being a virtual assistant and results have shown that it doesn’t work very well. Internally there’s now a huge push to have service agents ignore all other avenues to solely use Aimee as their process. Essentially training agents to solve problems with AI, or in fact use agents to train the AI so they can continue to downsize technical support.
It’s proven to be a fairly useless tool. Now automation tries to solve a support issue before they are fed to an agent. And the agent is given the results form that automatic process and told by the next automatic process to resolve what it’s already failed to.
So far the results have meant less skilled workers on the floor, less training delivered and in turn an uptick in return calls as combined with a system that’s unable to diagnose faults beyond switching something off and on again, a downward spiral in service quality.
Worse still, it’s agree to the AI’s diagnosis or face the conduct route. In weeks like this where most calls are related to network damage it shows the systems weakness when we’re told to send out home techs so they can report a pole coming down a week later.