Virgin Media UK co-parent Liberty Global adopt new AI chatbot for support
The co-owner of UK broadband, pay TV and mobile giant Virgin Media (O2), Liberty Global, has today announced that they’ve signed a 3-year “strategic partnership” to adopt Sierra‘s conversational AI platform across their various operating companies, which is intended to make customer interactions “easier, more intuitive and more effective“.
The use of AI chatbots and related solutions in a support setting has become increasingly common over the past few years and is often seen by companies as a way of improving efficiency, while also cutting costs. The latter is perhaps particularly relevant in the UK, where VMO2 has recently been linked to a c.£600m cost cutting plan (here); greater use of AI is already expected to be one of the outcomes from that.
The new framework partnership agreement with Sierra is similarly said to provide Liberty Global’s businesses with a common approach to deploying AI agents “capable of engaging customers in natural language, across chat, voice and text” (Sierra’s website clarifies that its solution can deploy a single AI agent across chat, SMS, voice, ChatGPT, email, and more).
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Such agents will focus on handling the more routine, as well as some increasingly complex, interactions. In theory, if used more as a complement than replacement to humans, this could allow customer-care teams to focus more of their time on situations requiring human judgement and deep expertise – improving overall quality.
Mike Fries, Liberty Global Chairman and CEO, said:
“Sierra has built a game-changing platform that we are excited to deploy across our footprint. By combining Sierra’s technology and deployment expertise with the deep knowledge of our local teams, we will deliver better customer experience across our group by making customer journeys simpler, faster and more effective.”
On the other hand, consumer sentiment toward the use of AI chatbots tends to be quite mixed, with many viewing it as being more of a negative (i.e. a way of reducing the number of actual humans that are available to provide support). On the other hand, if such systems do end up making it quicker and easier for customers to get their issues resolved, then that would still be a positive change.
Liberty Global said they’ve already started to deploy Sierra’s new AI solution across their 80 million fixed and mobile connections in Europe, which is taking place gradually via a phased programme and will be tailored to the unique needs of each operator and country in which they operate. Virgin Media are currently using a number of AI solutions (e.g. Lumi AI) within their support teams, so this looks set to expand upon that.
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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I wonder how long it’ll take before the AI is tricked into giving full discounts?
Unlikely but one can hope.
Probably unlikely based on how VM discounts work, if it isn’t available it can’t process/create a contract.
Is customer service an AI chatbot? I’m immediately going to the competitor.
But this is Virgin Media, so a dumb chat bot might be an actual improvement.
Having seen one of these being trained and in action, I’ve seen that they are quite sophisticated. A good chatbot can help with a high number of customer queries simply from the customer service documentation it has, and by looking up customer information in the database.
However it also needs to recognise when a query is more complex and escalate those to a human. Unfortunately if management push too hard to reduce staffing, that point can get moved too far towards the chatbot. At which point it starts giving incorrect responses to questions that are outside it’s knowledge.
I fear that could happen at VMO2 given they are targeting £600m in cost cuts.
I don’t care how good they are, if I have a problem and want to chat to someone I want a humnan, not a flipping machine.
We have become a society where unfortunately people don’t take the time to read or understand the information they already have. Many queries can be solved by just reading the on-screen text and doing what it says. As a result the number of CS queries has risen exponentially in comparison to the number of customers being served.
However I also appreciate that there are many queries that by their nature relate to where the something has gone wrong that needs a human to unpick. And a good AI will immediately refer those to a human to answer.
It’s a case of using technology appropriately. Unfortunately, to my earlier point I fear VM will push too far and it will be impossible to get a human to look at all but the most complex queries.
Any comment on the absolutely disgusting labour wanting to tack on £11 extra on broadband bills?
I put one on the article about it that have been posted on this site.
As said, it is from a useless Think tank, not labour.
It’s a proposal by a cross party think-tank, not Labour.
and has no support from the BBC itself…the think tank and government are spouting this.
Trained on millions of frustrated interactions with Indian call centres. What could possibly go wrong