AI Case Study
Marks & Spencer plans to automate all customer call routing with 90% accuracy using machine learning
Marks & Spencer is automating the routing of its customer service call centre switchboards. After conducting an initial trial, the service provided by Twilio will be rolled out to 13 call centres in the UK, and claims accuracy of 90%. Dialogflow is used to understand customer intent for automatic routing and speech will be automatically transcribed to text.
Industry
Consumer Goods And Services
Retail General
Project Overview
Essentially the software automates the switchboard function, routing customer complaint phone calls to the correct department. From Retail Sector, "The technology will be delivered by Twilio across 640 M&S stores and 13 UK-based contact centre hubs.
The project to migrate the retail chain’s switchboard operation took less than six months from concept to launch and will allow the company to analyse customer intent in real time for more than 12 million customer interactions annually. Before the technology was implemented, a trial run was held during the retailer’s two busiest days of the year, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, where it handled more than 20,000 customer calls."
The human cost of the automation will be mitigated, according to IT Pro: "Marks and Spencer (M&S) is replacing its call centre staff with artificial intelligence software designed to quickly deal with customer complaints. The retail giant said that 100 employees who work across its 13 UK call centres will not be losing their jobs and instead will be reassigned to in-store roles, ironically to offer face to face services on the shop floor."
Reported Results
Twilio claims the new technology correctly identifies 90% of queries and can direct a call within seconds. According to Digit:
"After a successful trial with Twilio, Marks & Spencer, in collaboration with DVELP, deployed its intelligent natural language routing solution nationwide and is able to;
* Handle more than one million inbound telephone calls per month.
* Transcribe the customer’s speech into text – by leveraging Twilio’s Speech Recognition tool, Marks & Spencer can analyse the voice of the customer in real time.
* Determine caller intent – through integration with Google DialogFlow, Marks & Spencer is able to take the transcribed text and determine why a customer is calling.
* Route calls – IVR uses caller intent to route the call to the appropriate department, store or contact centre agent to resolve the customer inquiry."
Technology
Function
Customer Service
Contact Centre
Background
According to Digit, "Prior to implementing the new chatbot solution Marks & Spencer’s infrastructure was built on a mixture of legacy phone systems that could not support its digital strategy going forward. As a result, M&S was unable to centralise customer information and could not seamlessly connect customers across its stores nationwide."
Benefits
Data
Details undisclosed