AI chats up Japanese call centre callers

Article By : Fujitsu

The service improves the customer experience by providing callers with natural conversation and accurate understanding and response to their queries.

Fujitsu has launched a cloud service that uses an AI-enabled automated chat-type service to answer inquiries from users calling in to call centres. Sales of the Business Application Operational Data Management & Analytics (ODMA) Digital Agent for Call Centres to corporate call centres in Japan will start between June and September 2017. The company plans to sell the service to 250 companies by the end of fiscal year 2020.

AI to replace call agents

The call centre industry faces chronic problems with personnel shortages due to high attrition rates among operators and difficulty in hiring. In addition, there are significant issues accompanying the increasing complexity of products and services, including long training times for operators and increasing training costs. Because of these, expectations have been increasing for the use of technologies, such as AI in supporting and increasing the efficiency of operator tasks. In light of this situation, Fujitsu's ODMA Digital Agent for Call Centres aims to resolve issues in call centres while simultaneously improving convenience for users.

The ODMA Digital Agent for Call Centres uses Fujitsu Human Centric AI Zinrai, Fujitsu's advanced-learning AI technologies, to load the FAQs and responses to queries accumulated within a company, thereby accurately understanding the input text of the query to find the correct answer.

In addition, the system automatically learns natural conversation from conversation records, and incorporates the experience Fujitsu has developed regarding the proper grammar and manners to use when responding to inquiries, handling operations in such a way as to put users at ease. Use of this service resolves issues facing call centres, including insufficient personnel and the growing cost of training, and it also significantly improves user convenience as answers are immediately available via chat, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

This service has been deployed on customer support lines at Fujitsu Client Computing Limited, which develops, manufactures, and supports Fujitsu-brand PCs, and its operational launch is scheduled between June and September of this year.

Searvice features

1. Accuracy in understanding queries and providing optimal responses.
   This service recognises the query text input by the user with high accuracy by using AI to study the FAQs and accumulated responses to questions within a company. By incorporating task-oriented conversation technology in which AI automatically studies smooth conversations from conversation histories and without preparing complicated conversational scenarios in advance, the system can understand spoken word input from users. When faced with ambiguous questions using general terminology, the AI can seek clarification to correctly understand the intent of the user’s question, leading to optimal answers. In an internal trial, the probability that the correct answer to a question posed by AI was within the top five answers was over 80%.

2. Capable of natural conversation outside of questions and answers.
   The system is capable of flexibly responding in conversational small talk that differs from the FAQs and query responses it was trained on, so users will feel as if they are in a natural conversation.

3. Reflects the conversational experience of operators
   By incorporating customer support experience and ways of speaking developed by experienced operators, the system provides a conversational experience. The AI technologies provided with ODMA Digital Agent for Call Centres will also be provided as the APIs "Communications bot" and "FAQ search," through Fujitsu Cloud Service K5 Zinrai Platform Service.