Customer Stories

24
Oct
Customer Stories  ·  Featured Articles  ·  Voice AI Technology
MNC Play Scales Customer Engagement and Boosts Growth with WIZ.AI’s Conversational AI Solution

Founded in 2013, MNC Play has been providing Indonesian customers with IPTV, Broadband Internet and Multimedia Entertainment services under MNC Group. With a large subscriber base of millions of subscribers, retaining subscribers and expanding recurring revenue has become a pivotal part for MNC Play to sustain growth. Moreover, with a wide array of services, upsell and cross-sell are also important to MNC Play’s strategy.

For a long time, MNC Play struggled with its outbound capacity calls to increase retention (payment reminder) and upsell (renewal & add-on) due to the shortage of manpower. Faced with diverse cycles occurring monthly, quarterly and yearly, limited human agents proved inadequate to manually make reminder calls. Moreover, trapped in repetitive retention calls, human agents barely have time to deeply delve into other upsell promotions, which usually requires sophisticated pricing strategies. As a result, the company saw subscribers lapsed, renewal rate dropped and revenue growth slowed down.

Scaling Engagement with Millions of Subscribers while Increasing Payment Rate

In Oct 2022, MNC Play adopted WIZ.AI’s Talkbot as an innovative technology solution to solve its scalability issue, with an aim to boost operational efficiency and recurring revenue.

The implementation was done in phases with increasing needs from MNC Play. In the beginning, 5K reminder calls were automated per month; in six-month time, the automated calls reached 30K per month. Compared with human agents, WIZ Talkbot excels in effortlessly adapting to workload changes by scaling up and down call volume with no resource limitation. Within one year, over 125k subscribers have been connected by WIZ Talkbot, which would have required over 200 human agent force in strength if done manually.

Compared with human agents, WIZ Talkbot is able to extract conversation insights instantly and tag them accordingly. In the payment collection, Promise to Pay (PTP) is regarded as a crucial metric to track payment willingness but could hardly be explicitly asked or recorded by human agents. WIZ Talbots, on the other hand, can record every subscriber’s payment intent with ease. With a PTP rate as high as 41.7%, WIZ Talkbot enabled MNC Play to keep a closer track on each stage of the payment collection, and have a more accurate estimation of the actual payment collection number.

The final collection results were also encouraging. WIZ.AI’s Talkbot delivers far superior actual collection performance compared to human agents, constantly beating human agents with a higher repayment rate up to 28%.

Using WIZ.AI's Talkbot as an alternative digital approach to customers provides outstanding results compared to human agents. Talkbot's voice is similar to a human voice and is not stiff, so customers understand what the robot is talking about.

Mohammad Arief Budiman, Head of Subscriber Retention and Loyalty Management Division at MNC Play

Crafting a Consistent & Irresistible Customer Experience

Making high-volume routine reminder calls could be daunting and emotionally taxing for human agents. Naturally influenced by the emotions and responses of the customers they are calling, their moods can fluctuate throughout the day. This can create inconsistencies in the level of service provided in each call, jeopardizing the customer experience.

In contrast, WIZ Talkbot is consistent, stable and reliable. Trained with large quantities of data such as user responses specific to payment reminder scenarios, and empowered by well-designed dialogue flows, the WIZ Talkbot perfectly encapsulates the industry’s best practices and consistently applies them to every call, crafting a coherent customer experience.  

Behind WIZ Talbot’s consistent performance lies the consistent support from WIZ.AI’s responsive team. The Customer Success team provides proactive back-end operation support and monitoring to ensure call efficiency, and regularly reviews the call performance with MNC Play’s retention team regarding business results and actionable insights.  

“In terms of the features provided, they are effortless for us to use, and the WIZ.AI team is cooperative in adapting to our needs so that the user experiences are optimized over time, based on our feedback.” noted Budiman.

With the objective of constantly optimizing the conversation experience to achieve best business performance, the Customer Experience team proactively conducts quality checks on the call experience. WIZ’s product managers are available for consultancy anytime should clients require a second opinion on their collection strategy, or a more customized solution.

Human-AI Copilot to Unleash the Full Potential of Human Agents

By automating high-volume routine reminder calls, WIZ.AI’s Talkbot frees up human agents from low-value manual tasks so they may focus on high-value strategic planning and other more valuable work.  With WIZ Talkbot relieving the agents of the bulk of such repetitive calls, MNC Play’s renewal team was able to invest more energies in diversifying their renewal and upsell strategies, such as refining the collection touchpoints to optimise renewal rates and implementing diverse promotional schemes to expand revenue growth for the company.

As Budiman adds, “Before we partnered with WIZ.AI, our team was on a treadmill of mundane tasks that ate away their time and energy. Now, things have completely changed. The Talkbots have taken over all our routine reminder calls, empowering human agents to apply their expertise and interpersonal skills to build lasting relationships and foster customer loyalty.”

Extended Partnership with Continuous Innovation

Following the success of WIZ Talkbot implementation, MNC Play has renewed their partnership with WIZ.AI for a second year. Additional use cases are being explored to further automate operations and boost revenues.

Currently, MNC Play is piloting Talkbots to upsell customers from monthly or quarterly subscriptions to yearly plans before renewal dates. This proactive outreach helps secure advance annual payments while reducing the manual effort required to repeatedly engage short-term subscribers.

Going forward, MNC Play is also keen to automate more processes with WIZ.AI’s latest technology innovations, including integrating Talkbots with their other digital channels like WhatsApp and email to deliver promotions and notifications at scale.

In an industry where customer retention and upsell are key to growth, MNC Play’s forward-thinking approach, powered by WIZ.AI’s innovative voice AI solutions, sets a benchmark for others to follow. The future looks promising as MNC Play continues to innovate the way of engaging with customers, increasing operational efficiency and boosting revenue growth.

About WIZ Talkbot

WIZ Talkbot is WIZ.AI’s flagship product. The intelligent platform facilitates over a 100 million automated customer interactions hourly, enabling exceptional customer service and strong business ROI.

Empowered by WIZ.AI’s proprietary TTS, NLP, and ASR technologies, WIZ Talkbot excels in understanding, listening, and communicating like a local, making it so convincing that 95% of users can’t differentiate it from human conversations. It adapts to a variety of voices, switching from firm to soft, swiftly to cope with the different use cases.

Wondering how voice AI automation can improve your business results? Speak to one of WIZ.AI’s specialists today.

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29
Sep
Customer Stories  ·  Featured Articles  ·  Voice AI Technology
PLDT pioneers AI-powered customer care with WIZ.AI’s voice AI solution on Azure
The Philippines’ largest telecommunications provider PLDT became the first company in the telco industry to expand its existing suite of customer service channels with a voice artificial intelligence solution. PLDT deployed the Talkbot Pro, a product of Microsoft partner WIZ.AI, via a contract with PLDT’s ICT subsidiary, ePLDT, to assist the collections team in delivering hyper-personalized customer experiences. The solution resides securely on ePLDT’s Azure Stack Hub, which ensures data compliance and sovereignty. As a result, the company has had a boost in efficiency, increased collections revenue, and streamlined back-end operations.
 


Through decades of innovation, PLDT has facilitated meaningful connections for its customers through fixed-line, wireless, and information and communication technology services. With a strong drive to elevate the quality of customer experience, PLDT’s customer group is leveraging innovation to expand its traditional contact methods with more personalized ways to individually connect with customers. “Our customers are at the heart of everything that we do. We are always looking for faster, safer, and more reliable channels for our customers to reach us if they need help,” says Jeanine Rubin, First Vice President and Head of Customer Care Group at PLDT.

Integrating AI to support agents

Apart from some outsourced callouts, PLDT relied mostly on one-way communication, including SMS, email, and APRS (automated payment reminder system) for collections. Dianne Blanco, Vice President and Head of Credit and Collections at PLDT, was looking for ways to enhance two-way conversational interactions with customers, particularly when it came to more sensitive situations like reminding customers of an outstanding balance.

The answer was WIZ.AI’s flagship product, Talkbot Pro. “Many other payment and collection reminder solutions don’t empathize, acknowledge, or respond to customer queries very well. If customers receive a call and realize it’s from a robot, there’s a strong chance they will hang up,” explains Blanco. “The WIZ.AI Talkbot does it all—during our first demo, it didn’t feel like a robot talking. It sounded like a human.” Combined with hyper-localization features, this voice artificial intelligence (AI) was the perfect fit for PLDT.

Singaporean-based WIZ.AI builds intuitive, smart voice AI engagement solutions that are truly human-like. “Unlike traditional turn-based or text-based chatting, our Talkbot listens and understands the intent of the caller’s speech in natural spoken language. In fact, over 95 percent of users are unable to tell the difference between a human agent and our Talkbot,” explains Allan Ong, Head of Regional Sales at WIZ.AI.

Over 95 percent of users are unable to tell the difference between a human agent and our Talkbot.

Allan Ong, Head of Regional Business Development, WIZ.AI

Setting up effective and compliant infrastructure

In September 2022, ePLDT and WIZ.AI worked together to develop and deploy 35 talkbots that handle payment collection, reduce churn rate, and help customer retention. “We’re proud to be the first telecommunications provider in the country that is leading the way in using voice AI to offer better customer service,” says Blanco.

The solution was integrated into ePLDT’s cloud contact center as a service (CCaaS) offering, backed by an Azure Stack Hub which is locally hosted in the ePLDT VITRO data center. WIZ.AI oversaw the application services and customizations while ePLDT managed the required infrastructure, including virtual machines and firewalls. In addition, ePLDT also ensures that the integration of WIZ.AI Talkbots into CCaaS will result in optimal connectivity for PLDT.

For Blanco, ensuring that the project would spark the upskilling of PLDT employees was essential. With this mindset, an internal team led the initiative, from understanding how to work with AI to deploying and managing daily operations. “Our call operators are no longer just making the call but also managing the talkbots doing the callout,” she explains. “Through working on this project, they’ve increased their knowledge of the AI bot and learned the terms that allow them to communicate smoothly with the technical team.”

Amplifying operational bandwidth

Over the first six months, the talkbots conducted 3.7 million outgoing communications with minimal supervision, the bulk of which were routine reminders. One year in, PLDT is seeing outstanding results.

“The talkbots added two more hours of call time into the day, which increased our productivity by 33 percent,” says Blanco. “The calls are even concluded quicker—the handling time for most calls are cut in half, from an average of six minutes to three minutes.”

The bots follow a standard script guaranteeing quicker and more consistent calls. Any updates or changes are incorporated by simply uploading a new script. With each call, the voice AI adapts, according to Blanco. “Similar to a person, the talkbot learns with each interaction. Every week, with each new conversation, we add to its knowledge base.”

PLDT was also able to increase revenue generated from collections by increasing contact rates with customers. “The net benefits of this initiative, resulting from the boost in efficiency, are a reduction in manual callouts by 15 percent and a higher collections rate,” says Blanco.

The talkbots added two more hours of call time into the day, which increased our productivity by 33 percent.

Dianne Blanco, Head of Credit and Collections, PLDT

Leveraging analytics for better connectivity

The localized AI talkbot, which can communicate even in Taglish (a mix of English and Tagalog, which is among the most commonly spoken languages in the Philippines), has significantly reduced the high volume and manual tasks for PLDT agents. “The real-time, automated Smart Hashtagging feature identifies customers in need of assistance, such as for billing disputes or service termination requests. This allows the agents to prioritize and serve them quickly, which results in higher customer satisfaction,” shares Ong.

Most of the follow-up work required after each call now happens automatically, further reducing arduous manual work. This includes the automatic transcription of each call and more accurate data for auditing purposes. “In the past, collectors would compile tally sheets manually. Now we have a database with all the information. We spend more time reviewing and analyzing the data instead of manipulating sheets of data to identify trends,” explains Blanco. PLDT uses these actionable insights to further enhance customer experience.

Having already met the targets for 2023, PLDT is ready to take the solution to the next level, to deliver even better customer care. This includes adding more talkbots to assist with the inbound call queue, promotional campaigns for pre-paid customers, and finding ways to increase personalization. “Right now, a lot of our calls are in Tagalog but we’re working to expand the regional bots so that conversations in Mindanao and Bisaya can also happen. We want to make our calls even more empathetic and authentic so customers can connect with and understand the talkbot immediately,” says Blanco.

Wondering how voice AI automation can improve your business results? Speak to one of our specialists today.
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16
Mar
Customer Stories  ·  Voice AI Technology
Link Net doubles its customer outreach with WIZ Talkbots

 

Link Net has been providing Indonesians with internet connectivity and home entertainment for over 20 years under the First Media, i-solution, and Link Net brands. It currently serves 2.8 million homes across 23 cities in Indonesia. Keeping track of all those accounts – especially when they fall past due – is a whole operation in itself.

“Previously, we used SMS for billing, which then was supplemented with outbound calls,” begins Pak Ikhsan Kurniawan, Head of Printing and Collection Department at Link Net. “We gradually moved to email and now, we also use WhatsApp. We also tried smart IVR but it turned out not to be suitable for overdue payments. So we stopped using IVR because it did not bring results.”

Link Net also struggled with capacity planning for its outbound calls for collections. When the telephone collections team is experiencing a manpower shortage, the company would temporarily reassign people from other departments to help manage the load. This disrupted day-to-day work and workload management. Link Net realized it needed a more effective way to follow-up with overdue accounts, and started exploring options.

Going beyond one-way conversations

“We liked WIZ’s solution because it was a two-way interaction, not like IVR which is very limited,” shares Pak Ikhsan. “It also helped us with workload balancing. If someone from telecollections takes maternity leave, we can immediately add more bots to fill the gap.” 

The solution brought tangible results. “When we tried the WIZ solution, our results improved, especially in the connection rate,” shares Pak Herri Dwi Prasetyo, MIS Leader of Collection & Recovery Department at Link Net. “The connection rate for human agents was 25 percent but with the Talkbot, it increased to almost 50 percent.” The use of Talkbots also freed up human agents from many of the easy, repetitive tasks. It also reduced the call load for human agents by half. “This gave our agents more time to focus on retaining customers and handling more complex complaints. The use of the bot made the role of human agents more strategic,” Pak Herri adds. 

“Talkbots are the best collection strategy we have implemented so far,” confirms Pak Ikhsan.

"We stopped using IVR because it did not bring results. Talkbots are the best collection strategy we have implemented so far."

– Pak Ikhsan Kurniawan, Head of Printing and Collection Department at Link Net

An exceptional user experience

When talking about their experience with WIZ, Pak Herri has good things to say. “The application itself is very user-friendly and has a good validation system,” he begins. “For example, if someone tries to upload the same number twice, the system will immediately eliminate one of them.”

Working with the WIZ team has also been positive. “All the WIZ team members are so supportive and helpful,” Pak Herri continues. “Whatever we need, the escalation process is so fast. As an end-user, it is very helpful to know that everything is processed quickly and all team members are contactable.”

For Link Net’s customers, the change in strategy was barely noticeable. “99% of customers do not realize that they are contacted by a robot,” says Pak Ikhsan. “Out of 20,000 contacted, only 10 complained about being called by a bot. When that happens, we exclude the specific customers from the next Talkbot call database.”

"All the WIZ team members are so supportive and helpful. Whatever we need, the escalation process is so fast. As an end-user, it is very helpful to know that everything is processed quickly and all team members are contactable."

– Pak Herri Dwi Prasetyo, MIS Leader of Collection & Recovery Department at Link Net

A new way to retain old customers

With the success of the new collection strategy, Link Net was keen to try the Talkbot in other scenarios. The company decided to try automating customer retention or recontracting. Together with the WIZ team, Link Net created a new script for contacting customers who were recently lost, like those who have not paid for their subscriptions in three months. “The contact rate for this category of customers is lower,” explains Pak Ikhsan. “We hope that with the new retention script, we can win back customers by offering promotions.” 

It’s still early days in the customer retention campaign and results are still to be seen. The team is currently refining the script based on feedback, in order to get the right message across.

Pushing the limits of automation and analytics

Link Net wants to set more stringent standards for their debt collection processes in the future. “We are heading towards digitization, everything must be automated,” begins Pak Ikhsan. “If someone defaults or misses a payment, they should be called automatically. Everything should already be automated, including redials. Then the results can be updated in real-time on the Link Net system.”

For Pak Herri, data is the secret ingredient to ongoing and future success. “We expect in the future we can download the transcript of the conversation directly from the system,” he says. “With this feature, we can use all information to gain feedback and complaints from customers. So when a human agent conducts a follow-up call to a certain customer, they will immediately know what the customer complained about. We will have the customer history and can give a seamless experience.” 

The collections team was so satisfied with the WIZ Talkbot that it recommended the solution to Link Net’s sales team, for customer onboarding. “We never contacted these type of customers before,” confesses Pak Ikhsan. “This is something we will explore and discuss further with the WIZ Team.”

Wondering how voice AI automation can improve your business results? Speak to one of our specialists today.
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14
Dec
Customer Stories  ·  Voice AI Technology
JAGADIRI achieves 5.3x higher cost efficiency with WIZ Talkbots
illustrate better return-on-investment

JAGADIRI works to protect the aspirations of its many Indonesian customers under the umbrella of PT Central Asia Financial (CAF). JAGADIRI provides life insurance, accident, and health insurance through digital marketing, telemarketing, and direct marketing channels.

“The thing with insurance is that it’s not like banking,” began Ibu Fitriah Betan, Head of Customer Experience at JAGADIRI. “As an insurance provider, JAGADIRI needs to make premium reminder calls to existing customers and continue providing service even up to 90 days past due.” Because the actual need for insurance happens in urgent situations, and the company does all it can to keep customers protected. On their part, customers need to pay their premiums promptly, in order to ensure that their policy remains active and can cater to unexpected incidents.

Creating a consistent customer experience with conversational voice AI

The need to ensure continuous coverage is why JAGADIRI puts a lot of effort into premium payment reminders. But the challenge is timing. Contacting customers for premium reminders can be tricky, as customers may be busy with their activities during the day. Another factor lies in the personal nature of the interaction – the mood of the agent or the way he or she communicates varies from one call to another. JAGADIRI wanted a more consistent way of engaging with its customer base, and ensure that these customers remain with the brand. 

In June 2022, JAGADIRI decided to transition its premium reminder calls to the WIZ.AI Talkbot. The implementation was done in phases; by September 2022, all premium reminder calls were automated. The results spoke for themselves. “Before Talkbot, we get less than 10 percent of connected calls for premium reminders. Now we get, on average, around 50 percent,” explains Ibu Fitriah. Talkbots are also 5.3x more cost-efficient than using human agents; the cost ratio for Talkbots is 6 percent, compared to 32 percent for agents. 

Using WIZ.AI’s solutions brought very tangible results in our premium reminder deployment. Before Talkbot, our agents get less than 10 percent of connected calls. Now we get, on average, around 50 percent.

– Ibu Fitriah Betan, Head of Customer Experience at JAGADIRI Tweet

An evolving partnership based on two-way communication

Beyond the results, JAGADIRI loves that WIZ.AI regularly checks on how the Talkbot is working, and provides recommendations on how to optimize the AI solution. From sales to project management to customer success and even customer experience, the WIZ.AI team was ready to help JAGADIRI make the most of its Talkbot. “WIZ.AI CX Designers help us refine our strategy by improving the scripts based on the data we get,” shares Ibu Fitriah. “There’s excellent two-way communication between us and the WIZ team. WIZ continually suggests how to update the Talkbots and implementing the suggestions improves our results.”

With the success of automated premium reminders, JAGADIRI is now looking to deploy the WIZ.AI Talkbot for more use cases. As of this writing, the team is developing debt collection scripts for due and overdue accounts. JAGADIRI is also planning to deploy Talkbots for Welcome Calls to new customers. “Talkbot has made contacting our customers much easier for the CX team,” concludes Ibu Fitriah.

The best thing about our experience is that WIZ.AI CX Designers are always helping us refine our strategy. There’s excellent two-way communication between us and the WIZ team. WIZ continually suggests how to improve the performance of the Talkbots and implementing the suggestions improves our results.

– Ibu Fitriah Betan, Head of Customer Experience at JAGADIRI Tweet
To find out how you can leverage voice AI for your customer engagements, speak to one of our specialists today.
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