Singtel is Asia’s leading communications technology group, providing a portfolio of services from next-generation communication, 5G, and technology services to infotainment to both consumers and businesses. The Group has a presence in Asia, Australia, and Africa and reaches over 740 million mobile customers in 21 countries. Its infrastructure and technology services for businesses span 21 countries, with more than 428 direct points of presence in 362 cities.

People are less loyal to their telecom provider than ever before. Singtel, one of the largest telecommunications companies in Singapore, recognized that providing a positive customer experience is directly tied to customer retention. With expectations of the company’s more than 640 million customers rising quickly for effortless, immediate, and convenient support, Singtel partnered with Netomi to scale high-quality customer care with AI.

By bringing AI into its workforce, Singtel has significantly decreased email ticket resolution time, alleviated time-intensive and mundane work from human agents, and lowered operating costs.

Singtel uses Netomi’s powerful AI platform to resolve a broad range of customer questions in seconds, such as how to apply for a new line, how to renew a contract, change a delivery time, or activate a new roaming plan. Email has always been one of the highest-volume channels for the telecom provider and historically had an average resolution time of over 24 hours.

Recognizing that many of the tickets spanned highly-repeatable scenarios, the company launched its virtual agent via email. By integrating into its existing agent desk platform Focal Scope, the company could seamlessly transfer customers to human agents when needed.

When a customer wanted to activate a new plan on their account, it used to take agents over 10 minutes as it required accessing multiple systems and back-and-forth interaction to confirm various details. The AI agent is now able to completely automate these requests in seconds, which is made possible by integrations with back-end systems and complex training and logic.

To effectively handle customer requests, there are a lot of nuances among audience segments, customer needs, and account requests. We trained Singtel’s AI agent to route very specific cases and customers to human agents immediately. These complex routing rules are based on a myriad of factors and real-time data pulled from the CRM and 15 other back-end systems. This ensures that the customer experience is never compromised and is also hyper-personalized, first contact resolution is high, and AI is leveraged only when it will provide the optimal experience.