M1 rolls out voice bot for customer hotlines

Singapore telco M1 has rolled out a voice bot for some of its customer hotlines to improve customer experience and the productivity of its contact centre agents.

Dubbed Maxine, the voice bot is built on Amazon Connect, a cloud-based contact service that touts speech recognition and natural language processing capabilities.

M1 noted that these capabilities would enable Maxine to engage in more life-like conversations with customers, by engaging them in open-ended conversations instead of menu-driven interfaces.

Since the last quarter of 2021, Maxine has been authenticating callers with a one-time pin (OTP) or sharing a customer’s position in the call queue and estimated waiting time.

M1 said its Net Promoter Score (NPS) – a common metric for assessing customer loyalty – in December 2021 had increased by 40% compared with December 2020, which it largely attributed to Maxine’s ability to capture callers’ intentions. This has improved call agent productivity by freeing them up to focus on more complex cases, it added.

As a cloud-based service, Maxine can be enhanced with new and incremental features and capabilities, with the ability to scale up and down quickly. It also enables call centre agents to work remotely without compromising the customer experience.

“Customer experience has always been a top priority for M1. Since embarking on our digital transformation journey two years ago, we have doubled down on delivering exceptional experiences for our customers. We are committed to ensuring a seamless and engaging experience for our customers on all platforms, including our hotlines,” said Stamford Low, director of customer experience and retail at M1.

“With technology as our enabler, M1 will continue to train Maxine to improve its capabilities and add more value to our customers, through the development of a self-help service,” he added.

Dean Samuels, chief technologist at Amazon Web Services in ASEAN, noted that with Amazon Connect, M1 can provide “superior customer service at a lower cost with an easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact centre”.

“Embedded artificial intelligence and machine learning with Amazon Connect makes it easy to automate interactions, understand customer sentiment, authenticate callers, and enable capabilities like interactive voice response and chatbots,” he added.

M1 currently operates three hotlines on the Amazon Connect platform, which will be progressively rolled out to other hotlines. It is also supporting other Keppel Group companies that are adopting Maxine, starting with Keppel Electric.