Introduction
In the highly competitive telecom industry, upselling is a crucial strategy for driving revenue growth and customer loyalty. Currently telcos leverage different channels like email, outbound calls, SMS etc. & strategies to drive upsell. For large telcos, outbound calling is one of the key strategies to drive upsell as it is used to generate a high ROI and conversions.
However, in recent times the scaling Human agents for making voice calls is becoming increasingly challenging due to following reasons:
- ROIs are declining due to increasing person-power cost
- It’s difficult to scale call center due to increasing call center & infrastructure cost, and workforce attrition
For telecom companies seeking to scale efficiently while controlling costs, AI-powered voice agents offer a game-changing solution. The key advantages of AI voice agents are as follows:
- Scalability: can handle a higher volume of interactions. Businesses can scale up or scale down customer engagement quickly and cost-effectively.
- Personalization: can deliver personalized, real-time recommendations without sacrificing a seamless, human-like experience.
We delivered AI voice agents for a leading Telco in SEA with the goal of scaling up upsell while improving ROI as compared to the call centers.
Challenge
Deploying outbound AI voice agents for upselling in telecom presents several key challenges:
- Natural, Human-like Experience: Ensuring the bot delivers smooth, engaging conversations while avoiding "hallucination" (inaccurate or irrelevant responses).
- Support regional language: Ensure that the agents are multilingual and can converse with the customers in their preferred language
- Low Latency: Maintaining real-time interactions to prevent delays in communication.
- Customizable Voice: Tailoring the bot’s persona, tone, accent, and speech style to regional preferences for better engagement.
- Speech Variability: Background noise, speech nuances such as accents can make it difficult for the bot to accurately understand and respond, leading to potential misunderstandings. Language diversity and multilingual conversations are also an incremental challenge.
- Compliance: Ensuring the AI communicates valid, up-to-date, and legally compliant information, particularly with promotions or offers, to avoid misleading customers.
- Conversation Complexity: Ability to handle complex conversations that may deviate from typical interactions that you might expect from a conversation.
- Lengthy Inputs & Responses: Managing long-winded customer replies that can hinder the agent from extracting information efficiently, and conversely, handling of lengthy agent responses and how the agent reacts when the customer interrupts mid spiel.
The challenge is to create an AI voice bot that balances accuracy, engagement, speed, compliance, and customization while handling unpredictable speech patterns.
Our Solution
Our Voice Agent Framework is designed to provide seamless, natural real-time conversations. It begins with audio input, which is transcribed into text using advanced speech recognition. This text is then processed by a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate a relevant and thoughtful response. To ensure accuracy and relevance, we integrated Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), enabling the LLM to access external information as needed.
The response is then converted back into speech through a Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine, ensuring a smooth and engaging interaction. The framework is fully integrated with telephony services for call facilitation and supported by backend systems that manage call scheduling, interaction data, and system actions like placing orders or creating tickets. This solution combines advanced speech recognition, AI-driven responses, and high-quality voice synthesis to create conversations that are both natural and efficient.
Conceptual Framework for Upselling Voice Agent
Key Features
The key features which we developed to ensure the success of this project are as follows:
- Background Noise Filtering: Isolate out background noise from the communication with minimum latency to ensure clear communication and minimize misinterpretation of context
- Interruption Handling: Manages interruptions smoothly, ensuring clear turn-taking and maintaining conversation clarity.
- Conversational Flow: Structured to guide customers step-by-step, from introduction to offer confirmation and subscription validation and minimize off-topic conversations.
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): Accesses a dynamic knowledge base, ensuring contextually relevant and up-to-date responses.
- System Integration: Integrated with other systems like Customer Value Management (CVM) systems, the agent recommends tailored upselling packages to boost revenue.
- Customizable Voice & Personas: The AI voice agent can be tailored with distinct personalities—enthusiastic, persuasive, or empathetic—and customized accents, such as a natural local accent, to enhance engagement and align with brand identity.
- Responsible AI Guardrails implementation: Implements safeguards to prevent toxic or inappropriate language, ensures customer data privacy, and mitigates data leakage risks.
Results & Benefits
We were able to generate a 50% ROI improvement with the ability to provide a 4X-5X scale vs the current call centers for our customers. Apart from that, the key benefits include:
Great Conversation Quality
The voice agent ensures clear, natural communication with minimal latency, providing an experience that’s smooth and engaging for customers. This high-quality interaction helps maintain a professional and human-like feel, making it easier for customers to engage.
Faster experimentation and iterations
Businesses can run more experiments, gather insights from a larger volume of interactions, and refine upselling strategies faster, leading to continuous optimization and improved results.
Increased Conversion
By enabling companies to handle more customer interactions simultaneously, voice bots break the limitations of human agents, driving higher engagement. This greater reach leads to increased upselling opportunities and higher conversion rates, ultimately boosting revenue for telecom companies.
Actionable Customer Insights
Through conversation transcripts and sentiment analysis, AI voice bots provide valuable insights into customer behavior and responses. Businesses can better understand why customers reject upsell offers, identify common objections, and refine their sales strategies to improve future conversions.
We are OneByZero
Headquartered in Singapore with local presence in Asean nations, we are a modern data & AI consulting firm. We focus on transforming enterprises with cutting edge solutions to generate value from data. We specialize in serving the Telecommunications, Banking & Financial Services, Retail and Ecommerce industries.
We focus exclusively on AI/ML, Data & Martech.
AI & ML, including Generative AI
We help organizations define their AI/ML strategy, develop and operationalize AI/ML & generative AI models, and implement MLOps to streamline operations. We have experience doing a variety of work in classical data science and cutting edge GenAI for Telcos.
Modern Data Platforms
Our team of experts build robust data pipelines, design data warehouses and lakes with strong focus on data quality and lineage, to build C360, marts, support reporting, dashboards to help organizations uncover insights in their data using a modern data stack.
Martech & Personalization
We enable customers to modernize their digital platforms to deliver omni channel personalization use-cases. We have deep experience with marketing use-cases & personalized content generation, automated campaign grid optimization and next-best offers & actions.
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