Latin American telecom slashes support costs and boosts sales in WhatsApp

In order to earn customer loyalty and expand its market share, the company is focused on providing a five-star customer experience to both pre- and post-paid customers — and enabling customer acquisition and selling in the popular social messaging app, WhatsApp. 

The company wanted to see if it could do these things without hiring additional customer service agents or significantly increasing its customer service and marketing budgets.

Conversational AI frees up live agents to handle white glove cases

The company implemented Conversational AI from Sprinklr Service. Previously, its agents worked with multiple backend solutions to resolve customer queries on digital channels. Live agents did the bulk of the work manually, cross-referencing with other systems while asking each customer the same basic questions, including name, phone number, and reason for contacting the company. Queues to speak with agents had long wait times, and agent fatigue was high.

To launch Conversational AI, the company worked closely with Sprinklr to develop more than 150 conversation flows and integrate with more than 25 APIs and several backend systems. Now, bots handle more than 60% of customer queries that come in through Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Live Chat. 

“With these automated flows and integrations, our customers can get most of their needs met without ever having to talk to a live agent,” explains the digital media coordinator. Chat bots now help customers add new services, check their balances, or view their latest invoices. If the bot can’t resolve the case, the customer is transferred to a live agent, who has the case context and customer information available to them in their dashboard from their interaction with the Sprinklr chat bot.

“This has enabled us to focus on high-priority customers,” explains the digital media coordinator. “Sprinklr Service has freed up our agents to provide proactive, white glove service to our higher-paying customers.”

Journey Facilitator enables selling in WhatsApp

The company has also implemented Journey Facilitator in WhatsApp, a popular instant messaging app in Latin America. It wanted to create a seamless, personalized customer experience in that channel with the goal of acquiring customers and upselling or converting pre-paid customers to post-paid. 

“While we already had tools to incentivize customers for upsells and migrations, the open rate on our traditional channels was at around 10 percent for SMS and two percent for email,” explains the digital media coordinator. “We wanted to create new selling opportunities and even more successful campaigns.” 

The digital media coordinator used Journey Facilitator to launch proactive messaging campaigns that encourage prospective customers to migrate from other carriers — and get pre-paid customers to sign contracts. Journey Facilitator uses customer data and purchase history to create and deliver personalized offers — which increases customer engagement and the likelihood of successful upsells. 

The company made sure its Sprinklr chat bot was fully integrated into the Journey Facilitator solution. Today, the bot converses with customers and sends relevant offers based on detected intent. When a customer accepts an offer, it automatically asks questions in order to gather the information required to complete the sale or migration process. 

This represents a 38% increase in cases resolved in digital channels annually. The digital media coordinator estimates the company would need to double its customer service workforce to handle the same number of cases without bots. Even better, the company’s net promoter score for cases handled exclusively by bot went up by 13 points. 

“The Conversational AI solution has made us super efficient,” says the digital media coordinator. “It’s enabled us to focus on post-paid consumers, which is a more significant source of revenue for us. We’ve made our agents and our customers happier — and we’ve done this without increasing our customer service workforce.”

The company has also had incredible success using Journey Facilitator and Conversational AI to sell in WhatsApp. Its campaigns have an impressively-high open rate in the channel at around 80%. This high read rate led to 110,000 sales completed in the channel in the first six months since implementation. Today, 20% of the company’s sales originate in digital channels, thanks, in large part, to the success it’s had selling in WhatsApp.

In fact, they’ve been so successful that the company is looking to replicate the WhatsApp model across Latin American countries where it does business. 

“We are proud of the success we’ve had developing WhatsApp as a sales channel and are excited to help replicate our success throughout the region,” says the digital media coordinator.