Broadband ISP and mobile operator Vodafone UK has announced that they’ll invest around £120m (Euros 140m) this year to deploy and upgrade their existing AI chatbot system with SuperTOBi, which will support customers via Generative AI (GenAI) technologies from Microsoft Azure OpenAI.
Vodafone already has an existing chatbot system called TOBi, which is being used in 13 countries across Europe and Africa. But the new SuperTOBi system can “understand and respond faster to complex customer enquiries better than traditional chatbots“. SuperTOBI has already been introduced in Italy and Portugal and will start serving customers in Germany and Turkey from this month, with other markets to follow “later this year“.
SuperTOBi can also interpret entire sentences and phrases, overcoming the limitations of existing chatbot technologies (and some humans ), which typically can answer only simple questions based on a few keywords. “It also engages in more natural conversation with customers for a more personalised experience, rather than one- or two-word answers, and it will automatically transfer a question it can’t answer to a person that can,” said the announcement.
Vodafone claims that the use of SuperTOBi in Portugal is already being used for booking appointments. As a result, the first-time resolution rate has increased from 15% to 60% and Vodafone’s online net promoter scores (where respondents are asked to rate their experience) improved by 14 points to 64 points (above 50 points is considered a strong result), although booking appointments isn’t exactly the hardest of tasks.
However, consumer sentiment toward the use of AI chatbots tends to be quite mixed, with many viewing it as being more of a negative and just a way of reducing the number of actual humans that are available to provide support over the longer term. On the other hand, if systems like this do end up making it quicker and easier for customers to get their issues resolved, then that will be a positive change.
Speaking of staff, Vodafone’s own customer care employees will shortly be “complemented” by an enhanced bot assistant of their own, called SuperAgent, which is based on the same sort of technologies as SuperTOBi (i.e. Microsoft Azure OpenAI’s Agent Copilot solution). This should help human agents to “quickly search and locate answers to complex queries or multiple questions” (remember when humans could do that by themselves?).
In Ireland, SuperAgent is assisting agents by sending a summary of its online customer conversation to the agent, so customers don’t need to repeat themselves. So, it’s probably not going to try and take over the world just yet, while simultaneously settling your billing woes and randomly hunting for people with the name John Conner.