logo_header
  • Topics
  • Research & Analysis
  • Features & Opinion
  • Webinars & Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Event videos

DTWS: Vodafone shares how TOBi is growing up

Paul Jacobs, Global Head of Customer Operations Transformation at Vodafone shared what's next for Vodafone's artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, TOBi, which is now present in 15 countries during Digital Transformation World Series 2021.

13 Oct 2021
DTWS: Vodafone shares how TOBi is growing up

DTWS: Vodafone shares how TOBi is growing up

Every superhero has an origin story. The same could be said for TOBi, Vodafone’s artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that was launched more than three years ago and is now present in 15 countries across the operator’s footprint. Paul Jacobs, Global Head of Customer Operations Transformation at Vodafone, is responsible for deploying TOBi across Vodafone. He shared how TOBi began, how it’s going and what are the next steps during Digital Transformation World Series 2021.

The idea for TOBi started in 2016 as part of a customer service strategy review. The operator needed a new way to help customers self-serve that would improve the overall service experience and drive efficiencies.

At the time, most companies were offshoring contact centers to reduce costs, explained Jacobs. “We wanted to look at whether AI could provide an alternative to that approach,” he said.

The operator wanted to see if AI could be used to automate simple queries and provide customer assistance 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This would deliver a better experience for customers and free up agents to address more complex “value-add” calls, he said.

To kickstart the project, the operator evaluated about a dozen vendors' technology visions and uses cases. After that, Vodafone narrowed the field to a few solutions for pilots in several markets and set up an acceleration unit within the company.

The pace and scale of the project was helped by having early buy-in from company leadership. The role of AI and bots “aligned with some of the broader digital direction where the business wanted to go”, said Jacobs. “TOBi in isolation could have potentially been a small niche part of customer operations that never scaled, but as part of a broader digital transformation there was a really good strategic fit.”

An important decision that helped to accelerate and scale the rollout after the first 12 months was to create what Vodafone calls the “Group TOBi Platform,” which brought together all the different vendors onto a scalable, flexible, group technology-led AI platform. “That allowed us to create more consistency and start to go faster”, said Jacobs.

TOBi today

TOBi uses AI to understand and respond to customer questions through chat and voice-based channels and is understood to be one of the largest applications of AI.

Jacobs said that customers and agents initially viewed TOBi negatively, but their perceptions rapidly changed once they started using it. Some customers were at first nervous about using a bot or felt that they were not important because they had been handed off to a robot. Jacobs said customers soon started to appreciate being able to check balances and quickly resolve simple questions and that customer feedback was positive.

For Vodafone’s customer service agents, TOBi and the use of AI were viewed as threats. To alleviate their concerns, Vodafone worked with agents and involved them in the development of the AI chatbot. In some markets, TOBi has started to help agents on calls by gathering data from backend systems, recommending next steps or processing some of the after-call tasks.

“[Agents] see TOBi as not just somebody who helps the customer, but actually helps the to do a better job and releases some of their time,” said Jacobs.

TOBi tomorrow

Jacobs said that TOBi is at the heart of Vodafone’s digital service strategy. The operator eventually wants all inbound customer contact to go through TOBi whether it is a call, chat or via the My Vodafone app.

Along the way, the operator is also adapting TOBi to be “agent-facing” as well as “customer-facing” and making the bot more trusted so that it can deliver sales to customers in addition to answering service queries.

Vodafone is also moving to what it calls “one platform,” said Jacobs, explaining that “we’re going to take the best elements of TOBi from all our markets and make them available everywhere, so we'll be able to evolve the pace of how we take things out to market even faster at Vodafone.”

Watch the interview – How will AI enhance the future of customer experience? here.


Not registered for the Digital Transformation World Series? There’s still time. Register here to get access to all the keynotes, panel discussions and master classes. Communication service providers can register for free. The event platform closes 29 October.