Turning customer support duties into revenue growth with GenAI agents

In today’s telco market, customer experience is king

In an increasingly competitive market – with ever-growing pressure to optimize networks, streamline billing, and drive growth – customer experience is now a crucial differentiator for CSPs. Yet delivering consistently high-quality support, available on demand, remains a major challenge. Expectations are quickly rising among customers for greater personalization, contextual awareness, multi-language support and 24/7 availability – but turnover in CSPs’ contact centers is high, with the most capable staff often leaving after a short time to pursue opportunities in sales careers.

At present between 60% and 70% of inbound calls to CSPs, on average, are related to customer support – yet average tenure for a care agent in contact centers is only a little over year. The ability to convert a well-managed support call into a sales opportunity is a vital skill, with a typical maximum conversion rate of between 10% and 20% - depending on the agent’s talent and experience, the customer data available to them, and integration of advanced analytics. But CSPs are caught in a cycle in which the people with such talents are not remaining in post for long enough to ensure reliably high standards in customer care or maximum sales potential from incoming support queries.

The Telco GenAI Agent Moonshot Catalyst addresses several critical needs in this area, which were identified through extensive research and collaboration with CSPs across customer care, sales and marketing domains. The answer lies in a shift towards AI-driven customer service through virtual assistants based on Generative AI (GenAI). Customers themselves are already acutely aware of the rapid advances in AI and automation, and are coming to expect proactive care measures, rather than needing to get in touch after the event to address issues as they arise. By helping to meet this need while delivering reliably high-quality support for necessary enquiries, CSPs can maximize their ability to convert support duties to revenue growth through targeted sales efforts, while also enhancing customer loyalty.

How GenAI agents can help

With this Catalyst’s innovative ‘digital humans’ solution based in dynamic virtual environments, CSPs can engage their customers 24/7 via personalized, real-time interactions. By drawing on deep customer insights and real-time data analysis, the solution can promote the best available offers while solving the cause of enquiries, tailored to each customer’s needs, to increase sales and drive revenue growth through conversational selling. The solution uses an avatar based on large language models that offer flexible, round-the-clock multi-language support, reducing the need for human intervention and thereby lowering operational costs.

A combination of elements from Amdocs’ amAIz Agents, NVIDIA’s RIVA, and AWS’ GenAI services ensures optimal model selection and optimization, fine tuning of foundation models, and refining of sales processes through GenAI. This allows each recommendation to be made relevant and valuable to the customer, increasing both the speed and likelihood of conversion as compared even to the most experienced and adept human support agent. NVIDIA's market-leading AI platform enables real-time speech-to-speech synthesis and highly immersive visualizations, setting a new standard for customer experience.

To address common customer pain points ahead of time, the solution also includes proactive care notifications and clear explanations for bill inquiries. By automatically notifying customers about potential issues or bill spikes before they contact support centers, customer anxiety is reduced, satisfaction is improved and resources freed up for other concerns. Clear explanations for unexpected charges can be generated to help customers understand their bills and reduce the volume of billing-related enquiries.

Security and scalability are of paramount importance in any such solution, however, to maintain customer trust and ensure long-term success and return on investment. The Telco GenAI Agent therefore draws on AWS' cloud infrastructure for scalability and flexibility, TM Forum's Open APIs to ensure seamless integration with existing systems and third-party applications, and telco-grade security measures to protect data and ensure compliance with industry standards.

Early results and wider value of GenAI agents in CSP support centers

This project offers CSPs an opportunity to transform their customer experience and simultaneously unlock new revenue streams and achieve competitive advantage—while also maintaining the highest standards of security, scalability, and trust. The efficiency gains achieved have been pronounced – by reducing the costs associated with data preprocessing by up to 60%, and of inferencing by up to 40%. Meanwhile, average handling time was brought down by around 63%, and first call resolution rates improved by around 50%.

These proof-points amply demonstrate the potential at hand to both enhance customer satisfaction and optimize operational efficiency. Instead of employing 1,000 human agents, a support center could operate with just 20 to 50 highly efficient agents, freed from routine tasks and able to focus on more skilled, value-adding duties.

Moreover, by setting a new standard for customer service, deployment of the Telco GenAI Agent will encourage other CSPs to adopt similar AI-based solutions, resulting in wider improvements to customer experience and operational efficiency. The success evidenced here should also drive innovation in other areas of the telecoms industry, such as network optimization and personalized marketing.