The challenge
As customers continue to adopt and use more digital channels to interact with brands, TELUS wanted an agile, reliable and scalable digital solution that could integrate multiple services in distributed systems to keep pace with their customers' needs over their preferred communication channel. As one of Canada's largest communications companies with over 15 million customer connections, TELUS was receiving large daily call volumes that consisted of simple requests which took up valuable frontline time to address and resolve.
To improve efficiency and enable better CX, TELUS wanted to increase its customer self-service capabilities by adding an intelligent platform to leverage cognitive, AI-enhanced chatbots in order to address these simple inbound interactions. The objective was to lower call wait times, streamline the customer experience and increase team member satisfaction.
Enter the intelligent TELUS International Assistant
Given the complexity of the client's needs, we knew we needed to develop and deliver a fully customized solution to meet their requirements. Leveraging a number of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services and using the latest AI technology, we built an intelligent and intuitive chatbot platform to enable powerful customer self-service resolution capabilities and reliable and efficient robotic assistance to support TELUS' frontline team members.
Notably, our intelligent TELUS International Assistant is specifically engineered to not only meet the immediate needs of the client, but also the needs of future transformation goals. The platform features a central repository of content and enriched media, which can be used across multiple bots and channels like web chat, mobile, SMS, social media, video collaboration and email. Additionally, our intelligent assistant is supported and optimized via a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine, fueling an impressive 95% average recognition rate across all chatbots.
Faster and more meaningful customer connections
An accelerator in digital transformation, our intelligent assistant platform can enable improved CX, cross-channel user engagement and greater navigation of complex services and large volumes of resource materials.
Our intelligent TELUS International Assistant enables and features:
- Advanced analytics
- Configurable dashboard
- Native and external chat handoffs
- Proactive chats
- Campaign management
All features, combined with world-class security, are present not only at the platform level but also at the end-user level, allowing for encryption, redaction and masking, and off-the-record data management to meet the wide range of legal and compliance requirements.
The TELUS Digital difference
Through cutting-edge technologies like our innovative chatbot platform designed for delightful, human-like conversations, TELUS was able to effectively streamline and simplify the storage of exceptionally large data volumes and achieved a 48% average containment rate. Moreover, spikes in traffic were handled without having to overprovision resources, thereby maximizing functionality while minimizing costs associated with underutilized capacity.
"The application was designed, built and deployed in record time.
Highly technical digital transformation projects, like this one, require
a deep understanding and broad expertise to plan and precisely
execute. The TELUS Digital team pulled this off impeccably
and continues to support us in this crucial pursuit."Powered by Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud was the platform of choice combining the performance of our intelligent assistant platform with Google Cloud's low latency networks to appropriately address the client's needs while facilitating their journey into the cloud. The overall solution leveraged our team's proven competency in the GCP domain to design and deliver a state-of-the art cloud architecture that can cater to high volumes of rush hour traffic for the chatbot platform with ease.
GCP services that were utilized as part of the delivered solution included:
- Cloud VPC: To enable networking over GCP
- Cloud Nat: For networking and security
- Cloud Load Balancer (TCP and HTTP): For traffic load balancing and security
- GCP Cloud Build: CICD pipeline for multiple applications
- GCP Container Registry: The docker image registry
- Google GKE: Kubernetes (automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized apps), customized dashboard, auto logging configuration, default monitoring and alert mechanism, both horizontal and vertical scaling
- GCP Storage: Object storage for files
- GCP VM: For compute VM
- Cloud SQL: Postgres databases
- MemoryStore: Redis caching
- Cloud DNS: Private DNS within cloud
- GCP Logging: Collecting application logs and GCP services
- GCP Stackdriver: Monitoring and alerting
- GCP Cloud Armor: Facilitating security needs
- GCP PubSub: Messaging and queue
- WAF: GCP Marketplace (Fortigate)
- IAM: Identity and access control to GCP
