After seeing an increase in the number of tenants’ calls and interactions over the past few years, ForHousing wanted to find a way to make its existing call-centre staff more productive while offering its tenants a wider choice of channels at the same time as reducing its costs.
ForHousing engaged with Amillan who implemented Converse360’s Service Automation Platform, comprising virtual assistants (WebBot), speech assistants (SpeechBot) and digital humans/avatars, all integrated via an orchestration portal. ForHousing then used its internal development team to customise the platform based around Converse360’s conversational AI system.
The Amillan/Converse360 solution has been integrated with the housing provider’s existing Enghouse Interactive call-centre software so that any calls unable to be answered by the virtual assistant are automatically transferred to a human agent, complete with full conversational transcripts.
Within three months of ForHousing’s deployment of the combined Amillan and Converse360 solution, there has been a 26 per cent increase in web traffic, with the virtual assistant answering over 40 per cent of the 3,500 web sessions so far, thereby reducing the number of contact-centre sessions by the same amount.
Based on the average session time before the deployment, the introduction of the virtual assistant has reduced the time ForHousing’s agents are spending on webchats by an average of 390 hours per month, representing a workload saving of around three FTEs per month.
