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Smart chatbot development from a single source with adesso

Sophie, the chatbot of the energy provider eprimo, is a hit with customers. Its growing popularity is the product of cutting-edge chatbot technology. The solution behind the technology is delivered by the IT service provider adesso, which is supporting eprimo in providing the digital online service.

Customer service chatbots are booming. The coronavirus crisis, which has been accompanied by lockdowns and store closures, has shown how important online services are for customer support. Increasingly, customers are looking online for ways to get answers and find help without being bound by regular business hours. Fast and easy 24/7 service is of the essence. The green electricity and gas provider eprimo launched its Sophie chatbot before the pandemic, relying on solutions and expertise from adesso. Sophie answers questions from eprimo customers and has already conducted over a million chat sessions. The results have been outstanding, with Sophie able to independently handle nine out of ten enquiries to the satisfaction of the company’s customers.

Chatbot support for a service package from a single source

Chatbots such as Sophie can relieve the burden on call centres and help to reduce costs. However, chatbots must also be able to efficiently and dependably handle the more complex questions for companies to achieve truly high levels of customer satisfaction with this new technology. This is where factors such as response quality, stability and scalability come into play, all of which require the latest expert knowledge. In addition to outstanding cognitive abilities thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning methods in dealing with customers, chatbots also need to be connected directly to back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The integration of further customer channels – such as telephone, messaging services like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, mobile apps and text messaging – is also a must for any modern ominchannel strategy.

Enabling customers to enhance their own chatbots

adesso supports companies such as eprimo during chatbot development with a package of services that are necessary to connect chatbots with a business’s information systems. Training and the further enhancement of the assistant are a part of that package. As a result, clients receive support from a single source, without having to oversee and coordinate a variety of different service providers.

adesso enables the specialists at eprimo to train the chatbot as a learning system and successively make it more intelligent. That allows Sophie to subsequently handle ever more complex queries while triggering downstream data processing in the company’s ERP systems.

Solutions for chatbot projects: Workbench and Runtime

On average, Sophie responds to roughly 70,000 enquiries a month, and that figure is rising. adesso’s Hans-Peter Kuessner oversees the project on behalf of eprimo. “Customer satisfaction depends to a decisive extent on the number and scope of benefits that the chatbot offers users,” he says. “That is why the success of the chatbot’s integration into the company’s processes is so important and sets our solution apart from other providers who are unable to deliver on this promise.”

The Chatbot Workbench and Chatbot Runtime solutions play a pivotal role in adesso’s chatbot technology package. The adesso Chatbot Workbench enables experts in the field to train the chatbot themselves, provide it with knowledge and manage the connection to back-end processes on their own. The adesso Chatbot Runtime links customer channels with multiple chatbots that work with each other by way of a concierge function and with back-end ERP systems. Moreover, Chatbot Runtime makes it possible to forward chat records to human contacts in case a particular chatbot does not know how to respond. That way, no question and no query remain unanswered.


Correspondence with the chatbot Sophie from eprimo (Copyright: eprimo)

This year, the eprimo solution even won over the experts, helping Sophie to win the Deutscher Exzellenz-Preis in the category “Customer Service” awarded by the market research firm Deutsche Institut für Service-Qualität (DISQ).

Those interested in learning more can watch a video of adesso’s webinar on training and maintaining intelligent chatbots free of charge. Entitled “Intelligente Chatbots: Aufzucht und Hege”, the recording is available at: http://ow.ly/Smga50A1LFO


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