How Singtel’s AI Assistant Simplified Customer Support in Southeast Asia
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One of Southeast Asia’s largest telecommunications companies, Singtel, is widely considered to be the “compatible case” for conversational AI’s ability to modify customer experience on a large scale. Singtel serves millions of customers throughout Southeast Asia, which created the need for a large-scale system capable of handling multiple inquiries per second without diminishing customer service quality. Therefore, Singtel employed a next-generation AI chatbot to automate responses to service billing, plan modification, technical support, and subscription issues.
Why Singtel Reimagined Support With AI Customer Support
The expectations of telecom customers have changed dramatically over the years. Now customers expect to get the information they need immediately without being put on hold for long periods or having to deal with complicated menu systems. Singtel identified that there was an opportunity to create a conversational experience, with Natural Language Understanding (NLU), that feels natural, is tailored to individual needs, and will be available for its customers 24/7.
Singtel took advantage of the opportunity and has created a strategic asset by treating automation within its customer service as a key component of its strategy rather than a way to save money on operations. The AI customer service agent was trained not only on telecom intent but also based on actual service interactions, regional behaviours and multilingual datasets. All of these factors are critical for working in a diverse Southeast Asian market.
How Singtel’s AI Agent Works Behind the Scenes
For Singtel, the goal of the transformation was not simply to provide a chatbot. Rather, Singtel is engineering a new operational model to provide a seamless conversational experience through the use of conversational AI.
Singtel’s AI customer service agent has several integrated technology components:
- Telcom-trained NLU models for accurate recognition of a customer’s intent
- Layers of reasoning powered by large language models (LLM) to assist in dealing with complex customer issues
- Time-sensitive integration with billing systems, service availability, and account activity
- Generated responses that adapt to the language and emotional tone of a customer
The successful integration of these components into one system allows Singtel to:
- Instantaneously address routine inquiries from customers
- Help customers diagnose issues related to their service
- Provide customers with plan suggestions based on their usage
- Manage add-on and subscription decisions for customers
- Redirect customers to a human representative when a situation requires human judgment
The above-listed integrated technologies are a real-life example of how the integration of telecom AI can work at scale and provide an efficient, customer-centric way to meet the needs of customers.
Real Impact: Faster Resolutions, Happier Customers
Since deploying its AI assistant at scale, Singtel has been able to achieve tangible improvements to customer experience across Southeast Asia. The conversational experiences have become more seamless, faster, and natural when compared to traditional IVR or menu-driven methods.
Benefits include:
- Less strain on call centre resources
- Faster resolution of tickets during peak periods
- Enhanced use of digital support channels
- Enhanced customer experience scores
- Enhanced agent productivity via AI-assisted workflows.
The implementation of this AI Customer Support (CS) model has established itself as a benchmark in the region, often highlighted at CACES Asia as the leading example of conversational AI in the Telecom industry.
How Singtel Strengthened Its Workforce With AI
Human agents were not replaced by the AI assistant; rather, they were enhanced by leveraging the AI assistant for the repetitive, high-volume work and reserving the human agent’s time and attention for the empathic care of customers, as well as for resolving more sensitive and complex cases. This approach also allowed Singtel to implement internal co-pilot applications that allowed their customer service departments to create greater responsiveness, summarise interactions quicker, and define or find information faster.
The hybrid workforce model developed by Singtel is now regarded as the standard for telecom AI transformation.
Trust, Governance & Responsible AI
For telecoms, trust is key, and for Singtel to build its AI Support, they have created comprehensive support systems based on 5 different protection measurements.
- Strict Audit Trails
- Privacy First Controls
- Human Escalation on Risky Questions
- Ongoing Monitoring of Their Models
- Bias Mitigation Strategy
The AI Support System Framework ensures that the safety, accuracy, and compliance of each conversation will remain intact. This is a major topic covered at all Leading Conversational AI Conferences.
Looking Ahead: AI-First Telecom for Southeast Asia
Over the next few years, Singtel plans to develop the following New Capabilities in its AI Support System:
- Multilingual Support
- Predictive Issue Resolution
- Proactive Recommendations for their Customers
- Expanding AI-Agent Co-Pilots
- Fully Integrated End-To-End Conversational Journeys.
Singtel is not using AI, but is shaping the future of Telecom AI transformation for the Southeast Asia region.
Conclusion
The success of Singtel demonstrates how the proper implementation of Conversational AI with well-defined goals, governance, and an emphasis on the end-user experience can provide significant benefits to Customer Experience at Scale. We can learn from Singtel’s experience as businesses across the region will soon replicate their model to drive future business objectives.
FAQ's
Singtel makes use of Conversational AI technology to create an AI-powered agent that helps customers with everything from account inquiries to troubleshooting, thus creating a more natural conversational interface between the agent and the user. The use of AI provides for an instant response to all billing and/or subscription questions, i.e. providing real-time answers.
Unlike traditional chatbots, which are simple and static, the AI customer support built by Singtel uses natural language understanding (NLU), logical learning models (LLM), and real-time integration with various back-end systems. As a result, the technology has been cited as an example of the most advanced Conversational AI capability discussed at many of the world’s leading Conversational AI conferences.
The AI agent will provide instant solutions to customer issues, reduce wait times for customers, and help create an individualised customer connection. As a result of these factors, customers will have an improved customer experience in Southeast Asia.
Yes, within the context of telecommunications transformation projects like Singtel’s, Conversational AI technology is trained using telecom-specific network, usage, and billing data in order to provide support that is very reliable.
No, the AI agent will be used to manage the lower-level operations of most customer contacts whereas the human agents will handle more emotional, complex and high-value customer issues. The two methods of providing customer support can be summed up as “balance” in delivering modern AI customer support to customers.
Singtel implements multiple measures, including strict regulatory policies, privacy control mechanisms, constant monitoring and human overrides (fallbacks), to provide a safe and compliant speaking experience to users in all countries where we operate.
Through the use of Telecom AI Transformation to achieve scale in automated processes, streamlined processes and improved customer journeys, Singtel is positioned to provide an impressive example at any conference focused on Conversational AI.
Absolutely! The AI agent can converse in several Southeast Asian languages which is critical to enabling a truly inclusive experience when using the AI Customer Support Solution.
DBS regularly attends and participates in industry conferences and Conversational AI sessions, sharing their results, experiences, and learnings with other banks and the broader community, as well as providing their playbooks for other banks to learn from.
Singtel's AI solution has demonstrated the ability to combine the elements of AI Customer Support, Telecom AI Transformation and AI Agent Workflows into one seamless solution that substantially improves the customer's conversational experience on an enterprise scale.
