Swisscard: Voice assistant understands dialect for the first time
Swisscard is the first company in the industry to use an automatic speech recognition solution at the customer interface that also understands Swiss German. The innovative technology was developed by the Swiss startup Spitch.
The newly implemented system represents a milestone for Swisscard and sets the course for the future in the Customer Care Center. The innovative technology ensures reduced call duration and significantly improves the chance of a customer's request being dealt with at the very first contact. The result is a greatly improved customer experience. The Swisscard-specific AI logic was developed in collaboration with the startup Spitch and implemented at Swisscard. It is the first professional speech recognition solution that understands Swiss German. Swisscard was recently awarded the "Golden Headset Award 2018" in the Innovation category for this.
The system, which is based on Swisscard-specific AI logic, answers the customer call after the first ringtone and asks the reason for the call. The speech recognition solution understands the spoken text and processes it semantically. The voiced customer concern is transcribed into High German in real time, interpreted, prioritized and assigned to the best qualified customer service employee available for the specific concern.
The customer receives the transcript together with the reason for the call as a pop-up on his screen. This means that the customer's concerns are already known to him or her before the actual call begins. The transcripts serve customer service employees as an optimal introduction to an effective and professional conversation. As a result, call times are noticeably shortened and customers can be offered solutions to their problems much more quickly.
The transcripts are also a valuable input for big data analytics applications. In the medium term, the solution also has the potential to handle simple customer issues such as card blocking fully automatically. With this award-winning speech recognition solution, Swisscard is able to further expand its customer service in terms of quality.
Gregorio Uglioni, Head of Transformation Operation Services at Swisscard, says: "Digitalization represents a fundamental change in the way we work at Swisscard. It opens up new possibilities to greatly improve the customer experience and enables new ways of working. The implementation of the speech recognition solution by Spitch based on Swisscard-specific AI logic has led to an exchange of know-how and has left a lasting mark on Swisscard as a company. The experience we have gained shows us that, with strong business partners, we are ideally prepared for changes in the future. Our customers are at the center of this and benefit directly from this innovative spirit."
Jürg Schleier, Country Manager DACH at Spitch, comments on the realized project as follows: "The Swisscard project realized on the basis of our solution is further striking proof that the future belongs to mature AI-based voice solutions such as those offered by Spitch. Companies are not only increasingly recognizing that these scalable solutions enable substantial efficiency gains and have significant cost reduction potential. There is also a growing recognition that customers value the speed, simplicity, and rapid problem resolution that such systems offer. We are very proud that Swisscard has been awarded the Golden Headset Award 2018 for this outstanding solution."
