Traditional telephone customer service is often regarded as a cost department, and even after the emergence of AI, it is often the first service to be replaced. However, Honghua International has used AI to flip the industry and successfully transform customers from cost units into profit centers.
Honghua International is a company responsible for recruiting, training and managing customer service teams. In the past, it relied on per-person pricing, that is, charging based on the number of people, and its gross profit was usually less than 10%. After introducing an AI intelligent customer service system, it not only reduced costs, but also improved service quality.
Honghua is a 100%-owned customer service subsidiary of Chunghwa Telecom. It was originally responsible for Chunghwa Telecom's business. It is now the largest customer service contractor in Taiwan. Although the customer service business will only account for 11.2% of revenue in 2023, its gross profit will reach 35.2%.
From "pay per head" to "pay per piece", gross profit increased from 10% to 35%
"We don't want to continue to follow the old path of per-person pricing, but hope to use AI to change the service model." Zeng Shizhong, associate manager of the new customer service department, believes that with the rise of AI technology and automation tools, the customer service industry is shifting from "manpower-intensive" to "technology-based" drive".
In the past, the "capitation pricing" model required companies to pay a fixed monthly fee, which resulted in resources being idle during off-season and being unable to cope with the surge in calls during peak seasons, affecting customer experience. In addition, this pricing method is linked to the number of manpower, the service quality has nothing to do with the charges, and the industry will not invest in improving the skills of employees. In the long run, this may lead to outsourcers being out of touch with the market and weakening their competitiveness.
Therefore, Honghua International chose to negotiate with customers on "payment by piece", conduct specific evaluations based on business details, and redesign the pricing standards. For example, if the business content includes 300 incoming calls, 50 customer problem records, and handling a small number of major customer complaints every day, Honghua will accurately calculate the investment in each job and set the price according to specific needs.
In addition, because AI intelligent customer service will record and analyze customer service conditions and detect common customer service problems, if companies can use this to think about the problems that are often complained by customers and improve the system, the number of calls will not exceed the quota, and the problem can be solved fundamentally, so that Customer management is better. In other words, introducing AI can save business owners money and improve internal problems.
Spend 100,000 yuan to develop AI modules, reducing costs by 50% to 60%
The bargaining chip for negotiating "payment by piece" is due to the low-cost AI module developed by Honghua in 2023.
At that time, in order to assist Honghua in analyzing customer service call recordings, the technical team developed an AI voice quality inspection function (analyzing customer service and customer calls through text, inspection keywords, sentiment analysis, compliance testing, etc., to help companies improve customer service quality and efficiency).
In the past, supervisors had to listen to recordings one by one to check the service quality of customer service staff, but now, AI can use emotion recognition to capture details such as changes in tone and vocabulary usage of customer service and customers, understand customer needs through intent analysis, and finally generate reports for supervisors to make. Take improvement actions.
Honghua successfully developed this technology with only 100,000 yuan, which not only saves labor costs, but also promotes profit growth. Later, Honghua successively developed other customer service functions, such as check-in assistance (a system that solves problems immediately and provides technical support), intelligent response (uses AI to automatically handle common customer problems and reduces manual intervention), and document review (review of information submitted by customers) Conduct reviews to confirm compliance and completeness), etc., reducing costs by 50% to 60%.
How does AI empower customer service? From "solving problems" to "exploring business opportunities"
"Piece-based payment is a business strategy, and AI transformation is only one of the action plans." Zeng Shizhong explained that the traditional way of working in customer service has already faced the problem of labor shortage. If we continue to use capitation and reduce employee benefits, it will only make the brain drain worse. fast.
If you want to change the industry ecosystem, AI empowerment is an indispensable link. AI knowledge management and real-time assistance can provide customers with higher added value and trust. It should also help customer service staff expand their functions and do more Emotional interaction and judgment analysis of value, "Human customer service will always exist, AI is a good backup, it only replaces some links."
Zeng Shizhong said that the public's understanding of AI customer service is stuck in the imagination of standard and inaccessible real people. However, at Honghua, the order is reversed. The initial planning is human-machine collaboration. "The three most important things for customer service are: knowing People who speak, say the right things, and solve them quickly," so real people are still the protagonists, but there are operating system pages with AI collaboration to allow employees to solve customer needs faster.
Zeng Shizhong said that AI should be used as an auxiliary, not to erase the value of customer service personnel. However, traditional manufacturers who develop customer service AI are only thinking about "replacing humans." However, if there is a gap between the customer service response that customers expect, customers may feel that AI is not easy to use and even affects the brand image.
With the assistance of AI, we are not limited to handling customer problems. "Even if the customer's original purpose is to solve the problem, we can seize every business opportunity during the intelligent question and answer process of AI." For example, someone calls to complain that the shoes do not fit. , AI will carefully remind you to ask the customer whether they have a jogging habit and whether they have other health problems, and recommend appropriate sports products, such as sports socks, etc. in the process.
Zeng Shizhong explained that AI can turn passive marketing into active marketing, and customers have a high chance of accepting suggestions in this context. "Even a complaint can eventually become a win-win opportunity."
