Whether it’s reporting a credit card as lost, checking the local transport network, or getting inspiration for what to cook for dinner, Front AI is at the forefront of implementing conversational AI solutions to help people get the answers they need.
Contacting customer service can sometimes be an exasperating experience – waiting in a telephone queue, trawling through FAQs, or having to repeatedly explain an issue – people become understandably frustrated. Answering this issue in Finland is the leading conversational AI service provider and platinum partner of boost.ai, Front AI. Its service offering covers the whole conversational AI journey: from identifying potential business cases to proof-of-concept, implementing the solution and then maintaining and further developing it over time.
With a team of 30+ talented natural language processing (NLP) experts and over 1.5 million automated conversations each year, Front AI has saved over 100 FTEs and achieved an exceptional client satisfaction rate of 97 NPS. It has delivered more conversational AI projects in the Nordics than any other company and its game-changing AI solutions are transforming customer service across many different industries, including payment solutions, the public sector, banking, and food services.
Easy to implement and use
Whether we are talking mortgage repayments or recipes for cheesecake, there are some common factors that are crucial to users of a conversational AI solution: it must fluently understand natural language, offer personalized interactions, helpful replies, and be easy to use. And there are also common themes from the perspective of the service providers – from banks to dairy manufacturers, successful virtual agents must be easy to implement, reduce support costs, and increase customer loyalty and user satisfaction.
Specializing in intelligent conversational AI that fulfills all of this criteria, Front AI has, in just a few years, successfully launched over 30 live virtual agents on the boost.ai platform.
Jari Annala, the CEO of Front AI, says: “Our clients are excited to try conversational AI, and the boost.ai platform is technologically and commercially ready – it’s really nicely packaged and easy to implement. We’ve mastered the technology and understand the real-life ways to utilize it to meet customer demands.”
Unique multi-language ability
With clients across several countries, it’s important to Front AI that the boost solution can handle all the complexities of many different languages.
“It’s essential – and it’s one of our key selling pitches – that the boost.ai platform allows us to implement and support solutions in multiple languages. It’s one of the unique values of the boost platform.”
- Jari Annala, CEO, Front AI
This ability to support local languages was a critical factor for the payment solution provider, NETS. Front AI helped NETS create a conversational AI virtual agent called Netta, which went live in December 2020, initially supporting English, Danish, and German on the open support pages. Now Netta is available in Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish and many more languages are being added, including Polish, French, and Italian.
More recently, Front AI launched a voice bot with NETS that extends the text-based virtual agent for a voice-appropriate use case: helping customers authenticate themselves in online transactions.
The best of both worlds
Whether it’s text- or voice-based, the boost platform allows Front AI to take the best from a traditional customer service interaction and map it onto the digital world, offering that experience to everyone, 24/7.
Annala explains: “We work closely with our clients to create an AI model that can repeat the same excellent customer experience that they're providing with human-to-human interaction.”
“This doesn't mean that it's an exact one-to-one copy, it means rethinking the customer service process a little bit in a digital domain. But you still need to be able to copy the best elements of traditional customer service and reuse them in the digital world. The boost platform facilitates us being able to do this successfully.”
Responding to real life
Being able to offer support outside of normal office hours is just one of the reason why businesses are keen to pursue digital channels. The banking sector is no exception to this. For example, the Säästöpankki Group’s goal was to create the banking industry’s best combination of digital and physical customer interactions. The bank started with an internal virtual assistant that helped to centralize information for customer service staff. Then, in May 2021, a virtual agent was launched on the bank’s public website that exceeded expectations – correctly identifying more than 95% of customer queries. Now the bank has multiple virtual agents for both non-authenticated and authenticated customers.
During the pandemic, the bank saw an increase in queries from customers concerned about their finances, many enquiring if they could delay their mortgage repayments. It quickly decided to further develop its virtual assistant to respond to these concerns. This is a common factor across all Front AI’s clients: they continue to use their conversational AI solutions to develop new approaches to learn about and meet customers’ needs.
For example, Front AI helped develop a recipe bot called Muru for the dairy manufacturer, Valio - one of the largest companies in Finland. The recipe service is one of the most popular in the country, reaching 1.5 million unique visitors every month and offering a catalogue of more than 5,000 recipes. Although Valio does not sell directly to end users, it invests heavily in marketing and direct dialogue with consumers.
The company had assumed that people wanted fast and easy recipes, but Muru revealed that this was wrong. Customers actually searched for more difficult, challenging recipes. This was a big news for Valio, so it introduced a new category in the recipe database. Today, based on the feedback from its virtual agent, you can search for recipes based on three criteria: easy, fast, or ‘challenge yourself’.
In direct dialogue
Another example of the adaptive nature of the conversational AI solution happened last summer, when it was really hot weather. Feedback from Muru indicated people were searching for iced coffee recipes and Valio realized that it didn’t have any suitable ones.
“So the in-house kitchen was called at 9 in the morning. By the afternoon, Valio had launched an iced coffee recipe, and included photos on the site. Muru has proved to be an important direct link with Valio’s customers – one that that they didn’t have before – and it’s facilitated a monitoring of demands and trends,” Annala explains.
Helping the residents of Oulu
Innovatively meeting people’s needs is also happening in the capital of northern Finland, Oulu. Front AI collaborated with the City of Oulu to provide local residents with an intelligent information assistant that can handle service requests and personalized information queries.
In November 2020, OuluBot was put into operation on the Oulu public transport website. Since then, the virtual assistant has been added to many of the city’s webpages and new topics are continually being added, so residents can easily get answers to a wide variety of queries, such as reporting lost travel cards, questions about welfare services, and tracking the status of a building permit. OuluBot provides a consistent service around the clock, offering knowledge to every user independent of the working hours or experience of a customer service employee.
Start with the customer
Despite the different markets that Front AI work with, there are some common factors for the conversational AI solutions.
“We always start by understanding the customers‘ needs, analyzing the traffic, and discovering what customers are asking. We then design the kind of services required, whether they are information services or transactional services, and consider if authentication is needed. We can start small and then go on an automation journey together with our client, adding along the way,” explains Annala.
And at the heart of all these solutions is the boost.ai platform. “The virtual agents are all very distinct but at the core is the same unique technology. Our expertise is to understand where a virtual agent can add value and then implement the boost.ai technology – resulting in the right individual solution for each use case,” concludes Annala.