Automating 80% of incoming inquiries within one month

The Customer: Posti

Since founding 400 years ago, Finland’s national postal service Posti has undergone massive expansion. Today, Posti has operations spanning postal, logistics and e-commerce services, employing 22 000 people across 10 countries.

Posti is committed to being the smartest and most customer-focused service in the market. As part of this effort, they employ hundreds of customer service agents who act as the front-lines in improving customer experience. However, as the business continued to grow, and expectations on customer service rose, Posti began to seek innovative solutions to help manage the workflow.

The Situation

Christmas is a busy time of year. Customer service lines become overwhelmed as families and friends need to ensure that their deliveries will arrive in time for the holidays. This seasonal spike in demand is common among a range of industries, from e-commerce to travel. As the national postal service, Posti is at the heart of ensuring Christmas runs smoothly for everyone.

The traditional solution is to hire seasonal customer service agents to handle the extraordinary volumes. This method is expensive and slow and often results in a drop in quality as new agents have little time to be trained. Posti wanted a smarter solution.

Posti decided to leverage the latest AI technologies in natural language understanding to resolve the issue of spikes in customer service demand, forever. Posti was committed to finding a customer service automation partner that could guarantee this efficiency gain, whilst ensuring the service excellence that their customers deserved.

The Solution

Ultimate met Posti in the run up to Christmas. Posti's expectations were high and the timeline fixed. Posti wanted a solution which:

• Empowered their workforce to work easier by freeing agent time
• Automated repetitive customer service requests
• Improved Posti's customer experience, through the provision of a 24 hour Christmas support service
• All deployed in time for the holiday season!

Ultimate enables the automation of repetitive customer service requests, in any language. The AI algorithms are powered by deep learning to understand the intent of behind customer messages and respond accordingly.

The technology is perfectly suited for high volume, highly repetitive cases. Here, Ultimate is primed to support a range of Posti stakeholders, from internal customer support agents, managers and, most importantly, customers. Customer support agents have more time to focus on complex cases while AI handles the repetitive work, managers report improved team KPIs and real-time customer input, and customers receiving resolutions instantly, 24/7 and in their native language.

The Success

Posti's partnership with Ultimate is a huge success. The AI was live in under 2 weeks and by Christmas was automating +80% of customer requests in the Christmas chat line. Posti's customer service agents were freed from the high stress that usually falls over Christmas season and were able to focus on what they do best: delighting customers.

Posti is scaling their use of Ultimate throughout their contact center. Ultimate suggested responses are being leveraged to support agents in providing faster, more on-brand answers. In the future, more automation capabilities may be on the roadmap, as well as the addition of Posti's 5+ support languages.