Aussie Broadband actively exploring AI in customer service

Aussie Broadband is actively exploring AI as a handoff technology for routine and repetitive customer support requests.

The telco has traditionally championed a human-centred ethos when it comes to customer service, but it appears that it has started looking over the fence at what its rivals are doing with AI and considering the technology's potential for its support operations.

While early days, the company appears to have accepted the prevailing wisdom around using the technology to free staff from low-value tasks to focus on those that need more human intervention.

“As you can imagine, in a contact centre there are a whole number of different types of calls that we get from people and some of those are really quite routine tasks such as 'I want to update day my credit card information’, or '[I want to] add another authorised contact onto my account'," O'Shea told a Veeam event in Sydney.

“We are actively looking at opportunities as to how can AI help us service those more routine types of enquiries faster, leaving our people to spend time on tasks which are a little bit more complex – the more technical types of problems.

“But also, so our customers ...[are] not waiting needlessly on hold, just to add a credit card or something is very routine."

O'Shea said that delivering “the really, really high level of customer service that Aussie Broadband is known for” remained "fundamental" in any adoption of AI.

A spokesperson for Aussie Broadband declined to expand on the telco’s plans for AI in detail, citing a media blackout currently in place in the lead up to the release of the company’s full-year financial results.

“We are always investigating ways that we can improve our tooling and systems for our people so they can better serve our customers," the spokesperson said.

"We do not have anything to announce currently but we are continuing to investigate what capabilities are in market and their suitability for our teams,” the spokesperson said.

Aussie cultivates a human-centred ethos to customer service, articulated through marketing and media activities, such as its blog “Humans Of Aussie”, its policy of keeping its call centre operations onshore and its oft-stated values statement: “Be good to people, no bullsh-t, have fun, think big, and don’t be ordinary – be awesome”.

Aussie’s spokesperson said any potential move to AI-enabled customer support did not mark a retreat from that ethos.

The spokesperson said that as part of the company's 'Look to 28' ambitions - citing a technology strategy unveiled last year - it "is always investigating better ways of working and servicing our customers."

“We will continue to grow our call centre operations in a sustainable way as we bring on more subscribers, but Aussie also has a long and proud legacy of innovating through automation, such as our CVC Bot,” the spokesperson said referring to a system the telco developed in 2018 to automate the process of expanding CVC on a needs basis.

O'Shea said that the company is taking a careful approach to its AI adoption, wanting to give staff access to AI models but remaining wary about the models' access to data.

“Obviously, we want to be able to give our staff access to contemporary tools so that they are able to do their jobs more efficiently - the same tools that perhaps their peers are using, but we've got to be really mindful about the data that is being fed in to those models, particularly as a heavily regulated telco,” O’Shea said.