Bell increasing use of AI for customer service and business clients

BCE Inc. has signed a multi-year deal with AI platform ServiceNow. Bell first worked with California-based ServiceNow, billed as an “AI platform for business transformation,” following an agreement announced in November. The company will now use the ServiceNow platform with an eye on “transforming” its network and IT infrastructure. It also expects to bolster its tech services offerings for “Bell Business Markets” enterprise customers and provide ServiceNow implementation “expertise” to those enterprise clients. The goal of the agreement is to streamline “business-critical” areas of Bell’s operations, including its customer service and field service teams, it said. The automated system will be able to handle order management, case management, and Bell’s incident response processes. In an interview with The Wire Report, Michel Richer, Bell’s senior vice-president of enterprise solutions, data engineering and AI, said the company will use ServiceNow’s field service management tool for its fleet of technicians. If a customer contacts Bell because equipment at their residence is not working, for example, the automated system can determine whether or not a technician should be sent to the site, when to send them, and then dispatch them, Richer said. When asked if automation means there could be job cuts for human customer service workers at Bell, who might typically handle calls for those types of service requests, Richer said only that “over the course of time, yes, those technologies will keep displacing some types of activities toward other activities. That's the natural evolution that we'll have seen in time. And we expect this will continue.” Richer noted that Bell has already rolled out its customer service chatbot via Google’s Cloud Contact Center AI for some of its brands, and is in the process of rolling it out for its other brands. It is also a technology Bell offers to its enterprise customers. Bell acknowledged in its press release that customers do sometimes wait “weeks” to get service, but touted the new system as meeting customers’ needs “in a matter of hours or days versus weeks.” At the time the ServiceNow partnership was first announced, Bell said automation would be used to offer faster and more reliable services, including “enhancing customer satisfaction.” It said in November that AI-driven insights would be used to improve customer service and predictive maintenance, “ensuring a proactive approach to customer needs, with greater visibility to order and issue status.” For its enterprise clients, Richer said Bell acts as the service “integrator,” to provide and manage the automated technology. Customers of those clients would then recognize a chatbot as operated by the business they’re dealing with, not Bell. “A chatbot is the interface between your customers and how the company wants to talk to their customers, answer their queries, provide them services,” Richer said. “And that part is always owned by our customers. We’re helping them install and manage the interface, which is the technology layer of the chat.” Bell CEO Mirko Bibic said in the company’s press release that the partnership with ServiceNow “positions Bell to be a leader within Canada’s tech services landscape, offering Canadian enterprises end-to-end support for their digital transformations as we transform our own network and infrastructure.” The ServiceNow platform will be implemented throughout Bell’s own ecosystem by FX Innovation, which Bell acquired in 2023. Lukas Lhotsky, president of FX Innovation, said in an interview with The Wire Report that the companies are “bringing really sophisticated technology that’s been developed in-house back out and giving that to other Canadian companies that have the opportunity to use it.” “We're really taking that ServiceNow capability of looking at the way organizations work, and deliver work, and deliver outcomes – from start to finish – and making sure that all of that is really tightly orchestrated. And doing that at a scale and in a way that no one really else is in Canada,” Lhotsky said. A customer service request might typically need to go through a series of systems and people in different networks and different IT stacks, which can be “quite complex,” Lhotsky said. “But we don’t want to have to worry about any of that complexity. We want to make sure you get the best possible experience… Who’s coming, when it’s going to be fixed, and your basic questions are resolved. And that’s true for residential customers, but it’s also true for enterprise customers.” Lhotsky said there is an “immense opportunity” in the public sector, as well, to streamline citizen services. “Anyone that is responsible for a portfolio of experiences to customers, or citizens, or whoever the end user is, is going to be interested in this ability to optimize the way they do work,” Lhotsky said. Neither Lhotsky nor Richer elaborated on specific companies or groups Bell counts as business clients, however, Lhotsky did say they include large institutions that are household names to Canadians, all the way through to local or regional companies. - Reporting by Hannah Daley at hdaley@thewirereport.ca

Bell increasing use of AI for customer service and business clients

News | | July 19, 2024

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Bell increasing use of AI for customer service and business clients

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