Chatbot? Nope – AI Assistant? Yeah!

Our personal Digital Republic customer service is sacred to us. This is why we have resisted the use of chatbots as a supplement to our Support Heroes’ customer service year after year. We kept coming to the same conclusion: chatbots don’t add any value for our customers. Various of our competitors have been using chatbots for a long time and in some cases they are even the only channel for communicating with the company. We always saw chatbots as a way for providers to keep their customers away from customer service for as long as possible.

Thanks to ChatGPT, chatbots were cast in a completely new light overnight. Dialogue-based AI – or conversational AI – makes it possible to understand the meaning and intention of a customer’s questions and provide logical answers. Without having to find out thousands and thousands of possible questions and answers, define them and then simply reproduce them, as was necessary with previous chatbots.

Accordingly, we also decided to provide you with a smart chatbot. After all, many inquiries can also be dealt with outside our opening hours. This is the perfect complement to the resources we already provide and allows you to conveniently navigate through the Digital Republic Support Portal’s wealth of knowledge.

Although we have decided to introduce a chatbot, our reservations remain strong. We all know ChatGPT and see the possibilities and potential, but also the problems and inabilities. In a chat assistant for our customers, there should be no hallucinations or useless answers.

We launched our chat assistant – the name “chatbot” was a little too negative for us – in our support portal at the beginning of the year. This means that instead of using the search field, you can now simply ask for help using the chat assistant.

The first few months show an absolutely positive result. The Digital Republic chat assistant currently has an average of 100 conversations per day with our customers.

Feedback from our customers shows that the option to chat with the AI assistant was very well received and many of the queries were resolved in just a few minutes.

And that 24/7 and in every conceivable language!

These were the two most convincing arguments for the introduction of our Digital Republic chat assistant. We are constantly expanding our customer service offering and have been offering personal support on Saturdays for some time now. But we will probably never be able to answer questions 24/7. Thanks to the chat assistant, you will now also be guided through Digital Republic’s entire wealth of knowledge outside of opening hours.

In multilingual Switzerland, we can already cover German, French and English without any problems. In addition, our customers and those potentially interested in Digital Republic speak many more languages that we are not yet able to offer. Our chat assistant ‘speaks’ all languages fluently and can therefore offer appropriate assistance:

We are currently reviewing the conversations of our chat assistant on a regular basis to check whether the answers are correct and whether our customers’ queries can actually be resolved.

Of course, there are many answers that simply refer directly to personal customer service or to our ticket system. However, this is intentional and results from the fact that all questions relating to personal customer data cannot be answered by the chat assistant for data protection reasons. In addition, no actions can be triggered by the chat assistant, only step-by-step instructions on how certain actions can be carried out in the customer portal or on the smartphone.

If we look at the general answers, which concern general questions about Flat Mobile, our flat tariffs, the eSIM or the customer portal, the chat assistant provides enough help so that you as a customer know what you need to do or where you can find more detailed answers.

Every interaction with the chat assistant helps to make the next interaction even better and provide the customer with a solution even faster. With the Digital Republic chat assistant, we are fulfilling our role as Switzerland’s most digital and innovative mobile communications provider and are consciously using AI as an interface.

Muriel Strasser, CPO, on the use of the chat assistant: “We are delighted that we have decided to use a chat assistant at this time. This allows us to offer our customers another new and simple channel for finding solutions quickly.”

Promising prospects for anyone who wants to get to know Digital Republic better or is simply looking for a quick solution to a technical problem.