Telefônica Brasil enhances its AI-powered call center assistant with Azure

The Spain-based mobile network provider has a presence in 12 countries, perhaps none more prominent than Brazil, where it has operated under the brand name Vivo since 2003. “We provide network access to more than 115 million users, including fiber broadband for 6.7 million houses and companies and 65 million postpaid mobile devices,” says João. 

Developing a digital customer service assistant

Telefônica Brasil continuously develops new technology to fulfill the needs and exceed the expectations of its ever-expanding customer base. “We’ve got to constantly innovate to offer our customers the best experiences and lead transformation in the market—that’s key for us,” says João. “I’m proud to help connect millions of people and offer solutions that make people’s lives easier, generate new business and new jobs, and promote digital inclusion in our country.” 

As a major part of this initiative to better connect customers, the company launched an AI-powered digital assistant called Aura in 2018. This call center assistant platform was designed to reduce wait times, improve customer satisfaction, and increase loyalty by providing customer service agents with the insights they need to resolve customer issues seamlessly. Although this platform helped solve specific, previously defined problems, Telefônica Brasil knew it needed to adopt new generative AI technology to further enhance the quality and agility of its customer service. 

Optimizing call centers with generative AI

Telefônica Brasil launched its I.Ajuda initiative in 2023 to improve its customer service operations, implementing Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, found within Azure AI Foundry, throughout its call centers. This large language model–based solution can identify the context of customer inquiries and generate responses to help customer service agents resolve problems quickly. Telefônica Brasil uses Azure AI Foundry products to create embedding systems and vector databases, in addition to analyzing images and documents for generating metadata. To do so, the company takes full advantage of Azure generative AI models. “The ability to implement new models is great,” says Paulo Cocato, Senior Artificial Intelligence Manager at Telefônica Brasil. “We can try a lot of things and change a lot using Azure OpenAI Service. Our ability to scale the solution very quickly might be most important.” 

In addition to cutting-edge generative AI models, Telefônica Brasil uses another Azure AI Foundry tool, Azure AI Document Intelligence, to gather and organize valuable information from customer interactions so it can be stored within Azure Cosmos DB. “A lot of information for product parameterizations and configurations for Aura sit inside Azure Cosmos DB,” says Cocato. “These parameterizations allow us to manage product offerings more efficiently, contributing to faster and more consistent service. We chose Azure Cosmos DB because of our extensive knowledge and confidence in this technology. We knew its high scalability, service availability, and fast response times would help us optimize performance.”  

Telefônica Brasil can draw actionable insights from its call center chat history with AI analytics to continuously improve customer service at scale, thanks in part to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure HDInsight. “We host our platform’s front end, back end, and sign-in mechanisms using AKS. This ensures a robust, scalable, and reliable infrastructure, enabling efficient storage and fast access to conversation history. And we use HDInsight to extract insights from these conversations.” This effortless access to key information facilitates a seamless flow of data across the platform, while Azure API Management provides highly secure access to the platform for Telefônica Brasil’s approximately 33,000 employees in the country. “Using API Management means team members throughout our company can work with our platform,” continues Cocato. “For example, a developer outside of our AI department uses API Management to access the models we provide.” By implementing this carefully selected suite of Azure services, Telefônica Brasil has improved its customer service, enhanced its operational efficiency, and increased its agility. “Our time to market using this technology is very fast,” says Cocato. 

Improving performance and customer satisfaction

The I.Ajuda platform is being used by 23,000 Telefônica Brasil customer service agents, who field an impressive 5.3 million questions a month. These agents can better handle this massive volume of customer interactions because of the streamlined processes and support the company put into place with its Azure-based enhancements. “By using AI, we’ve provided centralized access to the information that the agents need to manage customer requests. We evaluate the operational feedback and the prompts themselves, then use this feedback—positive or negative—to improve our processes,” says João. “Empowering customer service agents with clear instructions helps them know what they need to do and reduces their response time.” By introducing I.Ajuda, Telefônica Brasil has reduced its average handling time by 9% for individual customers and 4% for businesses. But it’s not all about speed.

Finding innovative ways to connect people

With a firm AI foundation, Telefônica Brasil has begun adding speech analytics and voice transcription to evaluate customer interactions at its call centers. “We’re developing a solution to analyze the calls so we’ll have a score of the quality that I.Ajuda generates to know what the customer says and whether the operator followed the correct procedures,” says João. “We really want to advance and improve our quality in the calls with greater accuracy.” 

This relentless pursuit of improvement helps Telefônica Brasil keep its vast network of customers connected across Brazil and beyond. “Giving each customer the best experience is most important to us,” says João. “So, we evaluate what we can do differently to improve each specific customer interaction and procedure and better personalize our customer service. We believe that will make a big difference.” 

Through its I.Ajuda initiative, Telefônica Brasil has already made a big difference for customers in Brazil. And it’s not done. With its flexible, scalable Azure foundation and more than 20 potential AI use cases currently under evaluation across its global network, the company will continue to develop new ways for its customers to connect, one innovative interaction at a time.