At Dell Technologies Services (DTS), our goal is to provide a seamless support experience for our customers, regardless of the communication channel they choose to use. As the demand for AI tools continues to rise and new technologies emerge, we are committed to staying ahead of the curve. To achieve this, we leverage data to help drive faster resolutions to support issues. Contact Connect AI (CCA) is the result of this effort. CCA is an ecosystem of troubleshooting intelligence that leverages natural language understanding (NLU) to improve customer experience and reduce issue resolution time.

The foundational capability of CCA spreads across the customer journey, from self-help to dispatch processes, and serves thousands of customers across 34 countries, supporting 15,000 agents. The solution has influenced approximately $9 million in total impact annually, enhancing customer experience by 3%. CCA identifies issues and surfaces resolutions across multiple channels, through on-the-box, online and assisted support. The solution consumes real-time data to predict issues across the customer journey, providing recommendations at different stages of the support process and is seamless across different communication channels.

The CCA platform is built on a federated architecture that consumes data from multiple sources, both on-prem and cloud-based. Our proprietary, patent-pending algorithm shortlists the most important features from vast data sources to provide timely recommendations to our customers. This algorithm is backed up by a robust backend machine learning architecture leveraging Kubernetes that allows CCA to reuse NLU models across the customer journey.
The business impact of CCA has been a 10% reduction in cycle time within CSG (Client Solutions Group), leading to a reduced case backlog. We avoid approximately 225,000 contacts annually within support services through proactive recommendations and reduce about 450,000 dispatches annually by improving troubleshooting effectiveness. Additionally, the solution has contributed to a 25% reduction in Time to Value (TTV) within deployment services.

The customer impact has been a 3% increase in customer satisfaction, leading to a 130-bps (basis point) improvement in Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). Embedding intelligence within the CRM has allowed DTS to set expectations for customers on unavoidable delays, resulting in a 6% reduction in repeat dispatch. NLU capability provides 360-degree insight into customers’ pain points across the journey, allowing agents to be proactive in their responses.

Moving forward, we’re excited to expand CCA to all product lines offered by Dell Technologies, explore offering it as a service to our external customers and strengthen our measures to protect data privacy, alleviate model bias and adopt ethical and green AI strategies. We also plan to reduce experiment/launch duration twofold by incorporating state-of-the-art techniques, such as multilingual transfer learning and deep learning through modular development, and reduce maintenance costs of the analytical engine by 50% by migrating to a cohesive in-house tech stack.

In conclusion, our initiative to develop a next-gen AI/ML analytical platform, Contact Connect AI, leverages NLU capabilities to identify and predict issues across the customer journey, providing timely recommendations to customers. CCA has made a substantial impact on both business and customer experiences and has the potential to expand to all product lines, ultimately boosting revenue for our external customers.

To learn more about how CCA works, please read our article on the topic.