Periodic Reporting for period 3 - WAI (Wiraya Activation Intelligence)
Période du rapport: 2019-09-01 au 2020-02-29
European mobile telecom operators struggle with low customer satisfaction and loyalty in highly competitive markets resulting in high churn, lower Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and high marketing spend to win new customers. Many operators use advanced churn prediction models; however, they have limited ways of effectively leveraging this knowledge at large scale when communicating with their customers. Now they are demanding tools to effectively engage on a personal level with the millions of customers that are predicted to churn, and thereby increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Wiraya’s managed cloud service cost-efficiently orchestrates and delivers personalized communication enabling dialogues with a large number of customers by blending voice and text in an innovative way to mimic human communication. Previously the communication is optimized manually based on our team’s experience. Now, thanks to the business innovation project Wiraya Activation Intelligence (“WAI”) we have taken our next generation product to the market, a product that is data-driven using AI technology, or specifically Machine Learning. Based on previous and real-time interactions, WAI learns and adapts what, when and how to communicate with each individual by matching profiles with specific communication micro journeys. The algorithms become better over time, resulting in ongoing automatic optimization. The platform is utilized in specific use cases such as; helping customers to change price plans, renew service or cross-sell, which in turn improves customer satisfaction and loyalty. This is in line with our overall goal to optimize customer lifetime value at a scale that is not possible through manual means.
When telecom operators start to communicate with their end- customers on their own terms, with a message containing relevant, individually tailored offers, the end-customer saves time and energy, and stress levels can be reduced which contributes to a higher quality of life. As a provider to mobile operators, Wiraya and WAI is a part of the move towards this human-centred economy and the improvement of the overall end-customer experience.
The specific objectives of the business innovation project are;
1. Validation of innovative technology - Taking the existing prototype to a fully scalable operational product, including automated provisioning of new clients, and validated performance & security. Optimized model selection, and chaining of models to enable fully automated communication program creation.
2. Customer trials of new cloud service - Infuse models with lots of real-life training data from trial clients and combine with content fragments to optimize the conversion numbers.
3. Verifying business strategy - The business plan and strategy that Wiraya has developed will be further refined and validated. It will contain the activities and expected costs needed to ensure that our new service reaches the market.
Through investment in WAI and benefiting from our cutting-edge AI technology and expertise, the EU is capitalizing on the digital opportunities in the age of the 4th industrial revolution. As a consequence, the EU’s status as a high-technology region will improve, which, in turn, will attract leading scientists and enterprises. The transferability of AI technology and expertise is securing the EU's innovation climate and global AI competitiveness, not only within the telecom industry but also within other industry verticals. Already today, we see the business potential for the development and marketing of a similar AI-based communication product as WAI within Banking & Finance, Insurance, Entertainment, and Utilities.
Wiraya’s managed cloud service cost-efficiently orchestrates and delivers personalized communication enabling dialogues with a large number of customers by blending voice and text in an innovative way to mimic human communication. Previously the communication is optimized manually based on our team’s experience. Now, thanks to the business innovation project Wiraya Activation Intelligence (“WAI”) we have taken our next generation product to the market, a product that is data-driven using AI technology, or specifically Machine Learning. Based on previous and real-time interactions, WAI learns and adapts what, when and how to communicate with each individual by matching profiles with specific communication micro journeys. The algorithms become better over time, resulting in ongoing automatic optimization. The platform is utilized in specific use cases such as; helping customers to change price plans, renew service or cross-sell, which in turn improves customer satisfaction and loyalty. This is in line with our overall goal to optimize customer lifetime value at a scale that is not possible through manual means.
When telecom operators start to communicate with their end- customers on their own terms, with a message containing relevant, individually tailored offers, the end-customer saves time and energy, and stress levels can be reduced which contributes to a higher quality of life. As a provider to mobile operators, Wiraya and WAI is a part of the move towards this human-centred economy and the improvement of the overall end-customer experience.
The specific objectives of the business innovation project are;
1. Validation of innovative technology - Taking the existing prototype to a fully scalable operational product, including automated provisioning of new clients, and validated performance & security. Optimized model selection, and chaining of models to enable fully automated communication program creation.
2. Customer trials of new cloud service - Infuse models with lots of real-life training data from trial clients and combine with content fragments to optimize the conversion numbers.
3. Verifying business strategy - The business plan and strategy that Wiraya has developed will be further refined and validated. It will contain the activities and expected costs needed to ensure that our new service reaches the market.
Through investment in WAI and benefiting from our cutting-edge AI technology and expertise, the EU is capitalizing on the digital opportunities in the age of the 4th industrial revolution. As a consequence, the EU’s status as a high-technology region will improve, which, in turn, will attract leading scientists and enterprises. The transferability of AI technology and expertise is securing the EU's innovation climate and global AI competitiveness, not only within the telecom industry but also within other industry verticals. Already today, we see the business potential for the development and marketing of a similar AI-based communication product as WAI within Banking & Finance, Insurance, Entertainment, and Utilities.
Most of the focus of the work performed in the first two of the three periods were centred around the two first of our main objectives for the business innovation project; (i) validation of innovative technology and (ii) customer trials of new cloud services.
We have moved the platform to become more automatic, rather than manual, in order to make scaling possible. The telecom operators have vast amounts of data and a lot of effort has been put into getting integration and data pipelines in place to support a continuous near real-time data flow. The data flow consists of getting target groups to the WAI platform, getting conversion and opt-out data, and sending results back to the operator.
The technical platform has been further tuned to secure performance and consistency for all automated data flows. The result is a system platform that is reliable, compliant, scalable and easy to set up and maintain.
The customer trials have been focused on testing communication hypotheses and collecting communication data. The hypothesis testing has been based on historical data and deep customer interviews to understand underlying motivations for customer behaviour. We already see an impact of 2-3 times the effect of the communication compared to the control groups in the use cases we have tested. The data collection we are doing at the same will serve as a training set to the models we have developed during the project. The models will optimise things like time of communication, day of communication, selection of communication program, etc.
The third and last period has been focused on further customer trials and fine tuning of the solutions in place for the selected use cases, as well as addressing the last of the objectives of the business innovation project; (iii) verifying business strategy, meaning focusing on product packaging and commercialisation.
The commercialisation of the innovation project is ongoing and with our primary efforts, we have validated the interest in the market. Several commercial discussions are now ongoing and ready to be finalised.
We have moved the platform to become more automatic, rather than manual, in order to make scaling possible. The telecom operators have vast amounts of data and a lot of effort has been put into getting integration and data pipelines in place to support a continuous near real-time data flow. The data flow consists of getting target groups to the WAI platform, getting conversion and opt-out data, and sending results back to the operator.
The technical platform has been further tuned to secure performance and consistency for all automated data flows. The result is a system platform that is reliable, compliant, scalable and easy to set up and maintain.
The customer trials have been focused on testing communication hypotheses and collecting communication data. The hypothesis testing has been based on historical data and deep customer interviews to understand underlying motivations for customer behaviour. We already see an impact of 2-3 times the effect of the communication compared to the control groups in the use cases we have tested. The data collection we are doing at the same will serve as a training set to the models we have developed during the project. The models will optimise things like time of communication, day of communication, selection of communication program, etc.
The third and last period has been focused on further customer trials and fine tuning of the solutions in place for the selected use cases, as well as addressing the last of the objectives of the business innovation project; (iii) verifying business strategy, meaning focusing on product packaging and commercialisation.
The commercialisation of the innovation project is ongoing and with our primary efforts, we have validated the interest in the market. Several commercial discussions are now ongoing and ready to be finalised.
During the project, we have taken WAI to an AI-driven, automated platform that, with limited configuration, engages with telecom customers via a combination of voice and text to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty and thereby minimizes the risk for churn. This enables the telecom operators to make full use of the churn prediction functions they already have in place. Impact has been proven in specific use cases with the participation of Tier 1 European operators in the business innovation project.
With our efforts to save 5% of the annual churning customer for the operators, we turn the operators’ focus from just getting the next new customer, to value the customers they already have. For the individual consumer these means better service and overall customer experience since the experience is tailored to their needs.
A quick onboarding time a technology that generates proven value makes it possible to scale up to successfully handle 500,000 customer interactions daily.
Following the specific objectives of the business innovation project we have successfully accomplished the following results;
1. Validation of innovative technology - Automatic matching of best communication journey for any given profile in key markets using chaining of multiple models from a repository of trained specific purpose models.
2. Customer trials of new cloud service - Validated impact of trial and conversion of telecom operators participating in trials into paying clients.
3. Verifying business strategy - An investor-ready business innovation plan, including financials and full Go-To-Market-Strategy.
With our efforts to save 5% of the annual churning customer for the operators, we turn the operators’ focus from just getting the next new customer, to value the customers they already have. For the individual consumer these means better service and overall customer experience since the experience is tailored to their needs.
A quick onboarding time a technology that generates proven value makes it possible to scale up to successfully handle 500,000 customer interactions daily.
Following the specific objectives of the business innovation project we have successfully accomplished the following results;
1. Validation of innovative technology - Automatic matching of best communication journey for any given profile in key markets using chaining of multiple models from a repository of trained specific purpose models.
2. Customer trials of new cloud service - Validated impact of trial and conversion of telecom operators participating in trials into paying clients.
3. Verifying business strategy - An investor-ready business innovation plan, including financials and full Go-To-Market-Strategy.