Project description DEENESFRITPL Efficient Customer Service with a Human Touch In a world where customers expect 24/7 care, the quality and availability of customer support services can make or break any business, especially in the service industry. Providing excellent service is no easy task and Customer Service organizations are tremendously inefficient. Support agents spend up to 20% of their time searching for information to assist customers or writing the same thing over and over. The EU-funded COALA project is developing an AI-based customer support assistant for agents to help them eliminate manual tasks. This technology is able to understand conversations and automate repetitive tasks, being not only an assistant for the agents but also a way for customers to easily find information. The solution increases agent productivity up to 20% and reduces agent turnover by 22%. Show the project objective Hide the project objective Objective Customer support industry is suffering from huge inefficiencies, as agents spend 20% of their time looking for information manually, in order to answer to customers. That translates into a cost of €10,400 per support agent annually. For a small company with a support team of 5 people, this adds up to €52,000 annually. In addition to manual search, there are some AI-powered technologies available, but they have several disadvantages. E.g. ticket deflection-based solutions redirect consumers to “help articles” where they can read about possible solution. The drawback of this technology is that it can handle only very simple questions and is not suitable for complex inquiries, therefore often resulting in decreasing customer satisfaction. Template-based solutions require manual creation and regular update of the templates which makes this technology less effective and time-consuming, taking at least 10% of the agents’ time. To solve these problems, Cleverly is developing a language-agnostic AI-based customer support assistant – Coala. This software is based on proprietary Knowledge Powered and General Understanding Technology that can understand conversations, automating repetitive tasks and personalizing user interactions. The main differentiator between us and the competitors is that we are building a generic recommendation model that is scalable across wide range of industries, small and big customer support teams. This has never been done by any other company. Coala provides 20-30% of cost savings annually, at the same time lowering agent turnover by 22%. The global customer experience management market size is expected to reach €29B by 2025 progressing at a CAGR of 22.9%, providing lucrative growth opportunities for Cleverly. Cleverly team is run by a team of serial entrepreneurs with previous startup building and scaling experience globally. The impact of the proposed project is profound: by 2025 we expect to employ 94 people and achieve a project ROI of 26. Fields of science natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresocial scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managemententrepreneurship Keywords COALA Programme(s) H2020-EU.2.3. - INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs Main Programme H2020-EU.3. - PRIORITY 'Societal challenges H2020-EU.2.1. - INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies Topic(s) EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020 - SME instrument Call for proposal H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020 See other projects for this call Sub call H2020-SMEInst-2018-2020-2 Funding Scheme SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2 Coordinator CLEVERLY, LDA Net EU contribution € 1 518 927,38 Address Calcada do lavra, 22, 2 1150-208 Lisboa Portugal See on map SME The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed. Yes Region Continente Área Metropolitana de Lisboa Área Metropolitana de Lisboa Activity type Private for-profit entities (excluding Higher or Secondary Education Establishments) Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Participation in EU R&I programmes Opens in new window HORIZON collaboration network Opens in new window Other funding € 650 968,87