Dive Brief:
- T-Mobile and OpenAI entered a multiyear agreement to build a custom AI platform called IntentCX, the companies announced Wednesday.
- IntentCX will be trained on billions of data points from T-Mobile customer interactions to determine the next best steps for customer journeys. The platform will measure customer intent and sentiment in real time as well.
- The platform will focus on delivering individualized solutions contact center agents can use to help customers through their queries, with the ability to handle automated customer interactions under certain circumstances, both companies said.
Dive Insight:
While a lot of the conversation around AI in customer service focuses on chatbots, T-Mobile’s effort to capture unstructured data could help the company build better experiences that go beyond self-service optimization.
“IntentCX is much more than chatbots,” Mike Sievert, CEO of T-Mobile, said in a prepared statement. “Our customers leave millions of clues about how they want to be treated through their real experiences and interactions, and now we’ll use that deep data to supercharge our care team as they work to perfect customer journeys.”
T-Mobile is currently testing IntentCX and plans to begin incorporating the platform into its business operations in 2025.
Better service through IntentCX could help T-Mobile maintain its current growth trajectory. The wireless carrier added 1.3 million postpaid net customers — customers with fewer than two months of unpaid charges — and surpassed 100 million postpaid customers for the first time ever, according to Q2 2024 earnings release from July.
Unstructured data from customer service calls presents a “gold mine” that can help customer service leaders pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of their operations as well as where improvements would be most valuable, according to Deborah Alvord, VP analyst with Gartner’s global customer service and support research group.
For example, companies can comb through the data to uncover why many customers are making repeat calls — which in many cases drives up costs while reducing satisfaction. Insights from customer service calls can help determine points of failure to plot out the best course of action.
“Should we introduce proactive communication? Generative AI could do that,” Alvord told CX Dive. “Do we set up AI to help our internal employees so that they improve first contact resolution? That could improve repeat call rates."
Decreasing repeat call rates appears to be one of the goals of IntentCX. The platform will connect directly into T-Mobile’s customer care system to preemptively identify customer needs and ensure they get the help they’re looking for, whether through a live agent or self-service.
