Today, the users tend to use apps to reserve a taxi, more than phone calls, but the service ‘Chiama TAXI 060609’ is still operational and continues to be used after about 10 years. “The fact that this service has been successful in operation with very few changes for about 10 years demonstrates that Interactive Media project was very well conceived from the start” said Luca Avarello, Head of Intelligent Transport System at Roma Servizi per la Mobilità.

The user experience provided by the Conversational Virtual Agents was highly appreciated at Roma Servizi per la Mobilità, so Interactive Media continued to assist in the automation of other relevant services over the years.

In 2016 this line was receiving about 35K calls on average per month, and this number was still growing. All calls were handled by human operators and they struggled to cope with the volume of incoming requests. About 1/3 of the requests were about local transportations timetable and routes. In fact, even in this day and age of the Internet, many people prefer to call the information line to receive a quick response instead of downloading apps and browsing web sites. It makes perfect sense, especially when one is in a rush.

However, most of the calls related with local public transport were not served because of the high workload of the operators, busy in other calls. Roma Servizi per la Mobilità decided to tackle the problem and provide a better level of service. The most cost-effective solution was again an automated service, capable of servicing most requests reducing the workload of human operators. So, they tapped Interactive Media for the project.

Interactive Media rolled out the first version of the service in 2017. These Virtual Agents are capable of providing information about the buses that are about to arrive at a bus stop. The Virtual Agents identifies the relevant bus stop using natural language, allowing the user to select a specific bus number as an option. After interrogating the information systems of Roma Servizi per la Mobilità, the Virtual Agents inform the users about the buses that are scheduled to arrive at that stop in the next few minutes, or the expected time of arrival of a specifically requested bus line.

In 2018 Interactive Media improved the service with the ability for the Virtual Agents to calculate the best route to reach one place indicated by the user using public transport, potentially with several buses and subway lines. The interaction is, of course, in natural language, and accuracy in understanding the location of origin and destination of a route is paramount. The routes are computed using the web services provided by Roma Servizi per la Mobilità.

At the end of 2019 about 13.5 thousand calls were automatically served by Virtual Agents every month, and the human operators were able to focus on the other services, where their knowledge and skills were most needed. This improved morale for them, while the public satisfaction with the service skyrocketed.

Lesson learned

This particular use case demonstrates in practice one of the tenets of the voice industry. Conversational Virtual Agents are not only a means of reducing the operating costs of a contact center, they improve the customer experience and also the working conditions of human operators, who are relieved from most routine tasks and can devote their time to activities that offer them greater professional satisfaction.

“The project with the information line of Roma Servizi per la Mobilità is an exemplary case where the OMNIA Conversational Virtual Agents have taken over a task previously handled by human operators to the great satisfaction of all stakeholders” said Roberto Valente, CEO of Interactive Media.

Subscription

Receive our exclusive content: