Meet Alphie – Alphabet Belgium’s multilingual chatbot
The 55,000 end customers of Alphabet Belgium have a new friend: Alphie, a chatbot who can answer queries on their driver journey 24/7, and in three different languages (Dutch, French and English).
Alphie is part of Alphabet Belgium’s Driver Center, the central point of contact for all customer queries – from fuel management over maintenance and repair to damage handling. He takes care of the FAQs – the frequently asked questions – meaning the human staff doesn’t have to repeat the same information over and over again.
MS Azure
Created in collaboration with Microsoft Azure, Alphie is ideally suited to answer FAQs around the clock, in multiple languages. Customer service is important, and so is Alphie’s response time: all answers are to the point and delivered in under two minutes.
Alphie’s catalogue of answers is based on 30 ‘intents’ – the information goals of the people asking the questions. Examples include: finding the nearest workshop or the best date to change tyres. As the chatbot expands his knowledge via machine learning, new intents will be added to his repertoire.
Complex questions
Perhaps Alphie’s biggest advantage: the Driver Center’s human staff now has more time to research and answer the more complex questions posed by Alphabet drivers.
Studies show that chatbots can cut operational costs in customer centres by up to 80%. It’s too soon to establish whether that will be the case at Alphabet Belgium – but Alphie has already reduced the answering time per question by five minutes.
Developed by Alphabet Belgium, Alphie could soon become a very popular export within the BMW Group (of which Alphabet is a part).
