T-Mobile claims that it – with help from OpenAI – is building the "first-ever" intent-driven AI-decisioning platform for customer experience: IntentCX.
The platform couples a real-time understanding of customer intent and sentiment with a “meaningful understanding and knowledge” of the customer to share personalized next best actions.
In doing so, it will guide both virtual and live contact center agents and – according to T-Mobile – take proactive actions on their behalf.
T-Mobile has reportedly set an internal goal to reduce its customer service calls by 75 percent with IntentCX.
Yet, that’s not only by intercepting issues with AI. To achieve this target, T-Mobile hopes to use the intent data to understand how problems start in the first instance and stop them before escalation.
In doing so, T-Mobile hopes to apply "the most advanced technology" to reimagine customer journeys, enhance back-stage processes, and create a blueprint for success.
These intentions are ambitious, especially around call volume reduction. Indeed, recent Gartner research found that 61 percent of customer support leaders expect generative AI (GenAI) to reduce their agent headcount by less than five percent.
However, Mike Sievert, CEO of T-Mobile, promised that the platform will "revolutionize how customer love is shown across our industry." He continued:
IntentCX is much more than chatbots. 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.
How T-Mobile plans to organize that data will be mission-critical for IntentCX to flourish.
Nevertheless, the company promises a "meaningful leap" from today's next best action solutions, which pre-program customer intents and match them to a limited set of responses.
Speaking to this at T-Mobile Capital Markets Day 2024, Sievert said:
This model is more human-like, listening to the customer’s real intentions and using massive data pools to optimize their journey with T-Mobile. This allows us to tap into millions of success and failure cases generated by both AI and humans.
In doing so, T-Mobile hopes IntentCX will enable live and virtual agents with "actual solutions" to customer solutions instead of just AI-summarized data.
The ability to customize that solution to the individual customer is also an exciting part of the solution.
Yet, another facet that shouldn’t be overlooked is the data privacy guarantees that OpenAI provides. Indeed, the generative AI giant doesn’t train its models on customer data from its APIs.
