SparkOptimus supports Budget Thuis with generative AI

05 March 2024 Consultancy.eu

Leading digital consultancy SparkOptimus has completed a project that helped Budget Thuis, an energy and telecom services provider in the Netherlands, introduce generative AI (Gen AI) tools into its business operations.

The project started when Budget Thuis, which serves more than a million customers in the Netherlands with reliable and affordable services, realized that the use of artificial intelligence could enhance its customer experience and the execution of key processes.

The telecom services provider engaged SparkOptimus to identify use cases that could benefit the company. “Although we usually prefer to do as much as possible in-house, SparkOptimus made Gen AI easy to understand and helped us focus on practical, effective results,” said Job Schipper Manager at Budget Thuis.

SparkOptimus supports Budget Thuis with generative AI

The SparkOptimus team identified around 50 generative AI use cases, spanning different parts of the business. From that list of cases, three were prioritized for testing in an eight-week pilot phase. Several other use cases were explored through the use of third party-built turnkey AI tools. After the testing phase, the project team developed scaling plans that saw the tools adopted for their final purpose.

“We collaboratively developed an MVP tool that accurately transcribes and summarizes customer service and telesales calls according to a specified format, reducing time spent by agents by as much as 15%,” said Matti van Engelen, Associate Partner at SparkOptimus and Lead of the firm’s Data & AI practice.

Automated call logging helps customer service teams to spend more time on value-adding activities, instead of manual, repetitive tasks.

Other tools adopted through this project include improvements to a chatbot that uses GenAI to sort through previous chat data and enact improvements automatically. This chatbot tool is now able to categorize conversations and can assess reasons why customers might escalate to speaking with a customer service agent.

“To meet the challenge of driving continuous innovation in the business, we designed a tailored test-and-learn approach,” noted Van Engelen. “This involved setting up dedicated cross-functional innovation teams, and implementing a quarterly meeting rhythm for ideation, prioritization, and evaluation of ideas.”

The award-winning consultancy also helped Budget Thuis to establish its own in-house capacity for independently replicating the test-and-learn approach for more AI tools to be adopted in the future. “This positions Budget Thuis to autonomously generate, prioritize, test, and expand innovative ideas, unlocking the massive value of generative AI.”

GenAI is largely taking the world by storm, with ChatGPT exploding in popularity when it was released in late 2022. A previous report found that GenAI, in all its various forms, could eventually add over $4 trillion to the global economy with the massive productivity boost it will bring to a wide range of industries. That is despite some hesitation from organizations that are weary of regulations that have yet to fully be implemented, like the European AI Act.

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