Dell Technologies
Nominated Award:
Best Application of AI in Large Enterprise
Website of Company:
https://www.dell.com/en-us
Dell Technologies Services
Customers are looking for technology partners who are trusted advisors, with broad and deep capabilities to provide strategic guidance, help them navigate IT and business challenges, deliver better CX and achieve outcomes.
Dell Technologies Services helps customer drive their digital business forward by meeting them where they are in their digital journey. We collaborate with customers on IT solutions that give them an advantage today and prepare them for what’s ahead. We empower them to be resilient and thrive with forward-thinking strategies, flexible choices, and consistent execution to ensure they achieve the outcomes they need.
Through an ecosystem of augmented intelligence, passionate experts, automated processes, and unmatched reach, we help customers accelerate deployment and adoption of technology and achieve measurable outcomes, while minimizing cost. We do this through the end-to-end, modernized services they need – from home to work (Consumer, SMB, Global Enterprise) and across their IT environment.
We deliver differentiated customer value through our scale, digital reach, and deep expertise. Our organization of more than 60K Services and partner professionals, spans 170 countries, 6 Services Command Center locations, and 750 parts distribution centers. We support over 200 million assets with 94% CSAT and cover the entire technology stack from edge to core to cloud.
Through our continued investment in AI and process automation we are digitally transforming to deliver the most adaptive, intelligent service experience. We collect more than 44TB of telemetry data daily and have integrated AI/ML throughout the customer journey and across technology to enhance the service experience.
• Greatly improve time to value through modern service delivery
• Provide targeted, strategic recommendations (prescriptive)
• Anticipate and solve more issues before they happen (proactive/predictive)
• Shorten the time it takes to resolve IT issues (80% less IT admin time on server issue resolution, 6X faster PC issue resolution)
• Continue driving improvements to products and services
Our services expertise spans the full IT lifecycle – from advising and consulting on desired outcomes, to deployment, management, residency, security, education, support and asset recycling / refresh. We offer different ways to consume – the flexibility to choose traditional or as a Service, and custom capabilities when a customer requires something unique.
Reason for Nomination:
In 2019, Dell Technologies Services (DTS) kick-started an initiative to digitize processes and enhance customer experience by reducing issue resolution time and improving troubleshooting effectiveness, by a paradigm called “shift left” providing proactive support to our customers leveraging artificial intelligence (AI/ML). This foundational capability known as “Contact Connect AI” (CCA) spreads across the customer journey from self-help to dispatch process catering 15,000 agents, serving thousands of customers across 34 countries. Solution has influenced approximately $9M in total impact annually, enhancing our customer experience by 3%.
At Dell Technologies Services ( DTS), we strive to leverage data providing a seamless support experience for customers irrespective of the communication channel to drive faster resolutions. Our mission has been to shift left to prevent and reduce issues faced by customers with their products. CCA helps achieve this mission by driving analytics, connecting data at scale across customer journey and providing recommendations and resolutions to our customers. Data generated through our IT modernization platforms such as Salesforce, virtual assistant, social media, search, on-the-box applications, emails, call logs that fuels the intelligence to understand our customers, problems they face, and surface personalized resolutions reducing issue-resolution time by 10%.
Our mission is to enable a seamless customer experience reducing time to provide resolutions and prevent them from occurring in future.
Technological transformation in the services domain has enabled our customers to access our service offerings faster than ever through a range of methods such as virtual agents, telephone call, emails, chat, social media, online etc. This generates rich textual data in the form of search queries, tweets, posts, emails, call logs and chat transcripts. Leveraging these data play a vital role in enabling our teams to build AI/ML solutions to support the customer journey across various channels and to provide proactive recommendations to our customers
Our Unique Solution: Identify-Predict-Action
Over the past 3 years, we have built CCA, an analytical platform consisting of next gen suite of interconnected AI/ML analytical solutions leveraging state-of-art Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities that identifies issues and surface resolutions across multiple channels – through on-the-box, online, assisted support. CCA consumes real-time data to predict issues across customer journey that helps to provide recommendations at different stages of a support process, at the same time being seamless across different communication channels.
For example, a customer trying to self-help is surfaced with real-time recommendations online eliminating the need to contact support. The same engine provides real-time recommendations to an agent via salesforce trying to help a customer seeking support. Same foundational intelligence provides alerts on-the-box through customer facing applications.
How CCA works
CCA is built on the foundation of a federated architecture which consumes data from multiple sources both cloud (salesforce) and on-prem (website, telemetry from box). Solution is built to be a scalable to cater both customers- CSG (Client Solutions Group) & ISG (Infrastructure Solutions Group). We have developed a novel patent-pending algorithm to shortlist the most important features from vast data sources which is crucial to provide timely recommendations to our customers. This algorithm is backed up by a robust backend Machine Learning architecture leveraging Kubernetes which allows NLU models to be re-used across the customer journey.
The project has delivered significant beneficial Customer and Business impact:
Customer Impact
3% increase in customer satisfaction leading to 130 bps improvement in our CSAT Embedding intelligence within our CRM has allowed to set expectations to our customers on unavoidable delays 6% reduction in repeat dispatch NLU capability provides 360 degrees insight on customer’s pain point across the journey, allowing agents to be proactive in their responses
Business Impact
10% reduction in cycle time within CSG leading to reduced case backlog
~225K contacts avoided annually within support services through proactive recommendations
~450K dispatches reduced annually in support services by improved troubleshooting effectiveness
25% reduction in “Time to Value” (TTV) within deployment services
Next Steps
• Expand the intelligence to all product lines offered by Dell Technologies over the next 2 years
• Explore offering CCA as-a-service to our external customers driving topline revenue
• Strengthen our measures to protect data privacy, alleviate model bias, improve fairness, and adopt ethical and green AI strategies especially as we are dealing with natural language data
• Reduce experiment/launch duration by 2X incorporating state-of-the-art techniques – multilingual transfer learning, deep learning through modular development
• Reduce maintenance costs of the analytical engine 2X by migrating to cohesive in-house tech stack, unified modelling approaches
Please see detailed description on Innovation in Leveraging Analytics for Service Excellence in Customer Support Journey the attached document: CCA-Project-Description.docx
Additional Information:
CCA has been developed by Dell Technologies Services Operations Applied Science and Engineering Team. A global team of Applied Scientists, AI/ML Product Managers, ML Engineers, AI/ML and ML Engineering Architects. The team was formed from very small beginnings approximately three years ago and has expanded ever since – currently consisting of approximately ~40 Team Members located in Ireland, India, USA, Egypt, Spain and Brazil.
DTS Operations Applied Science & Engineering team have built up knowledge and experience across a wide range of AI/ML approaches, techniques and algorithms including supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised learning, leveraging traditional Statistical Methods, ML, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU) etc. to tackle a large and very diverse range of business use-cases – delivering measurable, transformational positive Customer and Business impacts.
Natural language processing and understanding is a core strength of the team and we have developed deep expertise in this area. Our customers reach out through a range of channels , generating significant volumes of text data . This presents a great opportunity to learn more about our customers journey experience and help understand their support and service needs. NLP/NLU tools and products can enable DTS engage with customers, better understand customer sentiment and help improve overall customer satisfaction.