Southeastern handles 80% of customer interactions through ServiceNow Virtual Agent

The solution

UP3 recommended implementing ServiceNow Virtual Agent and embedding it in the Southeastern website, as the channel that customers use to contact Southeastern. Southeastern were already licensed for Virtual Agent with their ServiceNow provision, and it could be integrated with their existing ServiceNow platform right out of the box.

By providing robust data from their call centres around the topics customers were most frequently asking about, the UP3 team built out user stories to build the Virtual Agent conversation flows. This data was used to configure the Virtual Agent, meaning that at launch it was already tailored to service the specific needs of Southeastern customers, using its AI to identify keywords and phrases and then return the correct information to customers.

It was also really important to Southeastern that customers have access to a real person at every step of the process, and this option was built into every stage of the Virtual Agent journey.

Once Virtual Agent had been helping customers for a few months, UP3 updated it with an enhancement release, upgrading its topics and keywords to make it more relevant to customers, and adding in a new topic around industrial action. These enhancements were all built into Southeastern’s ServiceNow roadmap and sprints and were implemented as part of the UP3 ServiceNow Managed Service.

The outcome

Since going live, 80% of Southeastern's digital customer interactions have been resolved through the Virtual Agent, with only 20% of requests needing to be passed to a real person due to the complexity of the query. This is a testament to how quickly and easily Virtual Agent serves customers, since the majority of customers were served by the Virtual Agent without feeling the need to be routed to a live agent. With 21,000 interactions handled in 8 months, Virtual Agent has significantly reduced pressure on call centre agents, and improved customer service by empowering customers to quickly and easily self-serve. Southeastern continues to collect overwhelmingly positive feedback related to customer’s interaction with the Virtual Agent.

Already there is a plan to work with UP3 to roll out Virtual Agent to more pages on the Southeastern website, to assist with more processes like buying tickets. Additionally, it is going to be implemented onto the Southeastern App so that customers have access to the Virtual Agent on every possible channel and can engage with this valuable self-serving tool at any time.