Atento Raises the Stakes with AI, Sets the Bar for CRM Providers

For over 20 years, Atento has been going beyond the basics of customer service to create lasting bonds between brands and consumers. The global provider of Customer Relationship Management and Business Processing Outsourcing services pushes the limits of possibility to maximize every touchpoint along the customer journey, from customer care to sales to back office and technical support.

“We take pride in guaranteeing the best customer experience for our clients. That word—guarantee—is not something we take lightly,” explained President, Michael Flodin. “That’s a big promise that requires a significant commitment. We consider ourselves to be ready at every moment for our customers to have the best experience possible.”

An exceptional combination of people, solutions, channels and technology is the company’s secret sauce for delivering unique experiences that generate value for their business customers and their consumers. A sprawling team of over 150,000 outcome-driven employees forms the heart of Atento’s business model, contributing to its impressive standing as one of the only CRM/BPO companies among the “Top 25 Best Companies to Work At,” as ranked by the Great Place to Work Institute.

The company’s dynamic approach to customer engagement incorporates customer journey management and high-value solutions, supported by an innovative digital platform, to skillfully transform processes and drive measurable results. “At a time of rapid change, it’s our goal at Atento to be that resource our customers can always come to for meeting the growing needs of their consumers.”

To provide this level of support, Atento introduced new levels of agility, intelligence and efficiency using cloud-based AI transcription capabilities with Avaya Conversational Intelligence, and a combination of Avaya cloud telephony and on-premise telephony solutions.

Game-Changing AI Functionality

“At this point, nearly every company is using some form of artificial intelligence. But to what extent and to what benefit?” Flodin posed. Indeed, the technology is a crucial element of the contact center and overall transformation, but many companies struggle to get the most out of it. “It was important to us that we applied AI in a meaningful and intentional way to improve the customer experience and drive new efficiency gains. The AI transcription capabilities with the Avaya Conversational Intelligence solution have been a game-changer.”

Avaya Conversational Intelligence has enabled Atento to drive measurable increases in its customer satisfaction score. The AI solution automatically transcribes customer voice interactions into a usable format to more accurately capture conversations, better support more high-demanding in-call applications, and increase agent productivity by reducing
after-call work.

This AI functionality can also evaluate language and voice inflections to quantify next-level drivers of customer satisfaction like attitudes, opinions and emotions. This enables supervisors to interject during interactions rather than wait for survey results to create better immediate outcomes and improve the overall experience, driving higher customer satisfaction for both Atento and its customers.

"We’re getting really good results out of this, and the solution has actually led to other incredible operational benefits,” Flodin explained. For example, the company can take condensed versions of transcribed text files and auto populate them into the notes section of a client’s CRM records, reducing after-call work by approximately 65%.

The company is also experimenting with using transcription services to replace one client’s existing Net Promoter Score (NPS) program, said Flodin. “Rather than survey small samples of customers after the fact—with many of those responses typically skewing to include angrier customers—we can use transcription to monitor sentiment for 100 percent of interactions in real-time.” In this way, the company can more accurately assess in real-time whether a customer is happy, frustrated, angry or sad to immediately improve for better overall outcomes. The important factor being the ability to fix issues as they arise, in real time, rather than waiting until it is too late.

According to Flodin, “overall, we’ve been able to drastically improve the experiences we deliver while reducing total cost to serve for our customers.”

Atento was also able to create a combination of Public and Private cloud environments for its UC platform utilizing Avaya’s OneCloud approach. As one of the most flexible cloud platforms available for any size of business, users can choose where the solution lives, how they want to consume it, and how much or little they want to manage and control. In this case, Atento was able to leverage cloud telephony for handling certain applications with others being on-premise—all through one streamlined, simplified service offering.

“The question is no longer if companies are moving to the cloud but how they’re leveraging it to innovate and improve,” Flodin said. “Yet it was important to us that we had freedom of deployment. In other words, we wanted to be able to invest in cloud in a way that made sense for us. Obviously not every application is meant to be on the same cloud, or at all. Flexibility and customization were core to our decision-making.”

Using Avaya OneCloud, Atento was able to aggressively roll out cloud to 12 lines of business in four months. After a couple months of fine-tuning the solution, the company was able to simply add AI transcription services on top of it.

OneCloud also offers significant operational benefits from a geographical standpoint. “We’re getting ready to launch an operation in another country in the next month or so. With our old model, we’d have to order an MPLS circuit for that new location, which could have taken up to three months to receive,” Flodin explained. “With Avaya, we can use OneCloud as the circuit and stand up the service in a couple of days. The solution gives us a lot more flexibility to move calls around and bring up that operation more quickly, essentially providing disaster recovery capabilities as well.”

This blended cloud approach also enabled Atento to move away from a heavy CAPEX model to an OPEX approach that allowed for new levels of flexibility, both operationally and financially. “There’s a night and day difference between an ownership model, which requires a lot of sacrifice, and a cloud consumption model built on flexibility around deployment, payment and management,” said Flodin.

“With Avaya, we don’t have to come up with millions in capital to start a new center or implement new capabilities. What we pay is based on how many people are interacting on the platform every day. That’s it.”