Zen AI makes for smarter customer experiences

Dean Burdon - Zen Service Management Director

Around 18 months ago Zen set out on an AI journey with one thought in mind. The AI tools we wanted to create had to solve real business problems. They had to make customer experiences demonstrably better.

We didn’t want to do AI for the sake of it, or because everyone else was doing it. We didn’t start out on our journey intent on slashing costs. Instead, we identified two real business challenges that we thought AI could help us solve:

After experimenting with ChatGPT and Large Language Models (LLMs), we realised that AI-driven chatbots presented an opportunity to innovate in a way that would improve the experience of our teams and our customers. A year and a half of hard work later, the results are up and running and already doing what we hoped they would do.

Let’s introduce Zeni, Beni and Jeni.

Zeni and Beni

Our two AI chatbots, Zeni and Beni, are making customer experiences better.

Zeni

Zeni is our website concierge. She sits quietly in the corner of the screen, ready to help whenever you need her.

Ask a question and she springs into action. Zeni can guide you through Zen products and services, help with simple support queries, and point you in the right direction. She knows whether full fibre broadband is available in your street, can suggest the right package based on the kind of household you live in, and will run live checks to get accurate answers. She’ll ask a few clarifying questions if needed, help you set up your router, or share tips to improve your speed.

She can do plenty more too. But the important thing is this: Zeni is a lot smarter than the old versions of ‘live chat’. She holds real conversations, quickly sifts through huge amounts of data, and gets you to the answer without friction. Traditional live chat was often heavily scripted and inflexible, which could be frustrating when a question didn’t fit neatly into a set path. Zeni is designed to be smarter, more natural, and genuinely helpful.

Beni

Beni is our authenticated support assistant. You’ll only see him once you’ve logged into My Account – our residential customer portal. Because you’re signed in, Beni knows who you are and can securely access your account. That means he can answer specific questions about your service, check billing details, and make changes for you in real time.

Ask him about call routing, assigning an IPv6 address or when you last called your sister in Australia and Beni will give you the answer. Ask him to make a change to your service and he’ll do it then and there.

Round-the-clock support

Zeni and Beni have proved a huge success. A couple of years ago our live chat service would handle around 900 chats a month, and every interaction was managed by a human. Today, Zeni and Beni handle up to 5,000 chats a month.

That’s not saying that Zeni and Beni can do everything, and an experienced human agent is always on hand to take over a conversation if that’s what either the customer or the bot think needs to happen. In fact, we’ve made it incredibly easy for customers to transfer to a human agent whenever they want to. 

But our AI bots handle around 50% of all chats entirely by themselves, and they handle them well. We use the same quality control ratings for Zeni and Beni as we do for our human agents, and the AI is now scoring as well as - or better than - their flesh and blood colleagues.

For customers, the benefits are clear. Zeni and Beni never get tired, so they’re available around-the-clock. Nor have we used AI to replace staff. Instead, our human agents have been given more time to dedicate to more complex queries, creating even better customer experiences.

Jeni is our in-house help

Zeni and Beni help to solve the first of the two challenges mentioned at the start. Jeni is our answer to the second. Jeni is a universal knowledge bot, and our aim is that she becomes a single point of truth across the Zen universe.

She’s already playing that role for our support teams, who can ask Jeni for the information they need to help with a customer query. Jeni sifts through mountains of accumulated Zen knowledge to find answers to even the most obscure requests. By doing so, she helps our support teams solve customer issues faster and more completely.

We’ve also expanded Jeni into HR, so she can give colleagues information about everything from holiday allowance to flexible working - and lots of other things besides. She’s helping our sales teams too. Eventually, she’ll be the go-to knowledge centre for everyone at Zen, ensuring that best practice and the latest information is instantly available to anyone in the business.

Bringing Zeni and Beni to business

We’ve come pretty far in the last 18 months, and there’s a lot more to come. We’ll be adding new features and improvements to all our bots on a regular basis.

At the moment, Zeni and Beni work with our residential customers, but we’re confident that these super-smart assistants will also be helping businesses and partners with their sales and support enquiries by the summer. Tailoring Zeni and Beni for B2B is a tricky development task because businesses have more complex needs than residential customers, but we’re already well on the way to creating something of real value.

Further down the line, we could offer the expertise we’ve accumulated over the last 18 months as a professional service, helping business customers and partners create their own AI solutions. We’re also talking to customers about the possibility of offering white label versions of Jeni, Beni and Zeni as standalone products. If there’s a real need, we’ll add it to our AI roadmap.

We think this valuable AI can make a difference to customer businesses, just as it has our own. Zeni, Beni and Jeni are helping Zen scale at a lower cost than would otherwise be the case. Most importantly, they’re bringing better experiences to both customers and colleagues. Watch this space for further developments.  

1. Zen’s support team is excellent but small. Agents are online from 8am to 8pm. From late evening till early morning, Zen customers can’t get help from our human support services.
   
2. When Zen staff retire or move on, they take their accumulated experience with them. Sometimes, that amounts to decades of expertise lost to the business. That’s a significant knowledge retention problem.