Over the past few years, Altice’s Optimum broadband service has been dinged for poor customer service. Customers have complained that they were not receiving the advertised internet speeds for their plans; that there were hidden and unexplained fees on their bills; and that they often experienced long hold times, unreturned calls and unresolved technical issues.
These kinds of customer service issues have plagued U.S. cable companies for years, with Altice being no exception. But now, Altice is working to proactively improve the situation with help from AI.
An Altice spokesperson said the company has been working to improve its customer service since Dennis Mathew took over as CEO in October 2022. It claims that Optimum’s net promoter score (NPS) has seen a 26-point increase over the past two years across its 21-state footprint.
This week Altice announced it was working to improve its customer service via AI using at least a three-pronged approach. First, it is expanding its relationship with Google Cloud. In addition, Optimum uses an in-house AI virtual assistant named AVA to help gauge customer’s emotions as they’re interacting with customer service reps. And the company is also implementing an AI platform from Cresta to improve its sales rates.
Fierce Network spoke with Luciano Ramos, EVP and chief product and tech officer with Optimum, about the company’s use of AI.
Ramos said Altice has been working with Google Cloud for several years. “Most of our data environment runs on Google,” he said. “We’ve been on that journey for almost five years, moving data to Google Cloud, which gave us a great foundation for all this stuff on AI even before AI was mainstream.”
This week, Optimum said it will use Google Cloud’s Gen AI technology – including Google’s Customer Engagement Suite, Vertex AI platform and Gemini models – to improve customer service across web interactions, mobile apps, call centers and in-person kiosks.
In addition, Optimum is leveraging its own home-grown virtual agent, called AVA. Ramos said AVA runs on top of the Google Cloud big data environment. “It basically uses Google AI models and data to assist an agent when an agent is conversing with the customer,” he said.
Optimum has been using AVA for over two years now, and it’s already handling more than 50% of customer inquiries.
According to Optimum, AVA helps customer service reps respond to how customers are feeling.
“You can literally tell if a customer is liking what you’re telling the customer based on how they are reacting to the offers, the words that they’re using, the tone that they’re using. So you can understand customer sentiment in real time, and you can change the offers based on that sentiment,” Ramos said.
Finally, this week Optimum said it will deploy Cresta’s GenAI-powered technologies at scale to enhance its sales interactions with prospective customers. Cresta Conversation Intelligence and Agent Assist will help Optimum agents to improve sales conversion rates and assist with sales coaching.
Ramos said Cresta trains agents to have the best conversations they can have, using the right words, the right terminology and to understand what’s working.
“You know, today there’s a direct relationship between a really good supervisor and the impact on that group of agents, right? If you can level up all the supervisors to use the best of technology, then you have much better agents and can communicate better,” said Ramos. “So it’s a tool that supervisors will use to train our agents.”
Pulling it all together from a technology perspective, all of Optimum’s customer service calls go through Google’s natural language processing system. The AVA tool sits in front of the agent when the agent is having that conversation with the customer, assisting with real-time sentiment. And Cresta will help agents up their game for sales-related calls.