Collaboration with PKSHA Communication to Enhance Contact Center Business

ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Tatsushi Shingu, President and CEO; hereinafter "CTC") will start collaboration with PKSHA Communication Inc. (headquartered in Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo; Tetsuya Sato, Representative Director ), which offers comprehensive solutions in the field of customer success. The collaboration aims to provide services for improving efficiency of inquiry handling duties and reducing operator workload at contact centers. We will offer the services mainly to industries managing contact centers such as financial services, retail, mail-order, and restaurant and food service, and aim to achieve sales of 2 billion yen over the next three years.

Contact centers, which serve as a point of contact between companies and their customers, are working on improving operation efficiency, reducing manpower, and enhancing customer satisfaction. In recent years, there has been a growing expectation for utilizing AI technology to further improve their service quality and efficiency.

The new services leverage PKSHA Communication’s “PKSHA AI Suite for Contact Center,” a conversational AI engine for contact centers, to improve accuracy of automated responses to customer inquiries given to customer support organizations with advanced AI technology.

Additionally, by combining the services with CTC’s consultation services for digital transformation and customer experience (CX) improvement at contact centers, we will support streamlining contact center operations and reducing operator workload based on assessment of customer support operations and identified key challenges.

PKSHA AI Suite for Contact Center is a conversational engine, mainly consisting of four AI SaaS (AI-powered SaaS). The engine utilizes response data obtained from each of the following services to share knowledge and analyze Voice of Customer (VoC), thereby improving the overall quality and productivity of contact center operations.

Details of the four AI-powered SaaS are as follows:

1. PKSHA Chatbot
   An AI chatbot service that provides accurate responses to user inquiries based on context. It can be flexibly customized by being tuned to use company-specific terminology and industry-specific expressions. It can also perform complex tasks such as receiving inquiries and carrying out various procedures, thereby improving the non-voice response ratio and supporting efficiency improvement of customer support operations.
2. PKSHA FAQ
   An FAQ service utilizing technology to process natural language or human everyday language. It predicts answers and displays them during inquiry input and automatically creates appropriate answers for frequently asked questions by referring to past response records. It always provides the latest information to support the automatic resolution of customer inquiries. The FAQ website can be flexibly designed, and multiple FAQ websites can be managed centrally, which is expected to improve operation efficiency.
3. PKSHA Voicebot
   A service that automatically provides voice-based responses 24/7/365 on behalf of human operators. It can response to standard inquiries such as questions about products or services, support request reception, and reservations, which maintains response rates during busy times and time slots/times with fewer operators, and thereby ensures stable contact center operations.
4. PKSHA Speech Insight
   A service that transcribes phone calls in real-time and automatically summarizes them using high-precision speech recognition function. It significantly reduces the administrative workload of operators and includes features for supervisors to monitor operator call status in real-time, improving their response quality.

CTC has over 30 years of experience and expertise in building contact center systems and data analysis platforms, and will comprehensively support design, building and maintenance/operation of communication platforms utilizing PKSHA AI Suite for Contact Center.

Going forward, CTC will continue to expand services aimed at improving efficiency of contact center operations and enhancing customer satisfaction, contributing to further digital transformation of customer companies using digital technologies.