The National Social Security Fund (NSSF) of Uganda has introduced an AI-powered digital customer assistant named ‘Sanyu’ based on Avaya technology
Sanyu, an advanced chatbot that now serves as the NSSF’s front line of customer service, aims to reduce waiting times for customers who contact the NSSF by providing easy self-service for routine transactions – in the process freeing up human agents so that they can address more complex requests.
“We estimated that our customer service personnel were spending around three-quarters of their day on easily-answered queries, such as statement requests, registration, and FAQs,” said Richard Byarugaba, managing director, NSSF.
“By automating most of these interactions, our agents now focus on transactions that require human intervention, typically at the higher-end of the value chain. This transformation paid off during the pandemic, as lockdowns and distancing reduced our customers’ visits to physical branches and increased the demand on our call centres and online platforms.”
The deployment comes as the NSSF’s latest effort to digitise the customer experience. Over the last two years the organisation has moved over 94% of its member transactions and interactions over to digital channels, with only the remaining 6% of customers using walk-in service centres. That digital shift, however, necessitated a transformation in how inbound requests are handled.
“We had been struggling to keep up with the high volume of frequent queries coming in, and we did not have a solution that offered customers the same experience and convenience on our various different digital platforms. We wanted to have unlimited capacity to respond instantly, any time, to customer queries. There was also a need to free up our front-end employees from routine support requests and enable them to focus on more complex tasks,” said Byarugaba.
Since October 2020, nearly 164,000 customer transactions and interactions have been registered through Sanyu, and the NSSF is confident the solution will contribute to an improvement in its Net Promoter Score and first contact resolution rates.
