Utility Virtual Clerk: winning automation for inbound e-mails

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The virtual AI-based colleague that speeds up processes and improves the quality of execution, handling communications with a very high degree of accuracy.

The challenge

acquevenete, the integrated water service provider for more than 500,000 inhabitants across 108 municipalities in the provinces of Padua, Rovigo, Vicenza, Verona, and Venice, needed to streamline and optimize the management of the large volume of emails received from customers inquiring about contracts and services to ensure a quick and effective response.

Communications, such as those related to contract transfers or connection problems, used to be classified and entered into the CRM system manually- a timeconsuming activity for staff that was thus engaged in repetitive low-added value activities.

The solution

acquevenete turned to Fincons Group to automate the process of categorizing inbound emails and entering them into its internal CRM. First, Fincons introduced the innovative Utility Virtual Clerk (UVC), a “virtual colleague” who, thanks to AI, deep learning and Machine Learning technologies learns to automatically recognize and classify communications, improving business processes and freeing up staff from repetitive and low-value tasks.

Subsequently, together with acquevenete, Fincons identified contract transfer requests as the most burdensome communications because they require a lot of resource and validation. Fincons then upgraded the UVC, so it could automatically read and interpret the forms related to transfers, further improving the efficiency of the entire process. Indeed, the UVC easily recognizes recurring terms, requests, images, documents, and attachments, providing users with appropriate responses and correctly directing internal activities to follow up on the requests received.

The benefits

Over the course of a year, thanks to close cooperation between Fincons and acquevenete and to ongoing fine-tuning of the solution, the UVC was trained to classify communications with increasing effectiveness, handling a considerable volume of emails (up to 2’000 per month).

To date, 99% of inbound communications are handled automatically by the UVC with a very high degree of accuracy, between 70% and 80%, leaving only those files where users have not provided all the required data to be handled manually.

UVC has speeded up processes and improved their quality of execution, freeing up resources for higher value-added activities and improving the level of customer service