Vodafone today announced the European-wide rollout of SuperTOBi, its new customer-focused generative AI (GenAI)-driven virtual assistant.
Powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI, SuperTOBi can understand and respond to complex customer inquiries faster than traditional chatbots. It has been deployed in Italy and Portugal, and will launch in Germany and Turkey from this month, with other markets due to follow later this year.
The online chat service is the next generation of Vodafone's existing chatbot, TOBi, which already supports customers in 13 countries across Europe and Africa and understands 11 languages. SuperTOBi is a key initiative in Vodafone's wider customer experience transformation, all underpinned by its reallocated investment of €140 million this financial year.
SuperTOBi can interpret entire sentences and phrases, overcoming the limitations of existing chatbot technology, which can usually only answer simple questions based on a few keywords. It also engages with customers in a more natural conversational way, rather than providing one- or two-word answers, providing a more personalized experience. It also automatically routes questions it cannot answer to someone who can.
Vodafone Portugal customers are already benefiting from SuperTOBi when booking. As a result, first-time resolution rates have increased from 15% to 60%, and Vodafone's online Net Promoter Score (which asks respondents to rate their experience) has improved by 14 points to 64 points (above 50 points is considered an excellent result). Other customer journeys, such as billing, have also been added.
SuperTOBi is complemented by an enhanced bot assistant, “SuperAgent”, used by Vodafone's customer care agents, and a search facility, “SuperSearch”, on Vodafone's customer-facing website.
SuperAgent is based on Microsoft Azure OpenAI's Agent Copilot solution and helps human agents quickly search and find answers to complex queries and multiple questions. In Ireland, SuperAgent assists agents by sending them summaries of online customer conversations so customers don't have to repeat themselves. It also uses information exclusively from Vodafone's corporate and private knowledge databases, making it more reliable than publicly available information.
