Superloop gives Teddy and Mo an AI sibling in chase for margins

Superloop is expanding its use of AI to increase margins, launching a new assistant in its business customer and resale partner self-service portal.

The new AI assistant, called “Kay”, joins its retail self-service agents “Teddy” and “Mo” on the frontlines of Superloop’s customer service operations in allowing the telco to divert queries away from human operators.

Superloop said that Kay would be able to initiate a range of workflows to manage common tasks including checking broadband availability, generating quotes, running network diagnostics, tracking order and raising support tickets.

Kay is a conversational agent that will be built directly into its Krypto business self-service platform facing resellers and partners.

Superloop was unable to reveal how much human customer support work that it expected it would divert to Kay.

“It's still early days, so we're not providing forecasts around interaction volumes. Our focus is on improving the customer and partner experience by making common tasks faster and easier to complete,” a Superloop spokesperson said.

The carrier also remained tight-lipped on how its AI strategy was impacting headcount in support operations other than to confirm that it was improving margins.

“Superloop has shown it can scale to support customer growth and improve profitability over a number of years. Kay is another of our initiatives designed to both drive efficiency and provide a CX that others are not able to do, through our integrated stack,” the carrier’s spokesperson said.

Superloop’s AI strategy is seen by investors as vital to keeping its opex contained while business goes through a period rapid expansion subscriber base which grew 28 percent to reach 935,000 by the end of June.

At its full-year results in August, Superloop chief financial officer Dean Tognella said that the company’s investments in the technology had “broken the linear relationship” between growing its customer base and taking on additional labour cost in its customer service operations.

The company also provided an update on the progress of Teddy and Mo, revealing that they were “enabled” in 63 percent of customer interactions.

Superloop said that they handled 34 percent of customer support interactions with 400,000 calls avoided. In addition, it said that that its fault remediation AI bots, Refreshify and Exray, tackled 500,000 customer interactions with no further human assistance needed in 85 percent of cases.

However, amid the positivity was a warning. Chief executive Paul Tyler said the telco was approaching a limit in how much opex cost its current AI technology could take out of the business.

He said that the rate of improvement in its opex-to-sales ratio was bottoming out.

“We’ve tried to give you a sense of that in the number of calls that have been avoided over the last year – you can form your own view on what’s the cost of the call – and the opex-to-sales trend that we’ve been tracking over the last couple of years, I think we’ve gone down from something like 20 percent a couple of years ago mid-13s (percent) at this stage.

“I think that can go a bit further but it is certainly flattening out. There is a floor that we will get to with opex where … we just can't cut any further,” Tyler said at the time.

Asked whether Superloop could expect to extract further efficiency gains from AI beyond Kay, Superloop’s spokesperson said: “We see AI as an ongoing capability rather than a single initiative.”