The AA
Helping The AA learn how to evolve customer service delivery through conversational AI.
As a household name organisation in the UK, The AA have been developing technologies to serve their membership’s needs for generations. With a broad range of products and services across Roadside, Insurance, Hotels and more, they deliver a multitude of service propositions using different customer service delivery mechanisms. This landscape presents both a challenge and opportunity for implementing emerging technologies for change, across the organisation.
How might we harness AI and new technology architectures to help deliver services more efficiently, that would simultaneously improve the customer experience?
We wanted to help by starting small in a way that would help to determine the best underlying methods to enable implementation of a new AI-driven technology architecture that could scale across customer touchpoints.
Our first step was to explore a specific problem space that had developed traction internally, in order to quickly decide what assumptions were valuable to progress and which should immediately be de-prioritised.
With a team of users, internal experts, technologists and strategists, we spent a day building a set of use cases and prototypes, and simultaneously mapped a market sizing of the opportunity we were designing for.
This gave us a set of proof points and prototypes that could be shared internally, which showed that rather than solving a specific tactical opportunity, in this instance we needed to redirect efforts toward a broader set of strategic technical and business critical themes.
Our initial work provided a business case for a wider technology, market, vendor and stakeholder assessment before progressing to the next stage.
In this we illustrated the technical choices The AA should make for a next stage test, and an area of the business that was ready with the right resources and operational challenges to be used for the next test.
Through collaboration we defined the vision and outcomes for the next small-scale prototype. We assembled a cross-disciplinary team poised to provide the inputs and collaboration needed to test both the technology and operational demands required; to design, build and train a new conversational AI solution for a specific area of the business.
During a 2-week sprint, we defined the content, designed a technical architecture and designed and built a front-end prototype for training and testing.
Completing this next iteration sprint rapidly unlocked a range of critical insights; internal resource requirements, data organisation, supplier viability, and business readiness for scaling a solution ready for market, within and across organisational verticals.
