Asuntosäätiö Improves Customer Service with AI
Asuntosäätiö is a significant owner of residential properties in Finland. It is a strategic goal of Asuntosäätiö’s to have the most satisfied and longest-lasting customers in the industry, which is why customer understanding is an important focus of their operations.
Evitec Solutions and Asuntosäätiö have been collaborating closely on data platforms for several years. In the latest project, AI was brought in to help improve the analysability of customer calls and thereby enhance the quality of customer service.
More Precise, Consistent Information About Customer Needs
Asuntosäätiö keeps records of all customer calls and their contents. It is important for Asuntosäätiö to understand what issues customers are calling about and what larger themes emerge from the mass of calls.
The work of Asuntosäätiö’s service experts includes writing a summary of each received call, which is then saved in the information system. In early 2024, Asuntosäätiö introduced a new phone system that enabled call transcription. This created an opportune moment to experiment with using AI to produce summaries.
Asuntosäätiö’s Data Analytics Manager Pauli Sivula explains that previous experiences with speech analytics were not very promising, but now that technology has developed sufficiently, it was time to test AI again.
— I am really surprised and satisfied with how much AI has improved and can now help us develop service quality in a new way, Sivula states.
The main goal of the project at hand was to reduce manual workload in customer work and ensure that call summaries would be consistent and of high quality. This way, AI helps ensure that important matters always appear in the summaries, which also improves continuous data analysability.
Asuntosäätiö’s customer interface employees were happy about the new way of working. There has been no fear that AI would replace humans. With this solution, employees receiving customer calls can closely track the issues customers are calling about and quickly address emerging themes.
Antti Lehtosaari, Asuntosäätiö’s Customer Service Manager, explains:
— The solution enables continuous improvement of our service and faster response to customer needs. The summaries are precise enough to easily get an overall picture of the call contents. The summaries also help during the next call, where our employee can see the topic the customer last called about and can serve the customer more accurately. AI has thus helped us focus on the essential and also improve our efficiency.
Information Security and Quality Assurance
Information security was at the center of the project, as calls involve confidential information. Pauli Sivula emphasizes that it was crucial to remove sensitive information from the summaries and ensure that all operations comply with GDPR.
The project used new technologies, such as Azure OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, Matillion for ETL orchestration, and Snowflake for cloud data warehousing. Call transcriptions are sent to the GPT-4o model for summarization. The summaries are processed in the system at the end of the day, after which they are available for analysis. The quality of AI-generated summaries has been monitored to ensure they accurately represent the matters discussed.
— The AI-generated summaries were compared with summaries created by employees for quality assurance, and so far, the quality has proven to be sufficiently good, Sivula says.
Agile Collaboration and Direct Communication
Asuntosäätiö chose Evitec as a project partner based on previous collaboration and good experiences. Starting a project with a familiar partner is easy because integrations are already in place and both people and data are well-known.
The collaboration in the AI project went smoothly and efficiently.
— Working with Evitec has been truly seamless. Their ability to adapt to our needs, along with their expertise and professionalism, have made this project successful, Sivula praises.
— Our advantage is agility. We are the right size of company to communicate directly without bureaucracy, says Toni Muikku, Project Manager at Evitec Solutions.
Asuntosäätiö is considering opportunities to expand the use of AI solutions. In the future, it could be used, for example, in analysing customer feedback. As technology continues to develop, other use cases may also be worth exploring.
— The possibilities of using AI are enormous, and we’re looking forward together to what the future will bring, says Muikku.
Asuntosäätiö
Asuntosäätiö is one of the largest domestic residential property owners in Finland. Asuntosäätiö was founded in 1951 to address housing shortages and develop Finnish urban construction models. Today, Asuntosäätiö offers around 18,000 homes in over 30 municipalities, and Asuntosäätiö’s apartments are home to over 33,000 residents.
Evitec Solutions
Evitec Solutions is a Nordic developer of financial sector software solutions, a provider of consulting services, and a bold innovator in the industry. Their offerings also include analytics and data management services for multiple sectors. Evitec Solutions has a Microsoft Solutions Partner recognition in the areas of data and AI, as well as digital and application innovation.