The telecom operator has formed a partnership with the French company Illuin Technology to gradually deploy its conversational assistants. Now, AI agents answer questions subscribers ask about their invoices.
After generative AI, agentic AI is the new buzzword of the moment. Although many companies talk about it, few go beyond the POC stage. Bouygues Telecom is one of the rare French groups that can boast of having deployed AI agents on a scale. After giving its employees the opportunity to create their own AI agents by providing them with the Self AI platform from the French startup Prisme.ai, the telecom operator is this time tackling the improvement of its customer experience. To do this, it has formed a partnership with Illuin Technology, another French nugget in agentic AI.
Bouygues Telecom will gradually deploy agentic conversational assistants from Illuin’s Dialogue platform. These multimodal AI agents (text & voice) are capable of responding simultaneously to several types of customer requests and processing them autonomously. The objective for the subsidiary of the Bouygues group is, according to Alain Angerame, its customer relations & employee experience director, to “streamline the conversation with the customer, to open up the field of possibilities and no longer limit yourself to single answers.”
To automate the processing of the flow of incoming calls from its customer relations centers, the operator has a voice assistant which qualifies the request, responds to simple requests or, failing that, directs the customer to the right advisor. “This system has until now been based on key words and parameterized decision trees,” continues Alain Angerame. “This approach required a lot of work since you have to imagine all possible scenarios.”
Answer open questions
The move to agentic AI must free the chakras. “Unlike a rigid architecture, difficult to maintain and offering a fairly poor user experience, our approach is based on different specialized agents who make the conversation richer and more fluid,” explains Robert Vesoul, CEO & co-founder of Illuin Technology. For example, an agent can explain an invoice and hand over to another agent if the customer mentions a change of plan or a problem with their box.”
For the moment, Bouygues Telecom has started with bill management, an appropriate use case because it is based on an infinite number of scenarios. A subscriber can call for an excess of the package or for communications made abroad. “It’s a complex area because the combinatorics are enormous and impossible to script entirely,” judges Alain Angerame.
Like an advisor, the voicebot, called “Beety”, ends the exchange with open questions. “Did I answer your question correctly?” “Do you have anything else to discuss?” “If a customer wants, for example, to equip themselves with the new Wifi 7 box, another agent takes over and the transaction can go as far as sending the box,” illustrates the customer relations & employee experience director.
An automation gain of 50%
The issue is not neutral since questions related to billing represent approximately 20 to 25% of calls to 1064, or a volume of 50,000 calls per month. The rise in power was gradual. Today, 95% of calls on this billing topic are handled by the Illuin solution compared to 5% in June. “We have improved the automation rate on this subject by 50%,” rejoices Alain Angerame. The customer satisfaction rating has also increased by 15% in just one month.” At the end of the exchange, the bots are, in fact, directly evaluated by the subscriber as well as the customer advisors.
To provide relevant answers to subscribers, Illuin’s “squad” of AI agents queries Salesforce CRM or Bouygues Telecom’s documentary databases via APIs. Hosted on AWS, its agnostic platform can accommodate any LLM. In this case, Bouygues Telecom chose Gemini from Google. In terms of supervision, a module, called “Agent Analyzer”, analyzes customer interactions and ensures that agents behave as expected, a bit like Quality Monitoring for human advisors. “We also use safeguards to avoid undesirable behavior, such as denigrating the brand or mentioning competitors,” adds Robert Vesoul.
At Bouygues Telecom, an AI checks different scenarios every day while customer advisors test the voice server or customer verbatims a posteriori to get a human feeling. At the same time, the telecom operator uses process mining on its call flows to detect possible micro-leaks or malfunctions. In order to adopt the tone of the brand, the voicebot feeds on its “customer code”. Published three and a half years ago, it lists the postures and terminology that customer advisors must use.
Building on its initial successes, Bouygues Telecom plans to switch all of its voice interactions to the Illuin platform by the end of 2026. That’s 20 million contacts per year. “If we automate customer relations in a 24/7 approach, we invest in parallel in customer relations,” concludes Alain Angerame. “There is no opposition between the two worlds, human and digital. Our customer advisors are available for complex cases and to assist our customers.”
