Upgrading 25 million homes to full fiber broadband is a logistical feat in itself. Doing it while delivering a consistently good customer experience – across 700 communications providers, each with their own messaging – is another challenge entirely.
That was the reality facing Openreach before it deployed NiCE’s proactive AI agents. Engineers were showing up to empty homes, customers were getting conflicting information depending on their provider, and the company’s NPS sat below zero.
In this video interview, CX Today’s Rhys Fisher sits down with Chris Herbert, Director of Customer Service at Openreach, Eifion Lloyd, Senior Manager of Customer Enablement and Strategy, and Giles Bryan, General Manager of Proactive AI at NiCE.
Together, they walk through how a proof of concept built on daily Excel uploads eventually scaled into a deployment spanning 15 million customer journeys – reducing missed appointments by a third, cutting inbound contact volumes by a similar margin, and pushing Openreach’s Trustpilot score from 2.0 to 4.7 across 300,000 reviews.
The conversation covers what it took to get internal and external buy-in, how NiCE’s platform handles landline-only customers without a separate configuration, and a generative AI result that didn’t make the press release: a 22% reduction in install cancellations from an ask-me-anything chatbot trialed late last year.
On the lessons learned, Herbert is candid:
“We could have stopped when it was a bit hard. But we knew by listening to our customers that this was worth pushing through.”
Check out the full interview to find out precisely how a CX vendor delivers an implementation of this scale.
