The Challenge
IP Australia has a strong ‘digital first’ mandate, coupled with a desire to reflect the inventiveness of its customer base through the use of innovative tools for managing IP rights. IP Australia needed a partner with experience, expertise and cutting-edge technology to uphold that vision. In particular, it sought new support channels that would augment the success of its website redevelopment, and drive digital uptake.
Datacom embraced this challenge with the launch of ‘Alex’, the Australian Government’s first integrated virtual assistant and web-chat digital experience. Alex is the front face of IP Australia’s website, engaging customers directly, providing answers to common questions and actively learning from customer queries. This tool combines Datacom’s extensive expertise in human-centred design, analytics to enable evidence-based decision making, and integration with business processes to expedite customer interactions and optimise the digital channel.
The Datacom Difference
Datacom’s relationship with IP Australia continues to grow and strengthen. Having started as a contact centre outsourcer and evolving into a strategic partner, our long-term roadmap has already seen an increase in online transactions from 12% in 2013 to approximately 99% today, through the added insight delivered by these new tools, improving the customer experience overall.
Created through a collaboration with Nuance, a leading global provider of voice and language solutions for business, Datacom utilised its virtual assistant platform and worked closely with IP Australia to design the conversation strategy, website and web-chat integration, alongside the core content that would inform Alex’s answers.
Since launch in May 2016, Alex has had a significant impact on IP Australia’s digital engagement strategy. In 2013, only 12% of the agency’s 800,000 customer interactions a year utilised digital channels and this has grown to its current level of 99.6% digital adoption. Alex has supported over 50,000 customer interactions and assisted in maintaining IP Australia’s customer service satisfaction ratings at over 84%.
Alex’s successful implementation has been recognised with an Intelligent Assistant Award win at the 4th Annual Intelligent Assistant Awards in San Francisco.
In collaboration with our partners, a roadmap has now been designed that will see Alex progressively do even more to enhance the digital customer experience, acting as the common thread across the entire journey for IP Australia customers.
"Only through this in-depth partnership were we able to launch Alex, which now offers IP Australia an intelligent, 24-hour self-service customer experience.”
Patricia Kelly, Director-General, IP Australia
See Alex in action: A discussion with IP Australia's Intelligent Assistant