SK Telecom launches AI-powered customer service tool to speed up responses

November 18, 2024 10:22 AM

An SK Telecom customer service agent using its AI-powered tool to handle a customer call

SK Telecom has launched a customer service centre tool driven by a proprietary AI model tailored to enhance agents' handling of customer queries.

The centre has been using SK Telecom’s self-developed Telco LLM system in beta in Korea since October.

Developed in collaboration with AI firms like Claude developer Anthropic, the model is built on a dearth of industry-specific information and is versed in the operator’s knowledge base, allowing it to assist agents by retrieving data from internal systems more quickly.

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“SK Telecom is not only focusing on improving work efficiency as it evolves into an AI customer centre but also aims to provide optimised consultations for each individual customer,” said Hong Seung-tae, who leads SK Telecom’s customer value innovation group.

SK Telecom has been betting big on AI, most recently unveiling an “AI infrastructure superhighway” across Asia and the Pacific.

Its customer centre efforts provide agents with an AI tool capable of searching through the company’s materials to help answer queries quickly.

Beyond the specially developed large language model, SK Telecom employed Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to sift through its materials to find the most accurate information to better address customer queries.

In tests conducted in the past year, SK staff have been helping improve the model using reinforcement learning to ensure it is accurate with its responses.

Since its beta use in October, the operator said it has shortened the time its customer centre staff spend searching for relevant information.

SK Telecom now plans to launch the AI tool in all of its customer centre work in 2025.

In addition to the launch, SK Telecom unveiled plans to open an automated follow-up system in December, which would summarise customer calls to determine if queries required further action.

“Based on the Telco LLM-based consultation work support system, SKT will continue to utilise various AI technologies in customer consultation work in the future to take Korea’s best customer centre consultation service to the next level,” Hong added.