Copec’s bet on an AI-based customer service ecosystem - BNamericas

Copecadopted generative artificial intelligence to strengthen its ecosystem of products and services in energy, mobility and convenience, seeking to improve customer service as business transformation makes processes more complex.

The company chose to implement a first layer of service with generative AI on WhatsApp, its main channel with customers, and to develop a hybrid system that combines human and AI agents, which has made it possible to reduce resolution times eightfold, cut abandonment rates to a third, and raise satisfaction levels.

“The premise we had from the beginning is that we are incorporating technology to generate value for customers, not to generate efficiency,” said Tomás Irarrázaval, deputy manager of Technology and Business at Copec, in a conversation with journalists during the annualAWSevent.

Copec created a multi-agent system on the AWS Bedrock platform using Claude language models from Anthropic. The company defined which interactions can be resolved through AI and which must be referred to a human agent. “We must be able to identify this very quickly so as not to generate unnecessary noise for the client,” pointed out Irarrázaval.

The diversity of requests —such as inquiries about loyalty programs, points, complaints, or problems with credit cards— required the development of specialized agents. The architecture includes an orchestrator agent and between five and 10 expert agents. “One can grow [the number of agents] as much as one wants, and if one manages to build a good architecture, one can be quite efficient,” he pointed out. “The important thing is to think through that architecture carefully so that processing times do not start to get longer and it does not start taking too long to respond to the customer.”

According to Irarrázaval, AI handles 79% of the interactions they manage monthly, around 12,000 through WhatsApp. The tests began eight months ago and, since a month ago, the tool has been widely available for customers and some of the subsidiaries.

Copec is considering expanding the use of AI agents to other customer service channels, although no decisions have been made yet. In particular, the company still has doubts regarding the use of generative voice AI for telephone service. “While we are starting to explore this, we are going to run tests and see how good it can be; we are not convinced that this is the strategy we want to follow,” he said.

Meanwhile, the next step is to leverage AI to analyze and obtain more information about customer interactions and measure compliance with service processes.

(The original version of this content was written in Spanish)