Automated customer communication at Styria Marketing Services – with jtel voice bots

With the KLARA and PRIMA voice bots, Styria Marketing Services automates recurring customer requests concerning delivery and vacation services, around the clock and fully integrated into its existing systems.

Overview

Styria Marketing Services GmbH & Co KG (SMS) is the central service center for the Austrian brands of the Styria Media Group. Around 900,000 customer contacts per year place high demands on efficiency, reliability and service quality.

Together with jtel, SMS has increased the automation of customer communication. The intelligent voice bots KLARA for Kleine Zeitung and PRIMA for Die Presse now automatically handle recurring requests relating to delivery and vacation services around the clock.

Challenge

A large proportion of incoming calls concern standardized requests such as delivery complaints, delivery suspensions or forwarding. These processes are clearly structured but generate high call volumes and tie up valuable customer service resources.

The key requirements were greater availability, faster response times, less manual work on recurring tasks and freeing agents to handle more complex customer requests.

Solution

Together with jtel, Styria Marketing Services developed the KLARA and PRIMA voice bots. They are based on modern speech recognition using Microsoft Azure Speech Services and large language model technology from Mistral AI.

The voice assistants understand free-form spoken input and are fully integrated into the existing systems. Through the SAP connection, identification, delivery complaints, delivery suspensions and forwarding can be processed automatically, recorded in the system and confirmed by email.

Who is Styria Marketing Services?

Styria Marketing Services is the central service center for the Austrian brands of the Styria Media Group. For more than 20 years, SMS has supported readers and users of Kleine Zeitung, Die Presse, Die Furche and various Styria magazines, among others.

Customer service handles around 900,000 contacts per year, roughly half by email and half by telephone. Around 70 agents work at locations in Graz, Klagenfurt and Vienna, many of them primarily from home.

The main tasks include ongoing customer contact by email and telephone, subscription administration and billing, delivery complaints, vacation services, outbound campaigns and digital support.

64 percent of calls concern delivery complaints and vacation services. Online self-service options already existed for these topics, but there was no comparable automated solution for the telephone channel.

The result

More than a third of calls about delivery complaints and vacation services can now be processed completely automatically. Around 20 percent of these requests are successfully handled outside normal opening hours.

In total, 23 percent of incoming calls are handled entirely by the jtel voice bots, including processing in the ERP system.

Further benefits include a significant reduction in the customer service team's workload, seamless integration into existing workflows, and fast, efficient process handling.

Added value with jtel

Cloud deployment requires no additional on-site hardware and allows the voice bot solution to be expanded flexibly.

Through the intuitive backend, SMS can optimize processes itself, adapt LLM prompts and further develop routing logic.

SAP integration enables customer identification and the automatic processing and storage of delivery complaints, delivery suspensions and forwarding requests.

For reliable address recognition, the official street directory is regularly imported from SAP.

Flexible LLM integration allows SMS to respond to new models and providers. Reporting and real-time data are supplied from the database and visualized using tools including Power BI.