Overview

Styria Marketing Services GmbH & Co KG (SMS) is the central service centre for the Austrian brands of the Styria Media Group. With around 900,000 customer contacts per year and high standards of service quality, SMS faces the challenge of handling a high volume of calls efficiently, reliably and in a customer-friendly manner.

Together with jtel, SMS has taken an innovative step towards automated customer communication. With the intelligent voice bots KLARA (Kleine Zeitung) and PRIMA (Die Presse), recurring customer enquiries about delivery and travel services are now handled automatically around the clock. The voice bots are seamlessly integrated into the existing system landscape and offer measurable added value for customers and employees.

Challenge

The majority of incoming calls to SMS concern standardised issues such as delivery complaints or temporary delivery changes. Although these issues are clearly structured, they generate a high call volume and tie up valuable customer service resources.

The key challenges were therefore:

• High call volume coupled with rising expectations regarding availability and response speed
• Limited service hours, even though customers often want to resolve their issues outside of opening hours
• High manual effort for recurring processes that were already available in online self-service
• Relieving the burden on agents to create more time for complex and consultation-intensive issues
• Ensuring consistently high service quality despite automation

The aim was to handle customer concerns more quickly and efficiently without compromising quality or customer satisfaction.

Solution

Together with jtel, Styria Marketing Services developed an intelligent, voice-based automation solution: the voice bots KLARA and PRIMA. Based on modern speech recognition (Microsoft Azure Speech Services) and large language model technology (Mistral AI), the voice assistants understand free speech input and guide customers through their requests in a targeted manner.

The voice bots are fully integrated into the existing system landscape and access SAP in real time. This means that processes such as identification, delivery complaints, delivery interruptions or forwarding can be handled completely automatically – including booking in the system and automatic confirmation by email.

The result is intuitive and efficient customer interaction available 24/7, which reduces waiting times, relieves agents and, at the same time, achieves a high level of acceptance among customers.

Who is Styria Marketing Services?

Styria Marketing Services GmbH & Co KG – SMS for short – is the central service centre for the Austrian brands of the Styria Media Group. For over 20 years, SMS has been serving readers and users of the daily newspapers Kleine Zeitung and Die Presse, the weekly newspaper Die Furche, and Styria magazines. Since 2013, SMS has been operating as an independent company with the clear goal of providing excellent service to customers and readers.

Styria Marketing Services – One for everything, everything for you!

How does customer service work at SMS?

Approximately 900,000 customer contacts per year (50% emails, 50% phone calls) Approximately 70 agents at 3 locations (Graz, Klagenfurt and Vienna) – most employees work from home up to 90% of the time.

The main topics are:

• Ongoing customer contact by email and telephone
• Subscription management and billing
• delivery complaints
• Travel services (delivery interruption, forwarding, etc.)
• Outbound welcome, quality, care and cash calls
• Digitalsupport

The challenge: handling customer enquiries faster, more efficiently and around the clock without compromising on service quality.

Topics covered by the publishers Kleine Zeitung and Die Presse

64% of all calls concern delivery complaints and travel services. Online self-service portals already existed for these two issues, but there was no automated solution available over the phone.

The solution: Intelligent voice bots from jtel

KLARA – The Kleine Zeitung language assistant & PRIMA – The Presse language assistant

Together with jtel, SMS developed the voice bots ‘KLARA’ and ‘PRIMA’, intelligent voice assistants based on modern speech recognition (Microsoft Azure Speech Services) and large language model technology (Mistral AI). The voice bots were integrated directly into the existing system landscape and now automatically perform a variety of recurring tasks, including:

Callrouting

• Callers respond freely to the question ‘What is your concern?’ and are routed directly to the correct department.

identification

• Using the caller’s telephone number or voice input of a customer number, the voice bot searches SAP in real time for the correct subscription record and checks whether a subscription is active.

Delivery Iterruption

• The voice bot asks for the desired time period and the option ‘credit note or newspaper donation’, posts everything directly in SAP and sends an automatic confirmation by email.

Forwarding

• Temporary delivery addresses for a specific period are also accepted by the voice bots, stored in the SAP system and automatically confirmed by email.

delivery complaints

• Subscribers: Subscribers can report problems with newspaper delivery around the clock. Complaints are also stored directly in SAP and automatically forwarded to the delivery partner.

Using modern speech processing technology, voice bots understand callers accurately and guide them efficiently through the process – around the clock and without any waiting times!

The result: increased efficiency and improved customer satisfaction

Since the jtel Voice Bot went live, Styria has seen measurable improvements:

• More than a third of all calls regarding delivery complaints and travel services are now processed fully automatically by the jtel Voice Bot.
• Greater accessibility around the clock (approx. 20 % Calls are now handled correctly outside of opening hours.
• Significant reduction in workload for the customer service team
• Seamless integration into existing systems and workflows
• Maximum customer satisfaction through fast and efficient process handling

23% of all incoming calls are handled fully automatically by jtel voice bots – including processing in the ERP system. (Complaints and travel services) That’s more than 1/3 of calls regarding complaints and travel services. Thanks to jtel’s intuitive technology, SMS can continuously refine processes, customise LLM prompts and optimise routing.

Insight: jtel voice bots have already automated a large proportion of recurring processes and are being gradually extended to cover further processes.

A glimpse into the future: FAQ RAG Bot

Styria Marketing Services is preparing an FAQ voice bot for your customer service. The LLM-based voice bot accesses a dedicated RAG knowledge base to help customers.

The first prototype of the voice bot answers all questions about digital subscriptions and products offered by the daily newspaper Die Presse. It accesses a clearly defined knowledge database. If necessary, it sends tutorial videos or subscription data required for registration directly to customers via email or text message. Over the course of the next year, this voice bot will learn additional topics and be able to provide assistance with a wide variety of processes.

Requirements

• Reduce average handling time
• Relieving the burden on customer service agents
• Cost reduction through automation

Customer benefit

• Reduced waiting time
• 24/7 availability

Quote

‘Trust is the key to success. Once customers realise that it works, they are happy to use voice assistants.’
– Angelika Kuchling (Projects & Organisation Site Manager)

Added value with jtel:

Cloud provisioning

The SMS does not require any additional hardware on site and can expand the voice bot at any time.

Intuitive backend

SMS can continuously optimise its processes without detours, enabling it to implement its visions at any time. Of course, the jtel developers are always on hand to provide support with more complex issues.

SAP integration

The jtel Voice Bot uses the existing data in the SAP system for customer identification and, conversely, automatically records all delivery complaints, delivery interruptions or forwarding requests in the SAP system.

Excellent speech recognition for accurate address capture

The data from the official street directory is uploaded from SAP every six months. This ensures that street names are spelled correctly, thereby guaranteeing optimal delivery quality.

Flexible LLM connection

As LLM services are developing rapidly, the jtel system offers flexible LLM connectivity so that customers can connect the LLM of their choice at any time.

Evaluability / Reporting

Statistics and insights for continuous optimisation, as well as real-time reporting for direct control, can be extracted directly from the database. SMS uses PowerBI for visualisation.

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