Promises to automate customer service are only binding on those who listen?

More than 60 companies and publishers in France are promising to automate customer services, transforming telephone advisers into augmented agents, all thanks to AI-based tools or processes. Is Yampa.ai, the latest to emerge on this market, functional and more effective than Klark.ai, Mayday.fr, Sereneo, ilibot, Yellow.ai etc.? The promise is seductive (to revolutionise customer services) but the demonstration is a little less well documented.

‘AI-Native Agents for a new Era of Customer Care (..). Klark, the best generative AI tool for optimising customer service’ - these promises are all the rage, and every week they cause the share prices of BPO companies, where some of Yampa.ai's partners used to work, such as Stéphane Blondeau and Patrice Mazoyer (ex-ADM Processing, now Tessi, and Konecta), to plummet.
This week, Yampa.ai announced that it had raised €3 million from a renowned venture capital fund, Partech. The company promises to: - to automate customer service responses, thanks to native AI agents capable of providing reliable answers. It already has satisfied customers.

-to focus commercially on the mid-market. However, it is not possible to talk to one of Yampa.ai's customers already in production, although the results obtained speak for themselves, according to the slides and pitch we were able to consult. 

In 2024, there was a great deal of media coverage of the potential benefits of these new tools. They could lead to a sharp rise in response rates and in the quality of request processing, something that customers and consumers have been expecting for a long time. Yellow.ai's models boast error rates of less than 1% and average response times of just 0.6 seconds. These models set new standards for automated customer interactions. LLM Orchestrator makes it possible to orchestrate these processes,’ says Raghu Ravinutala, CEO and co-founder.

But we also saw Air Canada condemned, in February this year, because its chatbot had given Jake Moffat the wrong information about his ticket refund. Read more here. 

Comparing results with promises and commitments. A plea for an ecology of AI and digitalisation?

This week, the editors of En-Contact tested similar tools (chatbots, call-bots, AI agents) at La Poste (to send registered mail abroad), BoursoBank, GLS (for a parcel delivery problem), Orange (to retrieve a recorded conversation in a technical call-centre) and finally Pennylane (Arthur Waller, one of the co-founders of Pennylane, is a shareholder in Yampa.ai).

*The publisher was acquired by Oracle in 2005.

The results and analyses can be found in the news pages of issue 134 and in the Bottin's analysis tables, in the Customer Service Automation category.