Innisfil resident Justin Randall, chief innovation officer with Comwave Networks, recently developed an artificial intelligent (AI) phone agent, ‘Penny’, to help small businesses operate more efficiently.
Comwave is the largest privately owned and independent telecommunications companies in Canada and offers services in the U.S. as well. Outside of telecom and security features, Comwave offers TV, phone, and internet solutions for residences and businesses.
Randall has worked with Comwave for more than 14 years and has been in the telecommunications industry since 2003.
Born in Montreal and raised in Toronto, Randall’s experience in the technology field has been self-taught through his own ingenuity and years of book reading to further his knowledge in several diverse subjects.
At Comwave, he's responsible for all technology including internet, television, security and more.
When the pandemic hit in March, Comwave’s largest call centre — which was outsourced overseas — had a positive case of COVID-19 and immediately shut down, causing a ripple effect to Comwave’s day-to-day operations here in Canada.
“We lost our entire call centre due to a COVID case," says Randall. “In a building of over 5,000 agents, they went into lockdown (and) we scrambled to find another call centre to help."
Although Comwave found temporary solutions to keep their call centre active, Randall was not satisfied with the online ticketing system in place.
“We needed something that answered the phone without a person," says Randall. “Something that would turn tickets into cases."
Randall wanted a more personalized automated experience for customers rather than the typical ‘push 1 for support’.
“Customers have so many different types of requests, but not enough options,” says Randall. “Talking phone menus have been around for a long time, but we needed to have more ‘queue’ words to address certain problems."
So, Randall and his team of engineers did some research and began to work on a new technology he likes to call ‘Penny’ — after his two-year-old daughter, Penelope. Through a series of trials using Google Dialogflow and Cisco, Randall came up with a software that would transform their call centre and manage incoming calls in a more ‘empathetic’ way.
“Talking robots must have different combinations of buzz words. But with Penny, you can speak more naturally because of these AI engines that take similar example sentences with all the possible combinations," says Randall.
Randall says it's very common for customers to tell a ‘story’ when they call in to complain about an issue. So, Penny has been programmed to identify those tones and apply more options outside of the typical buzz words and will even say things like “I’m sorry your TV isn’t working, let’s see how we can fix this for you."
“We wanted to ensure customers felt heard,” says Randall. “We were well aware (AI Agents) was an emerging technology that was gaining attraction… (and) we wanted something for small businesses in case they ran into the same issues we did."
Randall says Penny has identified problems faster than Comwave has noticed and notes that she can handle all her own calls whether related to billing disputes, system reboots, or notifying field technicians when an issue needs resolution outside of her spectrum.
“This turned out to be so much more and that’s the real success,” says Randall. “It started off as a pilot project that developed – not all of them make their way to the final stages (and rightfully so, some things are right or wrong) – it was hard and a struggle! There were definitely moments where I felt like a fool for pulling the trigger too soon, but the end results were great.”
Penny is only set up for Comwave’s system, but Randall says his team is preparing pilot templates to deploy Penny on a larger scale for other businesses by customizing her program to suit the business’s unique platform.
“Despite how clever AI’s are at understanding language and abstracting the right information, they don’t deal with confusion at all," jokes Randall, adding that a lot of software is written to help Penny understand.
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