Business opportunity
For third-party logistics (3PL) providers worldwide, success hinges on exceptional customer experiences.
That's why one leading 3PL provider in the Asia-Pacific region set its sights on using technology in new ways to increase customer satisfaction. With a small customer service team of 50 people, customer service representatives handle hundreds of customer queries per month for its warehousing, fulfillment and transportation services.
To respond accurately to customer requests, the team had to manually query multiple internal systems, often relying on input from IT specialists. And since these specialists were already busy with other IT-related work, it could take up to 24 hours to reply to customers.
In a highly competitive market, the 3PL provider wanted to improve service levels by accelerating response to queries.
Technical challenge
Responding to inquiries from customers required customer services team members to coordinate with the IT team to manually find, extract and manipulate data spread across different tables in multiple back-end SQL databases.
The non-standard nature of the requests made it difficult to automate the response process to speed response times.
The IT team had to craft special SQL queries or filter and edit results, so the process consumed considerable time and internal resources.
The 3PL provider’s IT leadership saw an opportunity to use natural language processing and generative AI to boost efficiency and speed but lacked experience in these new technologies.
In a highly competitive market, the 3PL provider wanted to improve service levels by accelerating response to queries.
Our solution
Together, the 3PL provider and Kyndryl developed a prototype AI-powered customer service assistant on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in just 5 weeks.
Co-created in workshops, the prototype generates SQL queries from questions submitted in natural language by the customer service team. It uses the Gemini Large Language Model (LLM) on GCP’s Vertex AI platform to build queries, retrieve the targeted information from eight SQL tables, summarize it and return the report in an easily understandable format.
Kyndryl architected the prototype for easy scalability into a production-grade deployment and provided comprehensive handover documentation to enable the 3PL provider to continue its development.
What progress looks like
The pilot solution from Kyndryl helps the 3PL provider prove the value of applying generative AI to ad hoc customer reporting.
Once implemented, the customer service representatives will use a simple interface to request data in conversational language and receive accurate results in minutes. Customers will be delighted with the speed and quality of reporting, and internal teams will be more efficient. Once implemented at scale, the solution benefits include:
- Accelerated reporting from hours to minutes
- Reduced dependency of customer service representatives on IT staff
- Increased customer satisfaction levels
Kyndryl provided the expertise and end-to-end services we needed to launch our first generative AI pilot—one that can enhance our mission and vision for AI-driven transformation across the organization. This pilot is expected to serve as a stepping stone to building a full solution that can bring significant productivity and efficiency gains to our customer service function.”