Building your internal muscle for AI: First-hand lessons from Bell’s customer experience transformation

By Hadeer Hassaan, EVP and Chief Information and Customer Experience Officer 

"AI isn't just a buzzword; it's the key to unlocking unprecedented levels of customer understanding and personalized service – turning data into actionable insights."

The opportunities AI presents for enterprises are transformative – and businesses across Canada have taken notice. Yet while they might aspire to use more AI, many lack the in-house expertise to implement it. In her role as Bell’s Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer, Hadeer Hassaan faced this very problem. She knows the kind of experience she wants customers to have – easy, seamless and personalized over their channel of choice – but it hasn’t always been easy to deliver that experience with traditional tactics and technologies.

“The challenge we had, and I believe many companies face as well, is that being able to offer this tailored experience at scale had always been cost prohibitive.” 

Working with AI and large language models (LLMs), Hassaan and her team saw a path to the highly personalized and responsive service she knew would elevate Bell’s customer experience (CX). As research progressed and generative AI matured, her team kept the focus on ways to improve that experience. “The customer is at the heart of everything we do,” she says. “We’ve always aspired to provide that seamless experience through the customer’s channel of choice.” 

Expectations have changed – even if some businesses haven’t. 

Of course, customers today don’t just want this kind of experience – they expect it. Businesses that fall short of that expectation risk trailing competitors who have put in the work to move past the capabilities of traditional technologies. Businesses that don’t transform also miss out on the many other ways AI can drive efficiency, agility and scalability across their operations.  

Making technology work for customers  

One solution Hassaan and her team developed are new AI-powered virtual assistants that can answer simple customer queries and carry on natural-sounding conversations in English and French, which frees up our live contact centre agents to field more complex requests.  

You could think of these virtual assistants as chatbots, but they’re a far cry from older generations that couldn’t identify customer intent or operate outside of preprogrammed steps. 

“Everyone cringes when they hear ‘chatbots’ because we’ve all had different experiences that most of the time are frustrating,” Hassaan says. “What we’ve implemented is very different. Let’s say you’re paying your bill and then you decide to ask about the latest device. The chatbot can answer this question and keep the context and continue with the previous process you were going through.” 

With our previous chatbot solutions, more than 40 percent of sessions were abandoned – a clear sign many customers weren’t finding the interactions helpful. With the new virtual assistants, the abandon rate has shrunk to just nine percent across nearly four million interactions since 2024 – and customer satisfaction has tripled. 

"Accurate intent recognition is a key driver for a smooth customer experience, enabling call routing, call insights and better understanding."

Understanding customer needs 

According to Bell’s internal data, generative hybrid steering has helped the virtual assistants understand customer requests and ask appropriate follow-up questions, accurately understanding 97% of customer queries. Virtual assistants can also gather information from customers to route calls to the right places and share with agents to help them prepare for the interaction, reduce handling time and enable faster issue resolution. 

We’ve also developed an insights tool with LLMs and custom prompting to summarize, analyze and categorize interactions between agents and customers. This allows us to quickly surface insights and trends across all customer interactions, a process that would have otherwise been time and resource intensive. With these insights, Hassaan’s team can act quickly to improve agent training and boost consumer satisfaction, while also identifying selected agent behaviours to trigger performance coaching.  

Implementing AI solutions at scale 

To implement these solutions internally to support multiple Bell brands, we started with a phased approach, similar to the way Bell guides digital transformation projects for enterprise customers across the country. After working to understanding the projects goals as well as any appropriate data governance policies that should be in place, we started with a small-scale implementation by deploying a virtual assistant with a single brand. This allowed us to test the solution in a smaller market, learn, adjust and begin measuring results. After a few months we were ready to expand across all our brands with a higher degree of confidence. 

Finding and developing expertise for the transformation journey 

Implementing these technologies and applications within Bell was made possible thanks to the time we’ve dedicated and the investments we’ve made since 2017, building up our skills and knowledge in areas like AI and machine learning. Any company looking to get the most from AI must have a level of understanding of their data readiness and the capabilities of the technology. And the best time to start building that expertise is today.

“If you haven’t started already, you’re late. Customer expectations are evolving, and the technology is changing at light speed. So, the time is now.”  

But that doesn’t mean organizations need to start alone. Businesses wanting to move quickly, can help “build the internal muscle for AI,” by working with a partner like Bell – someone who has both the transformational expertise and the hands-on experience with AI implementation. This not only fast-tracks your ability to onboard tools today – it helps develop your own team of experts so you can stay ahead as AI solutions evolve. 

Enhance your customer experience with Bell 

Do you see the potential of AI to enhance your company’s customer experience, but lack the in-house expertise to do it right? We help organizations every day to design, implement and see long-term success with AI solutions. We can do the same for you, drawing on the same expertise we used to transform our own customer experience. 

Contact your Bell representative for more information, or request a call back.