In 2018, Safaricom added a unique new personality to its staff.

With a big smile, big eyes, and wearing a white polo shirt and black trousers, the young woman got to work. Her name is Zuri and she continues to work at Safaricom, catering to customers’ needs, 24/7.

So far, Zuri – a chatbot – has catered to the needs of eight million customers across seven platforms – WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, SMS 100, SMS 234, Webchat, and the mySafaricom app. Zuri has grown to become one of the main points customers use to get in touch with the company.

For Peter Kuria, a software engineer on Digital Channels, the team behind Zuri, the provision of a chatbot as a point where customers can interact with the company is an important aspect of customer care.

Chatbots play a big role in elevating customer care in an age where customers expect and often get instant support and gratification. The team understands that a customer expects a reply whether they call or ask a question on social media.

“If you compare a chatbot to a live agent, a chatbot works 24/7 while agents go from shift to shift. With a chatbot, the customer can get assistance easily and fast and it can personalize the customer experience,” says Kuria.

Customer experience has been a key metric for the company since its early days, with its decision to make calls to customer care free a memorable moment in its history.

Zuri is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

With such chatbots, computer programmes simulate human conversation either by voice or text and are programmed to be conversational, to learn customers’ habits and personalities, and at the same time to develop personalities of their own.

As more people become comfortable talking with technology, it has become normal to no longer have to call and wait on hold on customer care lines but instead, interact with bots such as Safaricom’s Zuri for customer support.

“The chatbot is a new technological evolution in how we offer customer service. It is one way we reach out to our customers to access self-services without having to call a live agent,” says Kuria.

For a chatbot to simulate real-time conversations and engagement, it uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is a branch of AI that gives it the ability to understand text or chat and spoken words the same way a human being can.

“Zuri has the feature of a chat interface and in our case, we handle the aspect of chat,” Kuria says.

Sometime in the future, he says, Zuri will also ‘acquire’ the ability to talk to customers.

Bots use machine learning to gain an understanding of customer interactions and the more they talk to customers the more they learn about them.

While call centres are bombarded with repetitive requests all day long, chatbots easily filter through many of these requests since they are trained to manage such routine work. Here, they provide instant responses to basic questions and resolve customers’ complaints quickly.

To further provide an elevated customer experience, Kuria says, Zuri is continuously being improved to give customers something akin to a personal touch by keeping the language simple.

“When you are building a chatbot you want it to imitate, as much as possible, a real customer care representative the way they would engage you in a conversation,” says Kuria.

The one limitation the Zuri Squad has is that the behaviour of the consumer is constantly changing.

“Customers’ language keeps changing. Most of the customer segment who use the chatbot is the youth and their language keeps changing, so we are constantly training Zuri to adapt to that change,” says Kuria.

There is also a constant conflict between the way language is used by the business internally and how customers use it, which means that the developers must constantly learn how to enable Zuri to respond appropriately.

He adds, “When we benchmark with international chatbots we are not yet there, but we are heading there.”

Some of the most popular chatbots in the world include Fandango for movie fanatics who want to be in the loop for all the latest movies or AccuWeather which provides an AI meteorologist.

As the digital revolution rages on, the team handling Zuri is working to make her more sophisticated to provide a quality user experience.

In a first, in May this year, Zuri was the moderator at Safaricom’s Full Year (FY) 2022 Results announcement, a hallmark of the chatbot’s versatility.

“Zuri is moving from just customer service to being a personality that’s representing the digital world. And as we talk about things like Metaverse, we already have Zuri who will handhold people into that virtual reality world,” Lucille Aveva, Safaricom’s Director of Customer Obsession says.

Once she is ready, Lucille adds, Zuri will be able to engage in meaningful and dynamic dialogue, meaning she will accurately identify what customers want and then formulate personalized and specific responses.

Technologies like Siri and Google Assistant are excellent examples of conversational AI which are more advanced than regular chatbots. These virtual assistants are configured to generate more human-like responses as compared to chatbots.

According to Kuria, Gen Z, who are tech-savvy, engage Zuri more than older people, who prefer to only make calls to the call centre.

As a virtual customer care chatbot, Zuri is on the frontline to engage with and to help address concerns of more than 44 million customers looking for support from live agents and Safaricom shops.