Customers Have Their Say at eGain Solve'26 Day 2
LONDON -- eGain turned over Day 2 of its Solve'26 conference to several long-standing and prominent customers, who stressed that their various eGain solutions were significantly benefitting their companies and their customers.
First up was BT (the former British Telecom), a long-time eGain customer. Now with more than 30 million customers using various connection solutions (telephone, mobile, digital), the company has evolved to where it supports not only individuals but also contact center and other business customers, said Stacy Young, its senior manager of knowledge.
Over the past several years, BT's knowledge management and related needs have evolved. During the COVID-19 lockdown at the beginning of the decade, BT rebuilt its knowledge management solution (with help from eGain) solution because with everyone working from home, the staff was much more reliant on corporate knowledge than ever before, Young said.
The effort was successful, with a 37 percent improvement in first call resolution as well as other benefits.
BT's AI journey started in 2024 as it worked with eGain to develop what it called instant answers across multiple business units while deliberately preserving guided help pathways to meet compliance requirements.
"It was important that we provided confident, accurate answers," Young said.
One of the prime challenges was ensuring that the answers continued to be accurate as the underlying data changed with updated information, said Paul Bentley, BT's knowledge and conversational product manager.
So the company developed and evolved the solution slowly, starting with pilots before wider implementation. Now the solution is shaving off 12 seconds per call, which is a significant amount, considering the millions of calls the company receives, Young said. There have been other benefits as well.
Next up was Rider Care, the internal customer support and service division of Specialized Bicycles. It sought to move customers to more self-service use and undertook a three-year program with eGain to consolidate and leverage multiple sources of content into a single trusted platform for riders, retailers, and colleagues across the globe, said Andrew McGuigan, its global leader.>
Rider Care and eGain consolidated what had been a siloed knowledge system with 11 tools and 13 locations into a single, structured AI knowledge platform managed by eGain.
When McGuigan first joined the company, the disparate knowledge system also meant that customer information, including interaction information, was spread across different systems so there was no centralized repository of customer information.
The first step was to review all of the information across the different systems to ensure that it was accurate, McGuigan said.
Rider Care now has around-the-clock knowledge access, cross-referenced learning and knowledge content, digitized product manuals, and search-optimized contact, which has improved efficiency while also reducing calls to the contact center.>
Since the process started, Rider Care has achieved a nearly 20 percent increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS) and has doubled self-help traffic.
However, McGuigan acknowledged that the development of the customer care knowledge base will never be finished, noting that it continues to evolve. The system is being reassessed again this year with an eye toward improving self-help templates and improving the translation process.
Developing an AI Agent
Translink, the organization responsible for the OVpay public transport payment system in the Netherlands, engaged eGain to help build a system that would provide consistent answers to customers who use self service, which many prefer over speaking to a human agent, said Jamilla Ettema, Translink's knowledge manager.
The company chose eGain's AI Agent solution because it was "aligned to all of our requirements right out of the box," Ettema said. "We use a central hub for our single source of truth."
Though the company has users who speak multiple language, Translink officials chose English as the base language for the AI agent.
Development was a four-step process that included the following:
- Building a knowledge base;
- Building the discovery link, including questions expected to be asked;
- Designing a knowledge management process implemented with workflows; and
- Creating a content guide to find a taxonomy and establish standardized techniques.
That structured approach led to a double-digit increase in the use of self-service. But, additional work still needed to be done to improve clarity and consistency. Content needed to be reviewed and the taxonomy refined.
Translink continues to refine the answers produced and the AI agent ease of usage by using feedback from both human agents and customers. That feedback and an analysis of customer queries also helps Translink continue to refine its FAQ page so that customers can find answers more quickly.
Ettema stressed that keeping a human in the loop is essential to ensure that AI agents produce accurate answers and perform as expected.
Serving Diverse KM Users
Philip Morris is transitioning the company away from its traditional cigarette business to smoke-free products and transitioning the tech stack that supports the entire business. With 1,000 scientist engineers and technicians and 85,000 employees serving 100 direct markets, the company needed to ensure every stakeholder has access to trusted information, said Imran Awan, its global product owner for digital knowledge management and AI foundations.
"We've been working with eGain since our overall objectives is to drive customer satisfaction and CX and to make sure everything drives for high quality, increased operational efficiency, and profitability," Awan said.
Users of the Phillip Morris knowledge includes people with varying degrees of comfort and knowledge with the system, according to Awan, who noted that if any of those people leaves, the person taking over those duties needs to have access to the right information within the company's knowledge base to come up to speed quickly. The ability to do so has a direct impact on revenue, so knowledge management can't be an afterthought, he said. It needs to support customer care, customer service, employees, and other uses within the company as well as support queries from those outside of the company seeking public corporate information.
The FAQs need to be dynamic and robust, with duplicates being eliminated, Awan said, and the eGain technology is helping keep the information and FAQs updated, eliminating redundancies and improving workflows.