Digital Assistant

The live chat service used by customers to contact Network Rail was receiving a high number of queries that were a) not the responsibility of Network Rail and needed to be re-directed or b) the responsibility of Network Rail but where the information already existed online e.g. careers queries. The digital assistant was brought in to help customers get the answers to their queries quicker and give Network Rail live chat agents more time to deal with more complex queries.

Where the digital assistant provides an unsatisfactory answer to the customer (e.g. incorrectly recognises their intent) they are able to provide feedback such as "that did not help" and the digital assistant will immediately attempt to hand over to a contact centre agent in this scenario.

No formal data set used. Target intents, and example ways in which these questions were asked, were collected from Network Rail's incident history, and this was compiled into training data. Example phrases that indicate an intent - e.g. "I want to buy train tickets", "Am I allowed to take photos in the station?", "Do you have any job vacancies?"