Case Study

Straight A’s online – ETS & Oracle digital assistant

Teaming up with Accenture, ETS reimagined customer experience in education with the creation of their Anita digital assistant

5-MINUTE READ

Call for Change
When Tech Meets Human Ingenuity
A Valuable Difference
Related Capabilities

Call for change

Lessons in customer service

ETS is the world’s biggest private nonprofit test maker. The company is one of the largest global assessment providers, administering more than 50 million tests in 9,000 locations across 180 countries. Those tests include the GRE, TOEFL and Praxis tests.

ETS wanted to provide more options for seeking guidance since their test takers are located globally and not always awake during US call center hours. ETS decided to transform their customer service and reimagine customer experience in education. They called on Accenture and Oracle to help.

When tech meets human ingenuity

First-class collaboration

Accenture brought together a diverse team including their management consulting and technology practices to collaborate with the ETS team. Accenture brought up the idea of creating an online chat to enable ETS to interact with all their customers around the world, and around the clock. The result: Anita, a digital assistant powered by AI to advance the higher demand for online support.

The work started with the designing of processes and governance steering an execution and delivery model. Accenture’s team led detailed UX designing to create a more human online experience through Anita, then coded conversation flow. The Anita platform was then integrated with other ETS systems and powered by AI so that insight-driven enhancements were possible. The solution was built on Oracle Digital Assistant and integrated with Oracle Service Cloud to support live agent escalations.

Accenture delivered a closed-loop feedback improvement solution for ETS by bringing knowledge engineering resources (who look at chat dialogues and improvement areas) along with deep analytics using ML algorithms to understand the performance of the digital assistant. This cycle of design, build, and constant improvement delivered real value for ETS.

A valuable difference

65%

Since the go-live, the company has shifted to servicing nearly 65% of chats with a virtual agent alone.

2.5x

Through significantly reducing the demand on live agents, the company exceeded its business case benchmark by 2.5 times.

Top marks for Anita

ETS has elevated customer service with more engaging, digitally enhanced experiences while solving care interactions in real-time. Since the go-live, the company has shifted to servicing nearly 65% of chats with a virtual agent alone, significantly reducing the demand on live agents. It’s a benchmark that exceeded the business case for Anita by 2.5 times.

With the current deflection performance built into the business case, Anita will be able to deliver 25% more net savings in its next year of operations. By continually improving the digitization rate, the cumulative savings over the next four years is forecasted to be 40% above the original business case.

As Anita handles more customer demand, less human-assisted channels are needed, which reduces cost while preserving high levels of satisfaction. At the same time, ETS will have the ability to meet customers where they want to be met, either through desktop or mobile devices. Through Anita, ETS has a solid foundation for intelligent customer care. The possibilities are endless for making interactions more proactive and more responsive than ever before.