FPT Smart Cloud drives productivity for Home Credit Vietnam

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud are the two technologies at the heart of Industry 4.0, driving greater agility and productivity, reducing costs, and creating better outcomes for the future of humanity. 

“They are the two most important technologies in the era of digital transformation,” says Le Hong Viet, CEO of FPT Smart Cloud. “We are proud to be the entity that's responsible for building these capabilities for the FPT Corporation.” 

FPT is, by far, Vietnam’s largest IT company, with operations in over 20 countries throughout APAC, Erurope, and the US. The company’s main focus, however, remains on its home market of Vietnam as the country rides the wave of digital transformation. FPT Smart Cloud, Viet explains, is positioning itself at the forefront of Vietnam’s digital revolution. 

“Our primary goal going forward is to drive more penetration of AI into different industries in Vietnam, from finance to retail and manufacturing,” he explains. “Productivity is crucial to the future of Vietnam if we want to escape the middle income trap. Technology is definitely the way forward for the country, and our products are helping to drive this much needed productivity increase for Vietnam.” 

FPT Smart Cloud is driving new growth for the FPT Corporation through its two cornerstone products: FPT.AI, and FPT Cloud. “FPT.AI is used to disrupt businesses by creating a big jump in productivity, which is exactly what we're doing right now with Home Credit Vietnam,” Viet explains. 

FPT Smart Cloud was selected by Home Credit Vietnam as a key technology partner. The two companies came together in 2019 with the goal of executing a two-year project to improve Home Credit Vietnam’s messaging, voice channels, and overall customer engagement capabilities. Viet notes that “our products have been proven in terms of their natural language processing ability, as well as speech recognition and speech synthesis in Vietnamese,” which led to FPT Smart Cloud’s Voicebot technology being selected to provide AI-powered virtual customer support agent solutions. 

“We initially set out a plan for a two- year project to use our Voicebot technology to successfully integrate virtual call agents into Home Credit's customer call centre in order to handle outbound and inbound calls. We spent six months building up a new platform for this purpose, as well as setting up the virtual agents specifically for Home Credit,” says Viet. “Then, we spent another six months doing a proof-of-concept, calibrating the virtual agents, piloting the project, and pushing it to completion. In total, we delivered on this partnership exactly a year ahead of schedule.” 

This achievement, Viet explains, is due to the “very close collaborative relationship between the two project teams,” which worked together to execute their strategy while avoiding the most common pitfall of AI customer service integrations. “Sometimes, AI can reduce the human workload and create efficiencies, but also result in a reduction of customer satisfaction,” says Viet. “This project managed to not only boost productivity and reduce costs, but also increase customer satisfaction.” 

The solution eliminated repetitive tasks for customer service agents, such as answering inbound calls with FAQs or making millions of outbound call reminders to customers with superior human-like conversational capabilities. This enables agents to focus on other complex tasks, enhancing workforce productivity, saving time and money for the enterprise.

Today, FPT Smart Cloud’s virtual agents handle more than 5mn incoming and outgoing calls for Home Credit Vietnam every month, and are capable of extending to over 12mn calls during peak times.

FPT Smart Cloud and Home Credit Vietnam look to continue the collaboration with new AI solutions already in discussion. From the integration of Call Quality Enhancement  to the implementation of the powerful Knowledge Base solution into chatbot and voicebot, the dedication of Home Credit and FPT SmartCloud assure both companies stay ahead of the AI revolution. This success story, Viet concludes, is a powerful indicator of the future relationship between AI, cloud, and Vietnam. “A lot of people in Vietnam are first time financial service users, but they are very digitally savvy. Most of them have already been using smartphones for a very long time, and there's a lot of fluency when it comes to digital channels and self-service finance,” he says. “Users are becoming more demanding, and they want to be able to connect with the service provider 24/7, which our AI solutions support. Some of our customers have millions of customers to engage with every week, which is where our AI-powered automation is driving tetter, differentiated customer experiences.”