Case studies - TOMS

Virtual employee who advises Latvian residents on taxation and customs

 

Success story in short

Toms, the virtual assistant of the State Revenue Service, advises Latvian residents on taxation and customs. When on-site visits are impossible, he facilitates smooth running of the Customer Services. Customers of the SRS do not shy away from asking their questions to the virtual assistant instead of calls or the conventional written correspondence. The SRS intends to integrate even more new AI solutions into their services, and have already started working on introducing new language technologies.

 

An authority approached by all adult residents of Latvia

The number of questions asked by the customers of the State Revenue Service increases year-on-year proportionally to more demand for self-services and the ability to receive answers to relevant questions 24/7. Each and every resident of Latvia who is at least 18 has to deal with this body, thus, the needs of the target audience are very diverse.

However, some questions tend to be quite similar that has allowed to transfer responsibility for providing answers to a sizeable share of such questions to a virtual assistant.

Every year, the period during which annual income statements are submitted poses notable challenges as the number of incoming requests increases along the workload of Customer Service Representatives. In 2020, everyone was unexpectedly overwhelmed by the Covid-19 pandemic that resulted in changes to the way SRS customers are served. This also requires an adequate IT infrastructure that is able to deal with daunting loads of up to 100,000 requests being sent at the same time.

"Customers’ experience in dealing with our service is very important to us, thus, we are happy to use the AI and conversational technology advances that will make people’s experience in dealing with the SRS ever more convenient and user-friendly,"

underlines Indra Kārkliņa, Director of the SRS Informatics Board

 

Taxation and customs adviser that never tires

Virtual assistant Toms joined the team in January 2020. During the first call, Toms spoke about customer communication with the SRS, registration of economic operators, use of the Electronic Declaration System (EDS), the annual income statement and eligible expenses, as well as the mobile app Eligible Expenses.

However, Toms has never stopped learning and keeps improving his knowledge to become a more valuable employee and provide even more support to customers who need advice or a tax or customs consultation. The number of topics covered by the virtual assistant keeps increasing and is updated with the latest news, incl. on the personal income tax log, Covid support, receipt lottery, resident certificates, single tax account, etc.

 

When no in-person advice was available from the SRS, customers preferred asking the virtual assistant

On the average, the SRS Tax Board provides 65,344 consultations per month, of which 47,010 consultations are provided by phone. During the Covid-19 lockdown, the number of phone and electronic consultations increased substantially.

At this time, Toms was quickly taught about all state support measures managed by the SRS, as well as completion of the most recent documents to provide answers to customers about the available support and relieve the SRS Helpline. Information about the national support measures for any persons affected by Covid-19 was one of the most popular topics among customers, thus, this information was updated in Toms’ knowledge base on daily basis.

During the emergency, customers preferred to speak with the virtual assistant instead of waiting for an answer by e-mail, in the Electronic Declaration System or their turn to speak with a human consultant. Annual declarations is one of the most popular topics that Toms needs to cover at any time of the year, but in March and April it dominates the scene and is a good match for Toms capabilities. For example, this year the greatest activity was recorded during the night from March 1 to March 2 at 2 A.M. in the morning when other consultation channels were not available.

The virtual assistant is not tasked with fully substituting human Customer Service Representatives, but is still able to provide answers to the FAQ and help people navigate the extensive SRS site. Thus, when it answers questions it quite often offers a link to a page where more information is provided.

 

SRS customers are positive about virtual assistance

Quite often, people thank Toms for the quick information made available 24/7, i.e. for answers to their questions as they did not have to wait for their turn to speak with a consultant of the SRS Helpline or see someone in person. Users have also praised Toms’ knowledge about various taxation aspects, especially his in-depth knowledge of the Electronic Declaration System.

"We treat Toms as a junior SRS employee, who is quickly learning and improving his knowledge day-to-day. Of course, Toms is a software that helps to navigate the taxation and customs world, thus, individual and complex issues can be better solved by more experienced SRS specialists who can be contacted via the EDS or by calling the helpline,"

underlines Ginta Saulīte, the Head of the SRS Tax Board Helpline

 

The results speak for themselves

  • Questions asked to Toms also serve as a source of information for SRS employees, namely, they can find out which questions are topical for customers, what are the most frequent difficulties, and what topics need to be explained in other channels.
  • As Toms provides answers to the FAQ, Customer Support Representatives can spend more time on solving more complicated situations like individual advisory sessions with customers about complicated issues that require the involvement of an experienced taxation expert
  • The virtual assistant contributes to the image of the SRS as a contemporary, advanced and customer- and innovation-driven public body.

Future ambitions

In the future, it is planned to integrate the virtual assistant Toms in the SRS Electronic Declaration System enabling authenticated users to receive customized answers depending on the information available in the SRS internal information systems. For example, the SRS plans to expand Toms’ language skills to cover other e-services offered by the SRS.

Toms was joined by a colleague on 2 January 2020. The gained experience led to the development of an internal SRS virtual assistant. Anna provides answers to SRS employees. The internal virtual assistant is able to provide information about annual leaves, career opportunities, remote work and organisation of professional activities.

The AI chatbot was developed on the Latvian State Administration language technology platform hugo.lv in co-operation with the Culture Information Systems center.

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Kristine Metuzale Tilde

Mārtiņš Sūna
AI Business Developer at Tilde