"Our ultimate goal is to create a program that can evolve on its own in a direction that allows customers to use it conveniently."
Kang Jin-wook, Senior Executive Vice President and Head of the Mobile and Digital Group at LG Uplus, who oversees the development and operation of the company's integrated customer service application (app) "U+one," said, "The future integrated service app will become a 'Self Evolving Platform' that evolves on its own in response to customer demands."
"U+one" is a program that provides customer center and membership services through a single app, launched last year. Senior Executive Vice President Kang explained the background of its launch, stating, "The customer center was an unremarkable app that customers only turned to when problems arose while using their communication service." He added, "The intent was to eliminate the inconvenience of having to run a separate membership app to find membership benefits and to enable customers to have new experiences through a single app."
The results of the integration were reflected in the numbers. As of August this year, U+one's monthly active users (MAU) stood at 6.096384 million, an increase of approximately 20% compared to before the integration. Weekly active users (WAU) rose by more than 1 million, from 1.81 million to 2.89 million. The Net Promoter Score (NPS), a metric of customer loyalty, increased from 27 points to 44 points. Senior Executive Vice President Kang noted that considering the NPS of major global telecom operators is in the 50th-point range, achieving global competitiveness is not far off.
Senior Executive Vice President Kang explained the success of U+one as stemming largely from two factors. He stated that it was significant to minimize the stress customers might experience during communication service consultations through AI search, while simultaneously providing various content, including partnership benefits that customers might easily overlook, through information provided in the Plus (+) tab.
Senior Executive Vice President Kang said, "Since the introduction of the AI search function, consultation calls have decreased. We expect this to reduce customer consultation stress accordingly." He added, "In the past, we expected so-called 'lost profit' arising from customers not using partnership benefits, but in the medium to long term, a structure that finds benefits customers might easily miss and returns them as customer satisfaction is more effective."
The next goal for U+one is the implementation of an actionable "AI agent" function. The plan is to provide a "hyper-personalization" service that helps each individual customer find and use necessary services using AI agents, ultimately enabling the customer center app to evolve on its own. Currently, the roaming service, where this function has been implemented, serves as the starting point for the AI agent feature.
Senior Executive Vice President Kang stated, "If a customer is planning to travel to Japan, the AI will recommend an appropriate roaming plan by considering factors such as travel purpose and usage patterns, allowing customers to sign up and use the service through the app without contacting the customer center." He added, "We are expanding available services in accordance with our phased plans."
He said, "Based on the customer consultation know-how accumulated at LG Uplus, we are training AI, and development for the next stage is also gaining momentum." He expressed his ambition to "provide only essential information that customers need and move it into execution, creating a service that can be resolved with a single word." Regarding concerns about security, such as personal information infringement, he added, "The principle is always to provide decision-making authority and information control rights to the customer for U+one." He noted, "Even for the roaming service alone, we devoted more than half of the total two-month development period to QA (quality assurance), including security testing."
in TECH
