AAA Deflects 30M Calls Using Virtual Agents.

American Automobile Association, or AAA, has been providing roadside assistance to drivers in North America for over 120 years. As a privately held not-for-profit, they serve over 60 million members.

Problem

AAA needed a scalable solution for their emergency roadside service (ERS). Stranded drivers were facing frustratingly long hold times, while agents were overwhelmed with calls from members and tow providers. Inclement weather like winter storms increased the amount of urgent calls to be handled by the same number of agents, so the solution needed to scale up or down to accommodate call spikes.

To address their business continuity challenges, AAA searched for an AI-powered self-service solution that would help them provide immediate assistance across all channels—while relieving their call volume and maintaining high-quality service.

Solution

After searching for the right vendor, AAA finally turned to Capacity. The Capacity team designed, implemented, and optimized their solution to fit AAA’s needs, resulting in an AI-powered Virtual Agent that:

• Begins the call with a personalized greeting based on an ANI lookup, creating a customer-centric experience right off the bat
• Determines why the member has called for roadside assistance, classifying the caller’s intent among one of dozens of needs
• To make sure a roadside assistance provider will be able to find the member, the Virtual Agent first asks if the caller is in a vehicle linked to the AAA account; if not, the Virtual Agent will collect the right details to update information
• Triggers an SMS link to pinpoint the precise location of their breakdown with GPS for faster assistance
• Sends a voice or text ETA to the member, making sure they are always informed about the status of their ERS request

By automating their roadside assistance process with Virtual Agents, AAA is able to provide quick, intuitive self-service that improves the customer experience without using live agent resources.

Results

As a result of using Capacity’s Virtual Agents, AAA has been able to completely upgrade the way they offer roadside assistance to their members.

In fact, with Virtual Agents, AAA has:

• Deflected over 30 million calls from agents
• Achieved a 66% cost-per-call savings
• Raised their CSAT score to 4.5/5

Hold times have decreased, even during inclement weather events—and the Virtual Agent can seamlessly scale to accommodate call spikes, adapting to the support team’s needs.

Together, AAA and Capacity offer members a quick, seamless way to get the help they need.

†