Customer Service Automation · Enterprise Knowledge Search
Telstra needed to help frontline contact centre and store employees handle customer interactions faster and more effectively, reduce repeated customer explanations, and let staff find trusted internal information quickly while maintaining privacy, security, and responsible AI controls.
Reported impact
The pilots improved frontline productivity and customer interactions, with staff saving time, understanding customer situations faster, reducing repeated explanations, and lowering follow-up contact; Telstra is now rolling both tools out more broadly across frontline teams.
Telstra built and is scaling two in-house generative AI applications on Microsoft technology: One Sentence Summary and Ask Telstra. Using Microsoft Cloud in Telstra’s secure platforms, One Sentence Summary applies Azure OpenAI capabilities to recent customer notes, interactions, and transactions to generate a concise history and status summary for frontline staff before or during service interactions. Ask Telstra combines Azure OpenAI Service with Azure AI Search to let employees query extensive internal knowledge bases through a simple search interface and receive AI-generated answers grounded in trusted corporate information resources. The rollout is supported by Telstra’s modernized data ecosystem, reusable AI capabilities, privacy protections, and responsible AI controls, with an API-first architecture and public-cloud migration work helping the company scale both tools across contact centre and store teams.
For One Sentence Summary, recent customer notes, interactions, and transactions are fed into Azure OpenAI capabilities running on Microsoft Cloud to produce a concise customer history and status summary for frontline staff. For Ask Telstra, employees submit queries through a simple interface, Azure AI Search retrieves relevant internal knowledge-base content, and Azure OpenAI Service generates grounded responses for contact centre and store teams.
"Leveraging the power of Microsoft Cloud and its Azure OpenAI capabilities, and built in our secure platforms to protect consumer privacy, One Sentence Summary and Ask Telstra were designed with Telstra to arm frontline teams to support customers more effectively."
"Powered by the latest Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Search, Ask Telstra gives AI generated responses to employee queries, presented via a simple search interface."
"Team members involved in the pilot were able to more quickly and easily gather information to support customers, with over 80% agreeing the technology has a positive impact on customer interactions."
"Trials during 2023 showed 90% of employees using the tool saved time and increased effectiveness, resulting in 20% less follow-up contact."
"Utilising Azure OpenAI’s large language model, One Sentence Summary transforms recent customer notes, interactions, and transactions into a concise summary of a customer’s recent history and status."
Review how this reference was scored and trace each normalized claim back to its documented source.
Scoring methodology
Customer Reference Value measures usefulness as a customer reference. Evidence Confidence measures the quality and traceability of available evidence, not independent verification.
Traceability
Field coverage shows which facts each source supports. Dates are shown only when documented by the source.
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