Convera reimagines customer service with AI-powered automation
By leveraging AI and AWS this global leader in commercial payments streamlined customer support and reduced response time, achieving 82% email classification accuracy.
Industry
Financial Services
Challenge
Transform a complex, manual email support system with an automated workflow, while maintaining strict financial compliance and PII data protection standards across international operations.
Outcome Leveraging generative AI, Convera deployed an automated email classification solution that reduced 130 email inboxes to three, achieved 100% automated case creation and 82% email classification accuracy. Solutions Rackspace Elastic Engineering, Foundry for AI by Rackspace (FAIR™) Platforms Amazon Web Services (AWS)Professional & Managed Services
Professional ServicesCustomer
Convera is a global leader in commercial payments that powers international business by moving money with ease. We provide tech-led payment solutions to help more than 26,000 customers globally grow with confidence, from small businesses, to CFOs and treasurers. As experts in foreign exchange, risk and compliance, with an unrivaled regulatory footprint, Convera’s financial network spans more than 140 currencies and 200 countries and territories.
"For technology support, our Rackspace team brought excellent AI experience. And they worked well with our internal engineers to execute the project and help us achieve our goals."
Situation
Upon deciding to migrate its IT operations to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in early 2023, Convera seized the opportunity to reimagine its IT operations to better support its global customer base.
"We called the redesign of our IT operations the 'reimagination journey,'" said Sudipto Das, VP of Engineering at Convera. "Our entire journey is more than just upgrading our technology. It's about rethinking how we do our business, including looking at what our processes are currently and reimagining them in ways that better serve our customers and help our company prepare for future."
At that time, Convera's customer support staff manually monitored 130 email inboxes, interpreted customer inquiries and created tickets in the workflow system. This process caused frontend bottlenecks and delayed responses despite advanced backend technologies. The challenge was even more intensive because Convera had to also manually manage sensitive financial transactions. This required precise handling of personal identifiable information (PII) to comply with each country’s compliance regulations.
According to Das, "Even though we built a workflow-based, sophisticated system in the backend, until we addressed the front-end complexity of incoming emails, including full automation, we were going to continue facing a big customer service challenge.”
To solve its frontend email challenges, Convera wanted a solution that could automate its email intake process and maintain the accuracy and security standards compliance agencies demand.
"Choosing Rackspace for both AWS and AI implementation made sense. It's about bringing together excellent technology capabilities with deep understanding of our business needs and ability to execute quickly.”
Solution
To modernize its customer support operations, Convera expanded its existing partnership with Rackspace Technology®. It leveraged the deep AI expertise of Foundry for AI by Rackspace (FAIR™) to quickly launch a generative AI solution. "We chose both AWS and Rackspace for similar reasons," said Das. "It's about the speed of execution.”
To support the solution, Convera implemented Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models available through a single API. This service was strategic, because it allowed Convera to build a flexible infrastructure that could adapt to rapidly evolving AI technology, while maintaining compliance with strict financial industry regulations.
The Rackspace team played an integral role in the project, creating a solution that could automatically comprehend incoming emails, classify them appropriately and create support tickets, while maintaining compliance requirements throughout the process. The solution leveraged AWS services, specifically the Claude Sonnet 3.5 Large Language Model (LLM) on Amazon Bedrock, to power the email classification. Advanced prompt engineering techniques were used to accurately interpret and categorize a wide variety of email types. Once classified, the emails triggered the automated creation of support tickets, streamlining the workflow and ensuring efficiency and precision.
FAIR™ expertise proved especially valuable in developing a solution that could handle the complexities of global financial communications. The team built an AI model capable of processing emails in multiple languages, accurately identifying and redacting sensitive financial data, and automatically routing inquiries to appropriate service teams. This customized approach ensured that automation wouldn't compromise Convera's strict compliance requirements, while allowing it to deliver the speed and efficiency improvements the company needed.
"For technology support, we needed a partner who could quickly create a proof of concept, prove the value of the project and take it to the next stage," said Das. "Our Rackspace team brought excellent AI experience, and they worked well with our internal engineers to execute the project and help us achieve our goals."
Outcome
Convera’s upgrade achieved three critical business objectives:
- Automated email to case classification with Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data redaction
- Streamlined ticket creation
- Automated email action summarization
Results included reducing its email inboxes from 130 to just three, while achieving 100% automated case creation using metadata. The system maintains 82% accuracy in email classification and summarization, even with the added complexity of PII data redaction, which is required for financial compliance.
Automation has transformed the customer experience by significantly reducing case resolution times, said Das. "We have automated the entire email intake process, and that helps us reduce the time it takes to intake a case and resolve it. This creates tremendous value for our customers because now our turnaround time for issues is greatly reduced."
Fast execution also proved crucial to the project's success. The project demonstrated the value of choosing partners who could move quickly from concept to implementation while maintaining close collaboration with internal teams.
"Choosing Rackspace for both AWS and AI implementation made sense,” said Das. “It's about bringing together excellent technology capabilities with deep understanding of our business needs and ability to execute quickly.”
Das also credits the Convera technical strategy. "Choosing the right technology was the biggest decision we had to make. Generative AI was the only solution that could deliver what we needed, including handling thousands of emails from different countries, regions, languages, customer types and case types."
The company aims to continue innovating, focusing on addressing both current and future customer needs. With its established AWS ecosystem and partnership with Rackspace, Convera is positioned to leverage managed services for faster execution and quicker time to market for new innovations.
About Rackspace Technology
Rackspace Technology is a leading end-to-end hybrid cloud and AI solutions company. We can design, build, and operate our customers' cloud environments across all major technology platforms, irrespective of technology stack or deployment model. We partner with our customers at every stage of their cloud journey, enabling them to modernize applications, build new products, and adopt innovative technologies.
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