How NTT DOCOMO added video customer support using AWS

This blog post was co-written by Masaki Yoshii, LABO Managing Director at Peers Co, Ltd,. and Takeshi Kobayashi, Sr Solutions Architect at AWS, supervised by Seiji Nishihiro, Senior Manager Consumer Marketing Department at NTT DOCOMO, INC..

Introduction

In 2022, NTT DOCOMO, INC., one of the largest mobile phone operators in Japan, successfully deployed their online video customer support solution called ‘d Service Online Counter’ built using Amazon Chime SDK. The deployment was done to docomo Shops nationwide and it supports over 60 thousand calls each month today.

(source: Peers Co, Ltd,.)

This post explains how NTT DOCOMO, INC. worked with Peers Co., Ltd, a Japanese retail tech consulting firm specialized in in-store customer service solutions, as a partner to develop and leverage Amazon Chime SDK to modernize the customer experience which brought to increased customer satisfaction, increased sales results, and improved efficiency of operation.

Situation

When global instability hit, NTT DOCOMO shifted to operate with reservations for in-shop visits to manage the number of customers to the shops and reduce in-shop waiting time. However, this introduced NTT DOCOMO sales representatives to face limited time spent per customer to mainly resolve customer inquiries and not able to initiate communications on new service proposal. NTT DOCOMO saw this as a sales opportunity lost and needed a digital transformation initiative to improve customer experience and increase sales win-rate by assigning specialized sales representative in a scalable manner.

We, Peers, saw this as an area where we could contribute using years of experience and knowledge on operating in-store customer services. NTT DOCOMO worked with Peers to deploy d Counter Online Counter to approximately 2,160 docomo Shops (as of March 31, 2023) nationwide. With d Service Online Counter, customers are connected via video meeting with sales representative to discuss on customer inquires requiring special knowledge or new proposed services and complete the contracts if successful in one stop.

(source: Peers Co, Ltd,.)

We, Peers, were looking for real-time video communication service which allows us to implement quickly with APIs that take care of the details, but also allows to access and adjust video communication settings when needed. After exploring several options, we found that the Amazon Chime SDK makes it easy to spin up WebRTC meetings in a cost-effective way, scale when needed, and allows to manage and maintain meetings through APIs. Amazon Chime SDK also allows to deliver a consistent experience by automatically adjusting audio and video in response to changing network conditions, export meeting logs for monitoring and analysis, and access to full control of the UI. Amazon Chime SDK offers many features in building blocks, which allows to be flexible and use only the features we needed. We worked closely with teams in AWS on the implementation design to successfully launch the solution for NTT DOCOMO.

“We worked closely with NTT DOCOMO and Peers from the early stage of their development to make sure they were leveraging full capability of Amazon Chime SDK and were in the right direction to be successful.” said Sid Rao, GM of Amazon Chime SDK at AWS. “We made sure they had early access to Amazon Chime SDK’s Media Capture Pipelines to be able to capture meeting data for their solution. Also, our team worked to release Background Blur 2.0 that has improved segmentation quality which meets their requirement. We look forward to see NTT DOCOMO and Peers expand further on their workload and we are here to support.”

With d Service Online Counter, since the customer calls are directed to an operator with expertise in the customer’s chosen topic, NTT DOCOMO was able to improve the efficiency of in-shop operations and customer satisfaction. Additionally, by visualizing the meeting conversation with data and analyzing successful sales communications, NTT DOCOMO was able to increase the successful sales contracts rate by more than 20% after the deployment. Some of the general features that d Service Online Counter solution provides are shown below.

(source: Peers Co, Ltd,.)

In early 2022, NTT Docomo initially deployed d Service Online Counter to few shops as trial and made multiple improvements in UX and internal operations before going in a full scale. With the successful results, NTT DOCOMO plans to expand the use in different directions in 2023.

“We are currently testing out this hybrid model where customers can talk with in-shop staff, but also leverage d Service Online Counter in the case of a specific topic from a customer needing an expert staff or additional staff needed to support our customer. Thank you to Peers and AWS on the collaboration of building d Service Online Counter. We plan to expand the use of this d Service Online Counter more in multiple scenarios,” said Seiji Nishihiro, Senior Manager of Consumer Marketing Department at NTT DOCOMO.

(source: Peers Co, Ltd,.)

Technical Solution

d Service Online Counter is built on top of AWS to address load balancing the traffic, providing a high availability architecture, horizontal scalability, high security, and high resiliency considerations. We built this solution to be easily deploy-able as a solution package using fully managed deployment service from AWS and with the capability to customize the look and feel of UX to meet each customer’s requirements. Below is a high-level solution diagram that features the infrastructure and managed services used.

(source: Peers Co, Ltd,.)

One of the features we required for this project was to be able to record the meetings so the meeting archives are available for post-analysis. Amazon Chime SDK offered Media Capture Pipelines that matched our requirement. We also leverage virtual background blur and replacement and voice focus (noise reduction) provided by the Amazon Chime SDK as an option. Background blur was a required feature to support the privacy of remote operators working from home or customers calling from home. Building these features ourselves would have taken a lot more effort and time. Voice focus also helps to minimize background noise in conversations between operators and customers, improving audio clarity. AWS provides these features that are heavy lifting to build from scratch, so we were able to focus on developing features that matter and are product differentiators.

Conclusion

At Peers, we work with enterprise customers who have high demands on quality and features. The flexibility of Amazon Chime SDK allowed us to provide service differentiation and have a strong solution to offer to our customers. At the end, we are seeing happy customers including NTT DOCOMO using our solution and we will continue to innovate and expand the capability of our solution with a growth of Amazon Chime SDK features.

With the Amazon Chime SDK, builders can easily add real-time voice, video, and messaging into applications with ML capabilities like Voice Focus, Echo Reduction, and Background Blur and Replacement. Amazon Chime SDK comes with the capability to capture audio, video, and content share streams, plus meeting events and data messages called media capture pipelines. Learn more about the Amazon Chime SDK here.