Artificial intelligence and collaboration: Maria Kalimeri’s recipe for a better customer experience

For Maria, the work is rewarding, especially because she gets to work together with other teams to build solutions, and she can see their impact in the real world. “It’s great to get feedback that the automations we develop have really made people’s everyday work easier”, she says.

Maria is a physicist by training, and she moved from academia to the corporate sphere in 2017. Her background in research and data analytics naturally led her to the role of data scientist and into the world of AI. “Analytical problem-solving, machine learning and AI, and utilising them to improve services and customer experience are things that excite me”, explains Maria.

Improving together through AI

In Elisa’s data and AI organisation, people collaborate closely both within the team and more broadly across different business units. Maria explains that the team members support each other through peer review practices, and every project always has a backup person. They also arrange hackathons and meetups to share knowledge about new tools and solutions.

This collaboration extends beyond Elisa: “We work with companies like Google, which enables us to quickly adopt new technologies as they arise. I’ve been surprised at how quickly an organisation as large as Elisa can adapt to new things”, Maria says.

Elisa already has dozens of professionals working full-time with AI and data – the data scientists, data engineers and AI architects form a strong community. Maria is also happy to encourage anyone interested in AI to reach out to AI professionals: “We’re more than happy for less technically minded colleagues to get in touch with us, and we can brainstorm ideas together. Sometimes AI is not the solution, but you can only find that out by experimenting. Sometimes even people who are experts in AI discover completely new ways to use AI through these discussions.”

AI helping Elisians in their daily work

Maria highlights two models she has worked on that are particularly significant in Elisa’s everyday operations. The first is a customer contact classification model that makes life easier for customer service representatives after calls. The model helps fill in forms quickly and accurately, allowing the representative to focus on the conversation with the customer without worrying about post-call tasks. “This model combines predictive machine learning and generative AI, and developing it required extensive collaboration between different teams”, Maria explains.

The second important model is a product recommendation system that uses large volumes of customer data to offer the right services at the right time. This improves the customer experience and increases customer loyalty.

Rewarding feedback

Although it’s not always easy to measure the direct impact of these models on customer satisfaction, Maria emphasises the importance of feedback: “When customer service work is easier and the Elisians doing it say they are happier in their jobs, customers notice it, too.” The efficiencies that these models bring are also visible in concrete terms, such as how much time people spend on post-call actions – and how much time these tools help them save.

For Maria, the work is rewarding, especially because she gets to work together with other teams to build solutions, and she can see their impact in the real world. “It’s great to get feedback that the automations we develop have really made people’s everyday work easier”, she says.

The future of AI at Elisa

Maria sees the future is very bright for AI at Elisa: “We are now at the steepest point of the development curve. Hyperautomation is already here, and AI is becoming increasingly embedded in Elisa’s operations. In the future, things like conversational business intelligence and AI-native processes will be commonplace, freeing up experts to focus on tasks that create more value.”

Elisa offers a wide range opportunities to grow and develop in the field of AI and data. If you want to help build the services of the future and make a real impact on the customer experience, explore career opportunities at Elisa!