RepsMate empowers businesses to create super agents by leveraging Azure's AI superpowers

As a child actor, Alin Rosca always disliked working in environments with strict rules. Instead, thinking outside of the box and empathizing with others became his strong suit. These skills came to good use as he joined the workforce. “As a sales representative, I was trying to find better and easier ways to do my job. How could customer service and sales agents like me handle customer objections more effectively and tailor responses based on other agents’ past experiences?”

The answer was RepsMate—a solution that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and data analysis to help customer service agents understand customer needs and behaviors. “Typically, when an agent is unsure of an answer, they either consult the knowledge base or ask a supervisor. Our assistant effectively becomes the supervisor,” notes Rosca, now the Chief Executive Officer at RepsMate. “Our aim is to empower them and turn them into super agents.”

Choosing the right technology partner

From day one, RepsMate tapped into the full suite of Microsoft's offerings. “When you’re in the startup ecosystem, it’s almost impossible not to be familiar with Microsoft solutions, so I knew what we were getting into,” Rosca says. “We soon enrolled into the Microsoft for Startups program and took advantage of free credits. Ever since, Microsoft representatives have been helping us expand our network and promote our product.”

Today, RepsMate is running fully on Microsoft Azure, leveraging its Machine Learning capabilities to fine-tune its algorithms and using Azure OpenAI Service to enhance the development of the AI assistant. “We've received a lot of help with the infrastructure from Microsoft. This allows us to train using large amounts of data faster. Thanks to Microsoft, we’ve also had access to people who helped us understand what to optimize to increase the efficiency of our models and infrastructure, to avoid unnecessary spending.”

RepsMate has also been relying on Power BI for its analytics capabilities. “What I love about Power BI is the level of insight you can develop. We have lots of data, and we can manipulate it in various ways,” adds Rosca.

Earning trust, expanding reach

The next crucial step for RepsMate was to join the Azure Marketplace as a transactable app, enabling the company to offer its services to more companies, and faster. “Previously, selling to a business was a lengthy process because we would have to be vetted as a solution provider. Many of our prospective customers already have an agreement with Microsoft,” Rosca explains. “With Azure Marketplace, we can bypass this vetting process, shorten the sales cycle, and engage more resellers. Being on the Azure Marketplace also means we've passed several approval processes and have been validated as a vendor, which builds more trust among our prospects.”

In its first three years of operation, RepsMate has become the talk of the town, onboarding giants like Vodafone, eMAG, and Regina Maria, the largest private healthcare services provider in Romania. Also, RepsMate solution has earned the company the Impact Star Award from Deloitte for a significant impact on business, aside from being a finalist in three titles in the Customer Centricity World Series Awards. “Most importantly, our clients consistently demonstrate their satisfaction and trust in our services by renewing their contracts annually, a clear testament to our ability to not just meet, but exceed their expectations,” Rosca says with pride.

But the most visible proof of the startup’s success is in the numbers. “Our solution has enabled our customers to cut the size of the supervisory team in half. We also expect a 20 percent to 30 percent reduction in chat durations and a 5 percent to 10 percent rise in the first-call resolution rate,” shares Rosca. RepsMate also helped optimize the agent training process, reducing average handling time by 12 percent. Finally, by classifying query reasons with a 93 percent accuracy, RepsMate has enabled its customers to automatically process up to 25 percent of the interactions with predefined answers, bringing speed and accuracy.

Besides improving agent efficiency, RepsMate has also found novel and innovative ways to help clients enhance customer satisfaction. Using RepsMate to flag high-risk phrases helped teams quickly contact dissatisfied clients, resulting in a 13 percent decrease in state authority customer complaints. With RepsMate, teams can also automatically analyze detractor behavior, leading to a faster response to dissatisfied clients and an over 4 percent improvement in Net Promoter Scores. More impressively, RepsMate’s clients achieved a 25 percent increase in sales conversion rates through a new ability to analyze and replicate the strategies of their top-performing agents. What’s more, with RepsMate’s proprietary AI algorithm, the solution can learn a new language within two months with over 95 percent accuracy, giving agents more linguistic versatility. 

Looking ahead, RepsMate continues to rely on its partners to grow. “We want to figure out how to use Azure OpenAI for reducing operational costs,” concludes Rosca. “We’re also exploring the use of Microsoft Fabric to analyze our AI-related data, so we can draw even deeper insights and develop better solutions. And we hope to use the Microsoft Marketplace and network to expand beyond Romania.”