Case Studies
Rapidly testing generative AI customer service solutions
AdriaCamps helps people book accommodation or camping pitches at more than 250 campsites across Croatia and Italy.
Fragmented resources drain productivity in customer service
AdriaCamps (link resides outside of ibm.com) helps people book accommodation or camping pitches at more than 250 campsites across Croatia and Italy. It offers several types of accommodation, including mobile homes, pitches and glamping tents, and a huge variety of facilities—from indoor pools to electric vehicle (EV) charging points.
To help customers choose sites with the appropriate accommodation and facilities, AdriaCamps maintains multiple databases and a large store of PDF brochures. Its customer support agents reference these when answering inquiries about the thousands of different options available. However, switching between information sources reduced the team’s productivity and responsiveness, and AdriaCamps set out to find a better approach.
Marko Bukovac, CTO at AdriaCamps, says, “As we looked to expand the business into new territories, we recognized that generative AI (gen AI) technology had the potential to help us respond more rapidly and accurately to incoming inquiries. As the first step, we looked for a partner to assist us in developing the best roadmap to AI. In particular, we wanted to be sure we understood the training data going into the system and the responses we could expect from it.”
“The MVP we completed with Deegloo was super, super useful in terms of learning how the watsonx platform works and how easy it was to start. ”
AdriaCamps chose to build a minimum viable product (MVP) using IBM® watsonx.ai™ studio. “We concluded that IBM watsonx™ offered us the easiest entry point for creating an enterprise gen AI solution,” says Bukovac. “IBM also offers transparency and assurance about the source of the training data for its large language models (LLMs).”
With the expertise of IBM Business Partner Deegloo (link resides outside of ibm.com) and the IBM Build Lab team, AdriaCamps worked on a two-month-long project to build a functioning gen AI customer service assistant that can converse in English and German. This assistant brings together information from five sources and presents it intelligently in response to natural language queries. The sheer number of different options at the point of booking made it technologically challenging to develop an AI assistant. To optimize the responses, Deegloo implemented a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique to bring in additional information from authoritative sources outside of the training data. Deegloo also developed a confidence score functionality to indicate the degree of certainty the AI assistant has about its responses.
Bukovac comments, “The Deegloo team were well-versed in technology and had strong coding skills. It was a great experience also because of their flexibility and willingness to understand our changing priorities during the project.”
Augmenting human assistants with AI
“The MVP we completed with Deegloo was super, super useful in terms of learning how the watsonx® platform works and how easy it was to start,” says Bukovac. “Moving forward, we will work on the challenges of managing structured data and creating reliable confidence scores for the gen AI responses.”
AdriaCamps has a three-step plan for adopting gen AI. First, it will partially automate responses to customer inquiries, enabling the team of fifteen customer service agents to focus on more complex cases. Second, it will build an internal knowledge base for agents to query. Finally, it will potentially provide customer-facing AI chatbots.
“Our vision is to use gen AI to augment the work of our existing agents, which will enable us to expand into other countries with the current team,” says Bukovac. “We’ll need to do more testing and see how the wider industry solves some of the platform-agnostic challenges we’ve encountered. Our initial choice of watsonx.ai gives us the flexibility to easily integrate other AI models as needed, which leaves our future options open.”
About AdriaCamps
AdriaCamps (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an online information and booking service for more than 250 campsites across Croatia and Italy. The brand is owned and operated by Gaveia d.o.o., one of the largest travel technology companies in Croatia.
About Deegloo
Deegloo (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a software development agency focused on delivering big data and data-driven solutions for enterprises. They partnered with IBM in 2023, helping clients get the best value and insights out of their data.