Scaling Customer Service with AI and Automation
The University of Helsinki set out to modernise customer service for a community of over 40,000 students and staff, handling more requests without adding manual work or losing quality. Vuono Group brought deep expertise in AI, data, and process development into the university's cross-functional teams, helping map the path to make that scale achievable.
“Working with Vuono Group meant having AI, data, and process expertise embedded directly in our cross-functional teams. We now have a concrete path so we can scale reliably, without compromising the high quality of our customer service processes.”
The Challenge
The university was consolidating its distributed customer services into a single access point, built around an AI-powered search of instructional content as the first touchpoint. Getting this right meant the content, AI answers, and processes behind it had to be reliable before automation could take on a growing share of the work.
How We Helped?
We provided deep expertise in AI and data science across multiple cross-functional project teams, advising on generative AI and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to build a customer-facing AI search service the university could trust at scale. To redesign business processes, we involved customer-service staff throughout, turning their frontline experience into a prioritised, evidence-based improvement plan.
We tackled the question every AI search project eventually has to answer: how do you know the answers are correct, not just fluent? We built an LLM-as-a-judge evaluation method with content experts and helped integrate it into the development team's workflow, so answer quality could be tested systematically as the system evolved.
We prepared the ground the AI search stands on, piloting automated subject indexing to assign ontology-based concepts to text. We tested how guidance materials could be classified and linked automatically, and advised on content and metadata practices so future content is AI-ready from the start.
Key Outcomes
The University of Helsinki now has a concrete, measurable path to customer service that scales with demand, without trading away the trust that comes from getting answers right.
Bottlenecks replaced with an evidence-based plan. The workshop turned frontline experience into a prioritised AI capability-focused improvement plan grounded in real operational reality.
AI answers the university can actually trust. The LLM-as-a-judge method gives an objective, repeatable way to test whether the AI search is getting things right, something most AI projects never build.
Customer service ready to scale in the AI era. Improving the usability of existing contents for AI search, as well as creating guidelines for AI-ready text creation, means the university can grow demand without growing manual work at the same rate, across a community of 40,000+ students and staff.
About the University of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki is Finland’s largest and oldest academic institution. Since 1640, it has contributed to the establishment of a fair and equal society that is considered the best in the world according to a number of indicators. Today, this multidisciplinary academic community solves problems that concern all of us, also on a global scale. A community of 40,000 students and employees is diversely open, comprehensively quality conscious and joyfully serious.