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EchoStar and Hughes save thousands of work hours, cut costs with Azure AI
EchoStar delivers entertainment, communication, and connection to millions of businesses and consumers around the world through leading satellite-powered brands, including Hughes Network Systems, DISH, Sling, and Boost Mobile. The company aims to provide these services reliably and expand on its mission to offer satellite coverage in hard-to-reach rural areas. That’s why EchoStar and its brands take a technology-forward approach to solving complicated operational, productivity, and customer experience inefficiencies.
An avid and early AI adopter, Hughes Network Systems understood the power of generative AI to address challenges in speech, vision, text, and structured data for a wide range of work productivity challenges. It needed a way to relieve sales call auditors from listening to hours of conversations to ensure quality communications, a priority customer experience objective at Hughes. The company knew it was an area in which it could significantly improve cost, productivity, and ROI by using the right technology.
Tapping the power of advanced analytics and speech-to-text AI
“We chose Microsoft Azure AI Foundry because of our longstanding partnership with the company and its deep technical knowledge. We rely on Microsoft’s approach to responsible AI and its data privacy, security, and governance options,” says Rupinder Bir, Senior Director for Software Delivery at Hughes Network Systems. This decision initiated an exciting journey toward automation and enhanced insights.
Using Microsoft Azure AI Foundry products, including Azure AI Speech and Azure OpenAI Service, Hughes has offloaded manual sales agent audit calls with an AI-driven, automated speech-to-text system. This new system delivers higher-value interactions and produces advanced call insights and agent directives across the entire call, exponentially boosting productivity.
Amarender Singh, Director of AI at Hughes Network Systems, adds, “Working with Microsoft, we have the flexibility to use open-source models and create speech-to-text and text-to-speech avatars, helping us process thousands of call center calls, driving substantial ROI gains for Hughes. Our sales agents can now act on advanced analytics we didn’t have access to before, freeing them up to create more innovative customer service experiences.”
Establishing a grounded, trusted LLM operations framework
Hughes also trusted Azure AI Foundry to help it successfully create a solid large language model (LLM) operations framework. “Generative AI comes with risks to security, privacy, and intellectual property with potential legal ramifications, so we wanted to be sure we were building and evaluating responsibly,” explains Singh.
To ensure high standards, Hughes used automated evaluation tools in Azure AI Foundry to systematically measure the quality and safety of AI-generated outputs. “The robust evaluation tools in Azure AI Foundry help our developers continuously assess the performance and accuracy of our AI models, including meeting standards for coherence, fluency, and groundedness,” says Singh. “This advantage helps us get from pilot to production more quickly and with confidence.”
Saving time and money
Hughes has implemented multiple AI applications that enhance employee efficiency and elevate customer service. Using AI to summarize all calls to the contact center, the company has saved more than 30,000 hours annually. In field services, AI-driven process automation such as virtual assistants for field technicians, site auditing, and analysis of technical support calls has streamlined operations, saving more than 8,000 hours. By replacing human auditors in sales call audits, Hughes has saved thousands of dollars and significantly increased efficiency.
Hughes has also adopted AI for generating and annotating images faster, to train traditional computer vision models, significantly reducing training times and improving model accuracy. The ability to search knowledge bases using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has enhanced information accessibility for employees and installers in the field, ensuring quick and accurate responses.
In quality assurance, AI helps Hughes better understand the reasons behind customer churn by analyzing the customer journey through surveys, calls, and case data. Collectively, these AI initiatives have boosted overall productivity by up to 25%, including automated sales call audit reductions of 90%, from $26 per hour for each call to just $2.
Looking to the future
Hughes is preparing to deploy further innovations. It currently has 12 applications in production, with many more in development. “We want to deploy agentic AI across various company verticals, and we’ve already gauged its potential with Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Copilot Studio. We view Microsoft as a long-term collaborator for AI innovation, even beyond the success we’ve already had,” says Singh.
By embracing AI across multiple facets of the organization, including customer service, field services, and quality assurance, Hughes is signaling its continuing commitment to improving operational efficiency and delivering superior customer experiences.
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