It’s 7pm, you’ve just shed all your work-day worries and you can’t wait to wind down and relax for the evening. The phone rings. It’s someone wanting to let you know about someone’s special offer on something. You’re politely resistant at first but he or she is insistent. So you just hang up. Being a spammer is a thankless task and you can bet the people responsible for the nuisance calls don’t particularly like their job. Still In Russia, a whopping 70% of all incoming calls in Russia remain spam despite the use of anti-spam bots and…insults from recipients.
That’s why Russian creative agency, Slava, has launched Help The Spammers for online educational platform, Skillbox, and Russian financial ecosystem, Tinkoff.
Help The Spammers listens to cold callers and offers them career-changing advice. It uses an AI smart assistant named Oleg, who detects and listens to cold callers. Instead of blocking them, however, it enters into a dialogue using speech recognition algorithms to respond in a witty manner, motivating spammers to retrain and change their profession.
For example, Oleg might reply with a statement that it is a psychological support service for call centre employees knowing they get bad-mouthed on a regular basis. Alternatively, it may appeal to their ego and let them know they have a beautiful voice made for storytelling. Other quips included informing spammers the days of phone surveys are numbered and that rather than trying to steal money, they should be stealing the hearts of recruiters at top companies.
All in, Oleg has over 30 scripts and associated combinations to work from, offering both free career counselling via a hotline service and providing spammers with a discount on training with Skillbox. The courses include programming, marketing, management, multimedia, engineering, game design and psychology.
Vlad Sitnikov, brand director, Skillbox, stated, “Help The Spammers allows us to solve the spam call problem from two angles simultaneously. Our global goal is to rid the world of nuisance calls. But, as an educational platform first and foremost, it is important for us to promote accessibility in education. We don’t care about a person’s background. We give everyone the opportunity to change their career and improve the quality of their life in general.”
Eugene Pakhmutov, creative director, Slava Agency, added, “We love spammers. After all, they start our day with good news about being approved for a substantial loan. And like parents, they always call first because they care about us. Now it’s our turn to take care of them.”
How Oleg works
Subscribers to any mobile operator and using any smartphone operating system can connect to Oleg, by visiting the project website and clicking the “activate assistant” button. Oleg then receives, records and decrypts incoming calls from unknown numbers using speech recognition algorithms. Oleg delivers motivational speeches on a case-by-case basis, these phrases hopefully inspiring the spammers to consider a career change. The service is free of charge.
To develop this updated version of Oleg, Skillbox and Tinkoff studied millions of recordings between users and spammers to work out how the issue could be solved in a productive manner. Skillbox and Tinkoff then developed new scripts for the smart assistant and integrated them into its existing protection versions. Over the course of a month, Oleg will offer spammers a unique promo code with a 30% discount on any Skillbox course.
Skillbox protects users’ personal data and builds an honest dialogue with clients. If a user receives an unwanted call from Skillbox call centre employees, they can report it via the feedback form or a call to the hotline. Within 24 hours all personal information will be removed from the database.
Credits
Client: Skillbox
Brand Director: Vladilen Sitnikov
Brand Manager: Daria Filimonova
Client: Tinkoff
Head of Brand Group: Olga Volkova
Oleg Product Marketing: Valeria Nelyubova
Creative Agency: Slava
Creative Director: Eugene Pakhmutov
Senior Art Director: Lyudmila Kulibaba
Senior Copywriters: Igor Kleshchov & Roman Vydashenko
