AI won’t replace a great customer service advisor. But it can help prepare one. Here’s how Orange Polska is doing it

Orange Polska’s Customer Service Center handles thousands of conversations every day. The quality of these interactions directly affects the customer experience and how the brand is perceived, making employee readiness not just a training priority, but a business priority.

The nature of customer service is also changing quickly. More and more routine requests are being handled by automated solutions, leaving customer service advisors with more complex situations. At the same time, a growing number of people are less comfortable with phone conversations as a form of communication.

Customer service advisors need more than product and process knowledge. They need to know how to build rapport, respond to emotions, and make good decisions under time pressure. These skills cannot be developed through theory alone. They require practice.

Traditional training, however, has its natural limits. Trainers cannot participate in every simulation or provide individual feedback to every employee. Orange Polska needed a way to give employees more opportunities to practice in a safe environment while assessing their readiness against consistent criteria.

The answer was GrowMe, a platform that enables employees to have realistic voice conversations with a virtual customer and automatically receive feedback based on the organization’s standards.

Each simulation is built around a scenario that reflects a specific business situation. The user talks to a virtual customer and receives a detailed summary after the conversation. They can then immediately try again and put the feedback into practice.

Scenarios can be tailored to different needs, from onboarding new employees and practicing sales and customer service conversations to handling complaints and more challenging interactions. Assessment criteria have also been aligned with Orange Polska’s standards, ensuring that the feedback reflects the organization’s processes and expectations.

The virtual customer adapts its behavior to the selected scenario. It can be more demanding, dissatisfied, or persistent in its position. The platform also supports multiple languages, allowing it to be used across different teams and areas of the organization.

Automation allows multiple employees to practice at the same time without requiring a trainer to run each simulation individually. Trainers can review scores, feedback, and conversation transcripts, track progress across the group, and focus their attention on areas where additional support is needed.