Rinnai Australia has deployed an AI-powered customer service assistant to streamline service operations and improve efficiency, with the HVAC manufacturer reporting response-time improvements of up to 35 per cent.
The Australian subsidiary of Rinnai Japan Corporation said it developed the assistant using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Enterprise AI and Oracle AI Database as customer inquiries have become more complex and increasingly require access to extensive technical documentation.
According to Rinnai Australia, its call centre handles thousands of inquiries, with individual cases averaging between 30 and 60 minutes. The AI assistant is designed to automate manual service processes, improve response accuracy and provide staff with faster access to relevant product information.
“As a trusted name in Australia, we have a responsibility to deliver fast, accurate and consistent support to our customers,” said Samir Shah, ICT business services manager at Rinnai Australia.
“As demand increased and our product portfolio expanded, we knew we needed to modernise the way we deliver service,” Shah said.
“With Oracle, we’ve been able to deliver a more efficient, responsive, and consistent customer experience by streamlining our service operations, reducing response times, and giving our teams faster access to the information they need.”
Oracle said its OCI Enterprise AI allows Rinnai Australia to build and manage AI agents that can interact with customers and automate workflows. Oracle AI Database stores Rinnai’s product documentation as vectors and uses semantic search to identify relevant information, while retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is used to provide responses based on the company’s enterprise data.
Stephen Bovis, regional managing director for Australia and New Zealand at Oracle, said AI could help businesses improve the speed and consistency of customer service.
“The customer service function is foundational to every successful business, and AI is transforming how organisations deliver speed, increased accuracy, and consistency at scale,” Bovis said.
Rinnai Australia said it plans to extend its use of AI to more complex processes, including supply-chain inquiries and field-service bookings.
The company said these capabilities will be supported by Oracle Autonomous AI Database, Oracle Digital Assistant and Oracle APEX.
