Rumblings in the AI Conversational Space

The AI conversational space is making a lot of noise moving into 2020, with efforts to release new chatbot products to provide a more integrated and seamless customer experience. Within customer service, chatbots have historically failed at taking in and applying the direct insight and demands of their customers reaching out. There is a need for solutions create superior chat conversations based on anticipated needs in real-time, while also continuously analyzing interactions to educate improvements on customer intent recognition. 

Enter Uniphore, an early conversation service automation category leader, that is expanding its solution offerings by delivering akeira^TM 2.0, an intelligent conversational digital assistant. Akeira helps automate conversations and reduce the cost of customer service for enterprises while providing  a better customer experience. Key features and associated business outcomes include:

Simplifying and accelerating deployment time of conversational digital assistants:

• Visual modeler: create and edit conversational flows on the fly for easy, rapid deployments
• Training: train the intents in a language for a channel and deploy across multiple channels
• Virtual agent health tracking: track intent served and call handling capacity  
• Sand box for testing: simulate an intent in a sand box before moving to production

Integration that brings cost savings and better customer satisfaction:

• Assisted training: rapid and continuous intent training to improve akeira’s NLU models to cut down on live agent volume
• Live agent transfer: intent-based routing or “hot transfer” of calls to a live agent based on contextual scenarios such as multiple failures or escalating customer sentiments or irritation
• Business end point connector service: secure connectivity to business applications and traditional interactive voice response systems
• Granular control of intents: flexibility to leverage intent-based features at will or to disengage in live environments for smoother roll outs

Uniphore conversational digital agents do what humans don’t like to

Akeira conversational digital agents work alongside call center humans to radically boost productivity and customer experience. They handle simple transactional conversations which shouldn’t require a human agent in the first place. They make suggestions during a call, proactively look up information and can take actions. Uniphore’s automated digital agents resolve issues in real time, with the capability to seamlessly hand back to a human at any time.

Akeira is an intuitive, flexible, intelligent solution that allows you to build out a digital virtual assistant on existing interactive voice response channels, web chat and mobile app channels to interact with the customers answering or responding to a wide range of questions and requests. Secure enterprise connectors to standard CRM, ticketing and other back-end applications further widen the type of requests and queries that can be handled. Akeira is multilingual, supporting global languages and flexible deployment options whether it is on cloud or on premise.

Advanced functionality to save time

At the core of akeira is a new visual modeler. This easy-to-use interface gives administrators the ability to design and deploy entire conversations from start to finish in a few minutes.  Enterprise administrators can create an intent flow, design responses, train user input variations for intent identification and simulate intent behavior from a single interface. The Visual modeler is scalable and can be trained once and deployed across multiple channels. Akeira’s interfaces will guide a user through every step of the conversation creation process.

Once deployed, akeira will keep track of real-time performance metrics using a virtual assistant health card that will identify the need for corrective action in a virtual assistant and enable administrators to take these actions based on data from the health card.

The success or failure of a virtual assistant is greatly impacted by its ability to learn continuously from conversations that have happened and the outcomes or next actions. To help ensure more effective interactions, akeira now has a function called “assisted training” which is a semi autonomous machine learning capability where an organization can continuously train akeira based on historical conversations and even allow users to identify patterns for new intents. Our digital agents act just like humans. Akeira can personalize content and understands sentiment, trends, and intent.

Extending akeira for even better customer experiences

With an extensive list of features and functionality already built into akeira, there are additional areas and applications where akeira can be deployed.  For example, the AI and automation capabilities can be leveraged across digital channels including web, mobile and social channels. Additional support for more languages and more automated machine learning capabilities are in development which will provide both enterprises and end customers a cost-efficient, personalized, accurate and predictive omnichannel customer experience.

“As virtual assistants and various bots came on the scene a few years ago, many organizations rushed in, believing it would solve their problems of scale and reduce costs.  But that proved false,” said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal at ZK Research. “In order for these bots to be successful, there needs to be capabilities which help not only set up but maintain and monitor the outcomes as well as help make recommendations for improvement. Uniphore’s latest akeira offering is a solid step forward in this direction”

“Customers have high expectations for any interactions with customer service agents, both real and virtual,” said Samith Ramachandran, senior vice president of product engineering at Uniphore. “Our latest akeira offering steps up the features and functionality of intelligent virtual assistants and makes them easier to set up, more cost effective to manage and, ultimately, smarter in the way they respond.”

Sign up for the free insideAI News newsletter.