By Kumar Priyavrat - Director, Product Line Management
According to Gartner, Artificial Intelligence (AI) augmentation will create $2.9 trillion of business value and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally in 2021. By 2030, decision support/augmentation will surpass all other types of AI initiatives to account for 44% of the global AI-derived business value. Nowhere is AI more valuable than when applied to interactions between businesses and their customers for obvious reasons:
- Augmented intelligence reduces mistakes while delivering customer convenience and personalization.
- Augmented intelligence enables improvements at scale, making it possible for SMBs to embrace it as they compete with larger enterprises who have been adopting artificial and augmented intelligence for years.
- Augmented intelligence improves job satisfaction for agents as they have the support they need to be 'fully human' and pull up information, often from different sources.
Over the last few years, the broad industry conversation has evolved from fear of replacing humans with AI to enhancing the human experience. The discussion amongst CIOs and CMOs now is how AI can allow them to serve customers better while gathering useful insights that can improve products and services.
Customers are in charge today – they don’t think about “omnichannel” they simply want their queries resolved quickly. They want brands to be available and respond on the channel of their choice – on the web, social media, loyalty apps, on the phone, and even embedded into smart devices as the Internet of Things continues to grow.
Customer Experience (CX) has become a strategic investment for businesses to be more competitive. With dozens of studies by industry analyst firms proving that customers are making choices based on the quality of service delivered along with their purchase, customers pay more for a product with a better service experience. It’s all about brand trust: customers want to feel confident knowing they can trust the brand to stand behind their offerings and assist in fast and friendly ways should a problem arise.
Radisys earlier this year rolled out ‘Engage’ – a suite of AI solutions that include both artificial and augmented intelligence. Our offerings are helping brands re-imagine CX and build truly differentiated customer journeys, which feel easy, fluid and personalized to the customer. This, in turn, makes contact center operations far more efficient, with shorter wait times, first call resolution and more.
Our Engage Virtual Assistant (EVA) application eliminates the need for customers to wait endlessly, listening to a menu of IVR options, or typing away on their keyboard when seeking answers to questions about new products. Our 3-in-1 bot enables unique multi-modal (Video, Voice, and Text) bot interactions to automate sales, marketing, and customer support interactions.
Unlike commoditized chatbots and voice-based digital assistants, the EVA answers verbal requests with video responses by human – not computer-generated avatars. Our clients are differentiating by enabling personalized engagement with trusted corporate faces or brand ambassadors while maintaining the brand’s authentic tonality, attitude, and style.
EVA also supports “app-less” technology, which means subscribers no longer need to download a customer support app. The application can provide video-voice-text bot engagement experience with the existing phone numbers that brands use for customer service, sales, and marketing.
Available as a white-labeled customizable application, Engage Virtual Assistant provides flexible deployment options – in network and hosted - for managed service providers (MSPs), Unified Communications Service Providers (CSPs), and Contact-Center-as-a-Service Providers (CCaaS). While service providers can use it to optimize their own call center services, the application also enables new revenue streams from call centers, SMBs, and large enterprises.
Our Engage Virtual Assistant technology is deployed by Reliance Jio, one of the largest LTE service provider in the world serving 370 million subscribers. It is helping business customers to enhance their customer service, reduce their customer support cost, and increase agent productivity.
AI’s most significant impact is felt in cost savings even as brands transform customer service for the better by making it more automated, intelligently augmented, and not just fast but fun.
Leading companies are continually experimenting with AI to improve customer experience. They are using machine learning algorithms to identify points of friction and predict future customer behavior, so they can continually improve how they are delivering exceptional experiences at scale.
What Radisys Engage solutions offer are more “humanized” bots – featuring real people and personalities, intelligently programmed to answer questions efficiently and quickly. It can transfer to a live human agent – if, in fact, a live human is needed – without losing any conversation context.
You can learn more by downloading the Intelligent Virtual Assistant Solution Brief or contacting me for a quick, live, customized demo.
