The chatbots journey: how they conquer the market

The digitalization of businesses has had, and continues to have, profound impacts on their operation processes. Tasks that, just a few years ago, demanded printing dozens of reports and many hours of analysis are now carried out in a few minutes – thanks to the support of innovative technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

Chatbots are another great example of a tool that is gaining acceptance and scale during this Digital Transformation. The focus of chatbots as a solution is very specific, as well as important: automating and optimizing service tasks, enabling a leaner and more efficient operation, while providing an excellent experience to customers using them. The proliferation of chatbots is not only due to their usefulness for businesses: they have become much more proficient in conversing with the users in a natural way, understanding the users’ requests and providing useful services to the public.

A Salesforce study, published in 2018, found that 53% of corporations expected to deploy chatbots within 18 months. And in fact, usage of chatbots is skyrocketing. It is estimated that 1.4 Billion people are using chatbots on a regular basis now, and by the end of 2021, 85% of chat-based user interactions will be handled without the intervention of a human agent. The investment in new chatbots in 2021 will be $5B.

PhoneMyBot: what is the technology and how it works

Currently most chatbots only understand text and cannot be used with voice.

PhoneMyBot provides an instant enhancement to the new generation of corporate chatbots. The solution is hosted in the cloud and efficiently expands the reach of chatbot to include voice channels. This includes the telephone channel which, according to surveys, is still the most used channel for consumers who need to solve problems, but it also encompasses channels – such as WhatsApp, that can send recorded voice as messages.

Livio Pugliese, CEO for North America at Interactive Media, points out that the solution integrates different services: it receives calls from the telephone network, transcribes speech into text, sends the text to the chatbot, receives the response from the system and transforms it into speech, transmitting it to the user. The process sounds natural: the whole flow – from voice to text and from text to voice, with the support of Artificial Intelligence – feels like a common conversation over the phone, for the comfort and good customer experience of those on the other end of the line.

 “PhoneMyBot can be used by companies that have already implemented a chatbot or by software vendors that offer chatbot platforms to their customers”, adds the executive. Most organizations that have a chatbot in operation continue to receive voice calls and answer them with human agents. Most of these calls would be manageable with the existing self-service operation as delivered by the chatbot: not doing so burdens the process and hinders the speed of service.

Interactive Media’s solution is therefore the best alternative for these organization to expand their self-service capabilities to the voice channel, while ensuring customer satisfaction. “PhoneMyBot derives from a unique combination of skills: we are experts in conversational AI but we also have a strong background in telephony and in speech technologies,” says Pugliese.

PhoneMyBot advantages

PhoneMyBot can greatly contribute to resource optimization – whether physical, financial or human. In the financial sector, for example, it is estimated that the deployment of chatbots and voicebots will generate savings of US $ 7.3 billion by 2023, channeling investments to other equally strategic areas of the companies.

In addition to the high potential for return – in the short, medium and long term – one of the biggest differentiations of the Interactive Media solution concerns usability: from the technological infrastructure to the management and monitoring portal to the commercial functions, everything works in order to provide a smooth integration with the existing applications and operation of the system. Text and voice complement each other to generate an incredible experience from end to end.

“Technically, the API to connect to the chatbot is very simple and easy to integrate. Commercially, Interactive Media offers a free trial version and a pay-as-you-go model, so businesses can start small and grow organically, as they see the value in the service. In technology and cost-benefit, there is no similar offer available on the market today “, reinforces the CEO for North America.

Conclusion

In the highly volatile technology sector, change is the only certainty – and chatbots are an engine of change. With the popularization of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, robots are gaining ever more space in the corporate world; now bots have also gained a voice.

The use of conversation AI for customer service has democratized the advantages of technology: while companies accelerate their processes and reduces operating costs, customers are gaining excellent contact experiences. The old IVRs (Interactive Voice Response), which required user to listen to a long menu of options, have finally become obsolete.

“Based on the Interactive Media’s experience, virtual agents are able to solve up to 80% of the problems, which ends up releasing human agents from a considerable number of telephone contacts, and especially the most repetitive, dull ones” explains Pugliese. “For the remaining 20%, those responsible receive information that allows for a shorter, more empathic calls, in line with customer expectations. The net result: everyone wins. And with PhoneMyBot, companies can use the chatbot they have already deployed to provide a phone-enabled virtual agent service” concludes the CEO. The initiative could not be better suited to a world that values ​​the disruptive and demands competitiveness – without neglecting the experience.

Was the content useful and helped you to rethink the service strategy – by text and voice – of your business? Excellent! Remember that it is essential to have modern, reliable, and efficient tools. Get in touch with us and find out how Interactive Media and PhoneMyBot can help you face new market challenges.

OMNIA architecture

OMNIA plays in the customer experience / contact center arena. Clearly, it is only a component of the whole solution that companies use to ensure the best experience to their customers and it has to play nice with many other systems: contact center suites, IVRs, CRMs, corporate directories and authentication systems. Integrations are thus an essential part of OMNIA and we have worked hard to ensure that they are easy to implement.

For starter, OMNIA comes pre-integrated with several of the most common contact centers technologies in the market: as we encountered contact center software suites from different vendors being used by our customers, we integrated with them and optimized the integration in OMNIA. It also supports the protocols to connect with IVR systems and with several CRM platforms.

Interactive Media decided long ago that it did not make sense to implement speech services or our own. Text-to-speech and speech-to-text (TTS and STT) used by OMNIA for its Virtual Agents are becoming completely commoditized, with quality rising rapidly and more and more offers on the market. So, OMNIA integrates with several of the main players, with the ability to use different services for multiple use cases. In this way, it is possible to understand the answer to an open question to the customer (eg How can I help you?) and a more specific answer (such as telephone number), because of the ability to switch to the most appropriate service task during a call. Consequently, we have a higher percentage of speech recognition and less need for referrals to human agents, resulting in an impressive ROI in operation.

In addition to the Media Server and MIND, OMNIA comes with several useful tools and modules. These are shown in the figure below as part of the overall architecture, together with the main integrations with Channels, Speech services and Contact Centers. New integrations are being added all the time.

The Media Server is OMNIA’s front-end service. It streams all media content and implements all the integrations to manage the services of third-party modules. It is also a web server and provides dynamic HTTP pages for multimodal interactions.

MIND acts as an application server to the Media Server, controlling both the call setup and the media that is played in the calls. The MIND environment is where the Virtual Agents live: the MIND AI engine evaluates the utterances from the caller (that have been transcribed into text) and decides what the Virtual Agents says next, identifies intents and provides the self-service answers.

Developers use the MIND Studio and MIND Skill modules to create and train Virtual Agents. The MIND Studio is a web GUI to create the Virtual Agents flow and manage all aspects of their deployment. The MIND Skill focuses on the Virtual Agents domain knowledge: the semantic elements that allow the AI engine to understand the users’ utterances.

OMNIA also provides a Business Intelligence module, which allows non-technical personnel to monitor the Virtual Agents KPIs and change some aspects of its service – for instance if a product has been discontinued and the Virtual Agent should change the way it talks about it. Finally, the OMNIA OAM module is for administrators to monitor and control low-level aspects of the services, receive and react to alarms and reconfigure the service if needed.

OMNIA projects: reliability, performance and high intents recognition

At Interactive Media, we have a long experience in using OMNIA (and its predecessors) to build the conversational experience that our customers want for their customers. Many factors come into play: the customer’s organization, the service they provide, the number of intents that have to be recognized, the figure of the customers calling in, and the lingo that the company uses.

We have become experts in analyzing all these factors and building the correct structures for a quick and effective implementation and we have codified the project strategy in a master plan, that we use over and over. It is not an automatic pilot for reaching perfect Virtual Agents, but it makes for a fast and predictable deployment – in a matter of weeks instead of months, and with well-defined milestones and activities.

We realize that we are not the only company offering a platform and services to implement, deploy and run Conversational AI Virtual Agents. In fact, the field is rather crowded: in the past few years many have joined us. But we believe that OMNIA gives us an advantage, in terms of ease of use, reliability, performance in recognizing the callers’ intent and in scaling up to millions of calls successfully served per month.

We can’t wait to train OMNIA to provide a delightful experience to your customers too: give us a call! 

Since this architecture was geared towards PCs, whose cost was falling while their power was raising fast (following Moore’s law), companies were able to set up contact centers at a reasonable cost. It was the dawn of industrial customer service: people started to be able to use their phone to try and resolve issues or set up services that previously needed an in-person visit to an office, or sometimes writing letters with no guarantee of a response.

However, while technology certainly enabled the birth of call centers, the humans work to make them function was also completely new. Agents had to be recruited and trained, a new organization geared to make answering calls as efficient as possible had to be developed. As with other sectors of industrial work, there was a need for specialization: agents could not be experts of everything and so a need arose to qualify calls for routing to the groups of agents in charge of specific topics.

The Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) was born, fronted by an Interactive Voice Response system (IVR). This was the beginning of the new century, the golden age for companies like Avaya and Genesys, innovators in the call center software field: every airline, every bank, every telephone carrier suddenly wanted a call center and business was booming.

(Call center is now an old term. Successive generations of marketing lingo have changed the name of the thing, first to contact center – with the addition of messaging and chat to the voice channel – then to customer experience (CX). We’ll change terminology as appropriate…)

So, companies wanted a call center, but to do what? This was a new capability and initially it was driven by technology (because we can) and by competition (because our competitor is doing it). Consumers were probably pleased but the ability to call a company was not seen by the public as a reason to buy its products or services more. Since calls were mostly to complain about a troubled offer, it was rather a double negative: mitigating problems, try not to lose customers. This does not bring in new money, so for companies, the call center was a cost, not an investment.

But they couldn’t go back: the genie was out of the bottle and the public was used to it. And so, in order to reduce costs, contact centers were operated on a shoestring budget, with the bare minimum of agents. At the same time, callers needed to be filtered: only the most motivated, and persistent, could be allowed in and IVRs were the perfect tool to provide this filter. And so, the menus got longer and more confusing, music on hold was invented (it could be seen as an advance, but for the low bandwidth of telephone lines that are geared to human voice and not music. This is why it sounds horrible.) and the wait and bad experience necessary to reach call center agents became a widespread meme.

Occasionally, there were attempt at improving the situation. In the late 2000s, texting and messaging app started to be used more and more as people switched from fixed phones and mobile “feature phones” to the first smartphones. Call center software vendors incorporated messaging into their product, which became “contact centers”. Also, the first limited voice recognition software started to appear and suddenly people were asked to “press 1 or say “sales”, press 2 or say “support” – not very user-friendly actually since the time it took to read a menu grew substantially. But something was also changing in the companies’ attitude towards their customer support function.

Slowly, customer support was seen as more of a competitive advantage. The first step was the recognition that, with products and services largely equivalent between different players, consumers could switch allegiance quickly and easily. Customer service was an area of possible improvement, and one in direct contact with the public. I was working at Genesys then, and I remember the spiel we adopted in customer conferences: how customers were a lot more likely to churn after a bad experience, so it was imperative to avoid one.

But this was still a negative approach: the real turning point was when companies started to factor in the customer experience not only as a cost, but also as a way to increase revenue, switching the contact center from a pure cost to be a revenue-generating activity. The switch is all in the accounting, but it’s fundamental: now there are reasons to invest more in the contact center and measure the overall revenue brought in by a better customer experience.

Which brings us to the latest development: the rise of conversational AI for customer service. Conversational AI was made possible by advances in natural language processing, understanding, and rendering, and the advent of Cloud architectures and the abundance of data available to “train” the Artificial Intelligence algorithms. Conversational AI changes the paradigm of how calls (or text-based interactions) are qualified, and in many cases allows customers to self-serve. The key is to understand the natural language that people use. This allows the computer program (Virtual Agent) to find out the intent of the call very quickly because the service domain is treated as a flat field and not a tree. Language is much more expressive than tones or single words and so an interaction goes through the qualification phase in 1, 2, rarely 3 question-answer exchanges. At this point, the Virtual Agent has enough information to either engage a computer application to satisfy the customer or forward the call to a human agent.

The customer experience is much better, and costs are also reduced for companies. This is because the biggest cost in contact center operation is the agents. Conversational AI has been proven to help boost agents’ productivity, and increase their job satisfaction: routine, boring interactions are best served by the Virtual Agents, which also collects information for the human agents to use. Agents are left with more interesting and engaging conversations.

But having more productive agents means that fewer agents are needed; happier agents means that turnover is reduced, with less need to train new agents since old hands are more able to solve customers’ problems faster. At the same time, fast, frictionless experience is what customers want when they contact companies: the best customer experience is when problems are services are provided quickly and easily.

Conversational AI is the present of call qualification, and its near future too. In the next few years it is easy to predict that contact center will rely more and more on a mix of humans and bots – the bots dong the grunt work, the humans taking advantage of it to deliver better and better experiences to customers. Beyond that, who knows? Making predictions is hard, especially about the future (Neils Bohr, various attributions).

The importance of customer experience in Telecommunications

Telecom companies, and especially mobile carriers, are completely dependent on their relationship with customers. Competition is intense and regulations make it easy to switch from one carrier to another. Since most carriers are equivalent for their device offering and network coverage, growing the business comes down to price, and customer experience.

Pricing is an internal strategic matter, but for customer experience, it needs to be agile, effective and, whenever possible, delightful, to keep the existing customers and attract new ones.

Customer experience means every (and any) contact between the company and the user, regardless of the channel. To compete effectively in this area, building customer loyalty, it is important to invest in strategies that personalize messages, streamline processes, and build an experience that will surprise and delight users.

Unfortunately, the telecom sector has a long history of poor performance in managing complaints. Precisely for this reason, carriers need to meet the growing consumers demand for better service and adopt robust and updated tools.

We at Interactive Media have seen this first-hand, due to our long experience with fixed and mobile carriers. For example Davide Arici, pre-sales manager, notes that “technology in itself is not enough: you need to have the support of vendors experienced not only in technology, but also in how to apply it intelligently to remodel the service processes“.

With an experienced partner that shares the common goal of a better customer service process, telecommunications companies can use disruptive technologies – always leveraging in full the supplier’s know-how – to launch a continuous improvement process in the short, medium and long term.

The power of artificial intelligence in customer experience

In telecommunications companies, one of the main areas where AI can make a difference is in customer service. Simplified and lean interactions, without wasting time, is what makes the consumer experience positive and Conversational AI is key to provide it.

“From this perspective, artificial intelligence enables fast and pleasant service based on features such as an open dialog for self-service, approaching human conversation“, points out the Arici. This way, it is possible to interpret the customer’s request and address it quickly in an automated way, without requiring the branching of static menus.

The key is simplification. The services offered by virtual agents powered by artificial intelligence need to be formulated and adapted on an individual scale, meeting the demands of each type of operation. Interactive Media, which has focused on customer service technological evolution for more than twenty years, has the necessary expertise to support companies in strategic choices – including the application of AI.

In addition to engineering, the deployment of conversational AI is like a recipe: the final system mixes diverse and complementary ingredients, technological, linguistic and psychological. “When it comes to customer service, the focus is on cutting the domain over the application’s target audience, shaping the dialogue to make it efficient in a specific relationship ecosystem”, emphasizes the pre-sales manager at Interactive Media.

So, the added value of the company that provides the artificial intelligence devices is not only in the robustness of the technology, but also in the ability to understand the operational details, reviewing the service flow and customizing the model according to the usage environment. To guarantee the effectiveness of the solution and the quality of the results obtained throughout the process – during and after the deployment of virtual agents in the telecommunications environment -, make sure you know the products and services of potential partners, and choose wisely what to deploy.

The Interactive Media solution for Telecom

Interactive Media’s mission is to develop, deploy and improve conversational virtual customer service agents, boosting the customer experience and, consequently, the overall results of its customers.

In the telecommunications sector, Interactive Media’s technology has a sizable installed base. “We developed a Conversational AI project for a huge mobile carrier. They have now 180 virtual agents, that perform multiple tasks typical of a telecom call center, such as: register users, gather their personal data (account numbers, date of birth, addresses, etc.); block a SIM card from a phone that has been stolen; enable or disable additional services; schedule installment payments and changes of how the invoice is received.”, says Arici. “This saves users time, since they don’t need to wait in a queue, and our customer substantial amount of money.”

By automating simple tasks, deploying virtual agents to perform them, it is possible to optimize resources and standardize the service flow, ensuring a more uniform experience for the customer. “In this way, 85% of the calls are executed automatically”, points out Arici.

Interactive Media’s tools are flexible and modular, facilitating integration with third parties – such as data networks, RDBMS, telephone centre and provisioning systems, avoiding additional investments. This way, managers gain autonomy to incorporate and adapt the technology according to the availability of mechanisms and resources, getting the most out of the disruptive power of artificial intelligence in customer experience.

The message, therefore, is clear: the solution for telecom operators must be flexible without losing in efficiency. “Interactive Media strives to be at the forefront of technology, while backing up our technical expertise with a strong organizational experience.“, concludes Davide Arici.