Solutions

What makes our Virtual Assistant solution unique?

The key differentiator of our Virtual Assistant technology is the ability to hold the context of the conversation, in natural language; this means that the Virtual Assistant is able to emulate the way people interact with each other (this technology is about creating virtual people, be that a virtual customer service agent, virtual sales agent, or a combination of both). You can see an example of the conversational capabilities by visiting the BT website and asking "I've got a problem with my line".

Key benefits

- Significantly reduce customer service calls and emails (available 24/7, and able to 'chat' to thousands of users at the same time)
- Help users find information quickly (as part of understanding a question, the Virtual Assistant can navigate the user to the appropriate web page or document)
- User journeys (rules can be defined in to control the user journey; e.g. drive users to particular products or registration process; help users to complete forms)
- Cross-sell/up-sell (as part of the conversational capability, the Virtual Assistant can make sales suggestions based on predefined rules)
- Create a virtual person to represent your brand values (the Virtual Assistant can have its own personality; users build a relationship with your brand through the interaction with the Virtual Assistant)
- Marketing (the user interface can contain context sensitive advertisements and/or customer service messages - and these can be controlled based on the question the user asks). Additionally, it's possible to deploy the Virtual Assistant as part of a banner advertisement campaign.
- Multi-platform: mobile, SMS, Telephony (IVR)

ROI

- Significant reduction in calls and emails (20%+ call reduction)
- One of our clients (National Express East Anglia) saw a 1,000% increase in users getting to target web pages
- Our Virtual Assistants are currently answering over 3M questions per month
- BT estimates that their Virtual Assistant (Emma) is saving them over 700,000 calls per annum
- Typical ROI is under 12 months
- We guarantee an accuracy rating of over 90% (by far the most accurate and consistent Virtual Assistant technology in the world)

Used by many large organisations

Our solutions are used by large organisations such as BT, O2, Lloyds TSB, Aviva, Alliance & Leicester, National Rail Enquires, Verizon and Philips Electronics. These implementations handle an extremely large number of transactions, and many of our customers have performed extensive security and load testing as part the procurement process. In addition, we deploy our own monitoring and alerting software which constantly checks the performance of the software and hardware, which ensures a high level of reliability. We have extensive experience of working with large customers on usability and accessibility testing (including AAA compliance).

User interface/Avatar

The user interface/Avatar is fully customisable (please visit the websites listed below to see a range of different front-ends).

Integration with databases/third-party applications

It's possible to integrate the Virtual Assistant with databases and third-party applications, providing the ability for a fully personalised virtual conversation with the user (e.g. if the customer is logged in, the Virtual Assistant could deal with billing transactions and make use of the account information for cross-selling/up-selling purposes).

Managed service

The fully managed service offering is the most popular option for deploying the Virtual Assistant. We have developed a solid (proven) methodology for all aspects of delivery and on-going maintenance. This managed service solution means that there is minimal impact on your internal resources.

Start simple and evolve

- Start with simple FAQs - then use the analysis of the questions to add the ability to answer more sophisticated questions/decision trees
- Integration into back-end systems (e.g. databases, CRM systems)
- Integration with other customer service tools (e.g. live-chat, call-back)
- The Virtual Assistant can help to fill in forms (or eliminate the need for forms altogether - information can be collected by the use of decision trees)

Statistics

The online/real-time reporting module provides a comprehensive view of the questions/answers/conversations. Reviewing the questions/conversations in this way gives a unique insight into customer behaviour. One of our customers said: "It feels like we're getting an insight into the people not the clicks". It's also possible to download the statistics in XML and Excel formats: the XML option provides the ability to load the statistics into third-part reporting tools. The statistics module helps drive the development of the "conversational" elements (reviewing the questions that people ask helps to define the more advanced conversation/decision tree elements, as well as improving the accuracy by reviewing the questions that cannot be currently answered). Download our reporting tools pdf .

Futures

- More sophisticated Avatars (3D, text-to-speech, lip sync. etc.)
- Voice recognition