Just about everyone has an IVR horror story to share. Being forced to listen to repetitive menus. Getting stuck in an endless cycle of trying to navigate through options that don’t meet your needs. Wanting to throw the phone against the wall in frustration after hearing an automated voice announce, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t […]
Earlier this month, Choice Hotels, the 2nd largest hotel franchiser in the world with more than 7,000 locations, took the stage for the virtual Customer Response Summit hosted by Execs In The Know. For the first time, they spoke out about their bumpy journey to getting a conversational AI experience worth talking about. Here are […]
The editorial team at CrmXchange sat down with our own Brian Morin to dive into the top 10 questions their readers ask about deploying stellar experiences with conversational AI over voice. Please provide a brief overview of SmartAction’s conversational AI. At a 50,000 ft level, the best way to think of us is having all […]
At SmartAction, we design, build, and operate AI-powered virtual agents for more than a hundred brands, ranging from mid-sized companies to the Fortune 500. That means we’ve done a lot of end-to-end customer journeys from “press 1” to “How Can I Help You Today?” As you can imagine, operating the AI-powered CX for some of […]
Now that I have your attention, this is why we don’t use Google…except for select use cases. As a company that manages the AI-powered CX for more than 100 brands, we often get asked about the place of Google or Amazon in our conversational AI technology stack. More specifically, since our reputation is staked on […]
Meet 7 different brands from our video roundtable who shared their different experiences with AI-powered virtual agents. Aarde @ TechStyle Fashion Group “When someone calls in, the first thing they hear is, “Thank you for calling JustFab, how may I help you?” They don’t have to say the word “shipping,” they don’t have to say […]
Frictionless experiences with conversational AI are not created by accident, but meticulously crafted by expert designers who know exactly how humans interact best with machines. Fabletics leverages a Virtual Agent to interact with their customers every time you call them. Take a listen to the clip below and learn a few best practices from the […]
What a journey it’s been in the conversational artificial intelligence space. Over the past two years, while Google searches for “speech recognition” have fallen and queries for “artificial intelligence” have flatlined, searches for “conversational ai” are on an upward trajectory. According to Gartner’s 2019 Hype Cycle for Customer Service & Support Technologies, Virtual Customer Assistants […]
Purchasing Power®, a large eCommerce company that enables employers to offer employee purchase programs, recently won the “Excellence in Self-service” award from Frost & Sullivan then followed that up with the Stevie Award for “Best Return on Customer Service Investment.” One year into their AI-powered virtual agent implementation with SmartAction, they took the stage at […]
Commentary by Mark Landry, Human Experience ActivistSeptember 10, 2019 Great design is just as important as the underlying technology in Conversational AI solutions. While it takes engineers to build AI solutions, it requires an artist to use it effectively. This is the role of a CX Designer, or as we refer to it at SmartAction, […]
As conversational AI capabilities and affordability have made big strides, organizations of all shapes and sizes are implementing it differently. At the highest level, these companies come in two types. The first hold onto their existing IVR and merely transfer routine conversations to AI-powered virtual agents while transferring the rest to live agents. Many organizations […]
If you’ve purchased a new pair of shoes in the last few years, chances are, you’ve been in a DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse store or purchased from their website. While DSW has encountered tremendous growth, that has also meant mounting customer service pressure yielding millions of inbound calls per year. DSW turned to SmartAction in […]