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. One year into their AI-powered virtual agent implementation with SmartAction, they took the stage at Customer Contact West to explain how they deflected 25% of call volume via automation, raised […]
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 […]
<<Step 4 This is the fifth of a five-part blog series that outlines the Five Best Practices for AI Self-Service Without Compromise. Use this guide to automate your contact center and Customer Experience (CX) with AI self-service in voice, chat, and text. Best Practice #5: Human-Centric Design from a team of CX Experts. Steps 1-4 […]
<<Step 3 | Step 5>> This is the fourth of a five-part blog series that outlines the Five Best Practices for AI Self-Service Without Compromise. Use this guide to automate your contact center and Customer Experience (CX) with AI self-service in voice, chat, and text. Best Practice #4: Avoid siloed channels with a […]
<<Step 2 | Step 4>> This is the third of a five-part blog series that outlines the Five Best Practices for AI Self-Service Without Compromise. Use this guide to automate your contact center and Customer Experience (CX) with AI self-service in voice, chat, and text. Best Practice #3: AI Without Data is Like […]
<<Step 1 | Step 3>> This is the second of a five-part blog series that outlines the Five Best Practices for AI Self-Service Without Compromise. Use this guide to automate your contact center and Customer Experience (CX) with AI self-service in voice, chat, and text. Best Practice #2: Virtual agents need “guardrails” There […]
Step 2>> Gartner predicts that “customers [soon] will prefer using speech-driven interfaces to other forms of self-service when given a choice.” That shift is being driven by advances in conversational AI, which uses advanced speech recognition and natural language processing to automate more calls, chats, and texts than ever before. Delivery over the cloud […]
IVR automation has been around for awhile, but for the most part, it just hasn’t been very good. It’s also been expensive and difficult to deploy. Everyone knows the limitations of IVR systems, and customers have a gag reflex when they hear most call automation. It’s hard to blame them. The cost and effort to […]
In November 2018, SmartAction’s AI-powered virtual agent solution was successfully tested by Avaya in its DevConnect program, a developer community and marketplace for third-party products that interoperate with Avaya technology (read news release). Only those solutions that extend the value of Avaya’s network are featured in Avaya’s DevConnect Marketplace after successfully completing formal joint compliance […]