Here’s a scenario I’m hearing about more and more regularly: In an effort to cut costs, Company X decides to replace the humans in their call centers with bots. In theory (and in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s mind) it makes perfect sense. In the United States, one in 25 employees is a call center worker and staffing costs are often one of a company’s biggest expense, so why not invest in a cheap technology that will...
For the better part of the last decade, most of the best artificial intelligence (AI) was built on the back of natural language processing (NLP). While many people perceive AI to be something of a future technology, the truth is that not only has nearly everyone interacted with AI, they’ve interacted with NLP. According to Wikipedia, NLP is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural)...
Have you ever heard of the 80/20 rule? It says that you can accomplish 80% of a goal with 20% of the effort. After extensive research about freeform conversational topics between businesses and their customers, we found that this rule does not apply when helping our customers build conversational artificial intelligence (AI) engines. We believe this is because our data shows that over 80% of customer communication is more complex than originally anticipated. This can be viewed...
Most companies are aware that CoBrowsing can decrease costs and increase customer satisfaction. However, after speaking with a top insurance company, I recently discovered another huge benefit of CoBrowsing - cutting down on the cost of regulation. This insurance company informed me that it took a significant amount of time to purchase a policy via the phone rather than online. Upon further research, we found that phone agents had to abide by regulation standards that required...
The concept of the phone call as we know it is in the process of dying a slow but eventual death. At nearly 140 years old, its days are now numbered. The question is, what will ultimately take its place? When analyzing technological advances, we typically find that the origin falls squarely in one of two buckets - consumer or enterprise - before migrating into the other. For instance, video chat made its mark and matured on...
From Facebook to Apple, some of the biggest tech companies are turning to bots in an attempt to simplify the online purchase process. Unfortunately, the reality is that the technology - regardless of its advances in logic trees, natural language processing, and machine learning - must always be backed up by real people. The human interaction is simply a necessary piece of the Customer Experience puzzle that will only increase in relevance to conversion rates over...
WebRTC (Web Real Time Communication) the newest standard for online communication and is intended to replace Adobe's old-man Flash. Prior to WebRTC, in order to send data (text, audio, video) from one web browser to another, the data would travel through a server (adding payload in terms of network traffic and latency). A server acts like the hub for a major airline- flights stop at the hub so that passengers can connect to their destination. Passangers...