On the challenge of being first

It is nearly two months since I’ve joined the team at Dasha Artificial Intelligence. By extension - this is two months that Dasha's product has gone international. When interviewing and taking on this role I felt that the product will sell itself. What we’ve got is head and shoulders above our perceived competition. So much so that I’ve been finding it difficult to get our (future) clients to fully grasp the paradigm shift which Dasha’s voice AI brings to the call center automation market. 

I will use today’s blog post to explore the difficulties of being first.

There are a number of companies offering products to automate call centers with IVR systems. These are big players including IBM, Nuance and Google Dialog Flow. The key value offering that sets us apart is that Dasha’s AI is human-indistinguishable - that is to say 97% of all people we speak with talk to us as they would to a human being. 

This raises some ethical questions and I promise we will explore in-depth the dialogue happening in tech now about the ethics of AI in a later article. For now, suffice it to say that the key paradigm shift we see in the coming years is that customers will expect a fully intelligent AI first when calling a provider and a human operator second.

The issue that we are facing today is more down-to-earth. There is no demand for a human-indistinguishable voice solution to augment call center operations because no such solution has yet been introduced to the market. This means that when I’m talking to our clients, I’m talking to people who compare us to legacy IVR systems and robo-calling solutions while the best thing to compare us to is a full-on call center. 

Take a look at how we stack up against an operator: 

A fair question - can Dasha do anything that a human operator can? Right now the answer is - not quite. We can do most repetitive tasks such as qualify leads as potential customers and inform them of the product offerings, conduct NPS surveys, distribute service updates, route calls and answer customer queries or prepare information for the operator. 

Getting back to my original question - how do we shift the paradigm of a market that is oblivious to the possibility of the solution that we are bringing? Our answer is three-fold - client education, client pain points study and product demonstration (which is really education). What we’ve seen work very well is having our clients talk directly to the voice models that are already in production and up and running. What works best is a pre-pilot demo model to run some call volume through for the client - this helped us to sign our first healthcare client in insurance claims management. 

Do we have the final answer? I think not yet. As a startup, we are constantly changing our approaches and looking for the things that work. If you ever faced a similar dilemma - educating an entire market, what was your experience and how did you tackle it?