A naturally intelligent approach to improving artificial intelligence

Stephen Hawking wrote, “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” Here at Conversica, we believe that applies to not only intelligence of the natural variety, but artificial intelligence as well. Sales methods change, customer expectations change, organizations change and, above all, technologies change. And we’ve remained at the forefront of conversational AI for several years now by embracing and driving change ourselves.

 To that end, we recently announced significant enhancements to our flagship product, the Conversica AI Sales Assistant (just a reminder, the AI Sales Assistant leverages AI to take on routine business conversations like contacting and qualifying sales leads, freeing up human salespeople to close more deals).

 Having automated hundreds of millions of human-like sales conversations on behalf of tens of thousands of salespeople at many hundreds of companies, I’ll say with all due modesty that we’ve gotten pretty darned good at this AI-for-sales thing. But our customers’ businesses continually change and, per Dr. Hawking’s advice, we are continually adapting and so made these upgrades to our platform specifically with customer requests in mind:

 ·        “Generation 3” Enhanced AI – Additional flexibility, functionality and processing power to support the needs of our large, global customers with a high message volume, as well as to handle a wider variety of conversational scenarios.

·        Enhanced Third-Party Integration – Our technology integrates with more than 45 customer CRM, marketing automation and lead management systems, including solutions from Salesforce.com, Marketo, Oracle, HubSpot and Velocify. New capabilities have enabled tighter integration with current partners, and open the door to an expanded cadre of new ones.  

·        Automated FAQ – Improved AI capabilities that can interpret customer intent and respond to common questions without disturbing a human, freeing up even more time by handling routine requests.

·        New User Dashboard – With a modern, streamlined user interface, salespeople and managers find the right information more quickly to assess how well their AI Sales Assistant is working on their behalf. Customizable tools and controls facilitate and expedite account management tasks, while more flexible reporting options enable users to drill down on specific details as needed for a custom view of their sales assistant implementation.

·        Timeline Intelligence – By recognizing how time influences conversation flow, Our AI maximizes prospect engagement while minimizing potential for prospect frustration. These new capabilities elegantly enable our solution to read and appropriately act upon timing-related customer responses, such as out-of-office messages or responses like, “Please reach out to me again in three weeks.”

·        Enhanced Alerting Functionality – At the critical point of hand-off from the AI sales assistant to the salesperson, enhanced email, SMS text and CRM alerts deliver just the right information and context for prompt and seamless follow-up. Users can tailor when and how they are alerted and can easily provide feedback to the AI to enhance machine learning and improve future interactions.

·        AI Automotive Service Assistant – Introduced mid-year, our new AI Automotive Service Assistant addresses the specific needs of dealership fixed operations departments that are continually striving to strengthen their customer relationships and boost lifetime value. The assistant follows up on inbound requests and proactively reaches out when service appointments are due based on service intervals, recall notices and previously postponed service needs.

 We’ve been able to continuously improve the Conversica conversational AI platform because it’s built upon a proprietary future-proof architecture, that combines machine learning with three kinds of artificial intelligence: Natural Language Processing to understand incoming messages, an Inference Engine for decision making and Natural Language Generation to create customized, helpful and humanlike messages at scale. We’ve also built out an extensive 3rd party integration framework that connects CRM systems and Marketing Automation systems to deliver a complete lead engagement solution for customers in both B2C and B2B industries.

 Ultimately many things change, but one that hasn’t is our ongoing commitment to providing our customers with an AI solution that delivers a great experience to their customers and a great boost to their bottom line. We think you’ll agree that’s the intelligent approach.