The AI Cloud company ASAPP has called the death of the dreaded canned responses from chatbots, messages and text that has often frustrated consumers.
ASAPP launched a new AI service for call centre agents who communicate via chat and messaging with customers. It’s called AutoCompose and the service uses a suite of artificial intelligence technologies that read what consumers are messaging to companies and suggests the right responses to agents before they even have to type their responses.
“AutoCompose provides agents with personalized guidance and tailored language on how to message with customers, automating 70% of their digital conversations,” said ASAPP CTO Priya Vijayarajendran who joined ASAPP earlier this year from Microsoft where she ran its worldwide data and AI business. “Rigid legacy canned response libraries have little applicability to most conversations… AutoCompose continues to learn over time to deliver the best outcomes for your business,” added Vijayarajendran.
Call centres employ 1.3 million people in the United Kingdom, which is about 4% of the UK workforce. It’s an industry that has grown over the years even with rising competition from other countries where labour costs are less expensive, and against the rising tide of automation. In an upcoming CX report from ASAPP, due out later this month, the company worked with an independent research firm that polled nearly 600 people working in customer service and found that 90% of agents want to see more aspects of customer calls and digital interactions automated.
ASAPP AI researchers have spent the last 8 years pushing the limits of machine learning to provide contact centres with content suggestions that are timely, relevant, and helpful. The company said the new service can shorten the time it takes a customer to resolve their questions and problems through text and messaging by 25%. That’s significant for the larger call centres that operate throughout the UK. “AutoCompose identifies a customer’s problem in real-time as it evolves and provides Customer Service Agents a choice of the right responses to drive the best outcomes,” said Vijayarajendran.
Unlike traditional agent response libraries that provide static responses, ASAPP’s response libraries are dynamic and evolve through AI models that continually learn and improve from an analysis of historical, and ongoing, customer conversations.
The legacy technology that operates in most call centres today is rules-based. The rules are designed and fixed by humans, often consultants. (If ‘A’ happens then do ‘X’). ASAPP has designed its artificial intelligence to allow AutoCompose to learn and evolve with changing circumstances of customers’ demands and changing inquiries. The service also provides the ability to personalize agent responses to increase the likelihood that an agent will want to use the service. It does this by training the AI models specifically on a company’s data, and the most successful responses agents choose for the best outcomes for customers.
While the company didn’t share customer names a spokesperson said that AutoCompose is now being used in the airline, telecoms and insurance industry.
