Intelligent Virtual Agents
Provide extraordinary customer experiences with practical AI
What are IVAs?
Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) are automated, always available, self-service applications. They offer capabilities that are similar to human service and support agents – they just never rest or take a vacation
Improved CX
Consumers are becoming more demanding. They now expect an immediate service response anytime, anywhere and on any device. They’re also looking for self-service options that enable them to solve problems without speaking to a live agent - and customers almost always prefer a Virtual Agent to waiting for a live agent.
Cost Savings
Many companies still use human agents to do repetitive tasks. Assigning those tasks to Virtual Agents will help your organization significantly decrease support costs. You pay for Virtual Agents just like their human counter parts. They just never rest or take a vacation—and they’re substantially cheaper.
Greater Compliance
The penalties for violating industry regulations can be staggering. PCI-DSS fines can range from $5,000 to $10,000 per month and HIPAA fines range from $500 - $5000 per violation and can include criminal prosecution. Inference’s Virtual Agents can help organizations avoid violations and penalties by collecting sensitive customer data without revealing information to a human agent.
Virtual Agents Have Skills
They can understand human speech in over 100 languages and respond using text-to-speech (TTS) that is almost indistinguishable from a human agent. IVAs can be configured with very basic skills – the most basic agent might simply answer the phone, ask the caller if she wants to maintain her place in queue, and schedule a callback. An advanced IVA might have the skills to understand human speech in multiple languages; determine intent using natural language processing; process PCI-compliant payments; and respond in multiple languages over the phone, via chat, or messaging channels.
Virtual Agents Automate Things
IVAs can perform all kinds of tasks to care for customers. They can make appointments, reset passwords, look up orders, survey customers, process payments, and answer all kinds of questions – over the phone, chat, or messaging channels.
Virtual Agents Are Employed Like Human Agents
Just like a team of outsourced contact center agents, you purchase IVAs and pay for them for as long as you need them, on a monthly basis.
IVAs Can Be Installed Anywhere
IVA technology is platform and vendor neutral. It doesn't matter what your existing contact centre platform is, it doesn't matter. Five9 IVAs can be installed in any environment.
Agent Skills:
Upgrade from IVR to IVA for More Conversational Self-Service
We offer an easy-to-use, visual, IVR builder. IVR enables human-computer interaction for inbound and autodial campaign calls.
Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent is more powerful than the previous generation of technology, enabling calls to be transferred to intelligent virtual agents that use the latest speech-to text, text-to-speech, and natural language processing from Google, IBM Watson, and other cloud-based conversational AI providers. This enables Five9 customers to easily build and deploy self-service applications that automate many more of the routine and repetitive tasks that are traditionally handled by live agents.
How Does it Work?
Using our code-free, visual builder, you can drag and drop components to create your IVA, or customize one of the pre-built IVA templates. Then, configure the Five9 Transfer Module to pass incoming calls and caller data to a virtual agent. The virtual agent can then offer a wide variety of self service capabilities, using speech recognition and text-to-speech in hundreds of languages and a wide variety of voices. What’s even more powerful is that, as described in the next section, your virtual agents will be able to respond to open ended prompts like “How can I help you today?” using natural language processing. This makes the user experience more conversational while enabling you to automate tasks that were previously too cumbersome to be handled using speech recognition.
Natural Language Processing
Virtual Agents that understand
Natural language processing makes it easier for your customers to get support through self service because the complexity of the interaction can be dramatically simplified. It also increases the percentage of inquiries that can be automated, helping you reduce costs. NLP lets you eliminate complex IVR menus and go beyond speech-enabled, directed dialog systems. Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent helps you embrace NLP by packaging and integrating the most advanced technologies from companies like Google and IBM into Five9.
With NLP you’ll be able to do:
Intent Matching: This enables your virtual agent to determine what your customer wants. Intents are created for anything a customer might request. For each intent you simply provide a set of examples for how the customer might make the request. For example, “I want to make an appointment” or “I want to cancel an appointment.” The virtual agent then matches user requests against intents that it knows how to resolve (“Book Appointment” or “Cancel Appointment”). As customers use your virtual agents, you can incorporate what they’ve said into training examples that help them get smarter over time.
Entity Extraction: This helps you extract important information from what is said to your virtual agent so that you are able to act on it. This information can include system entities like dates, times, place names, amounts, developer defined entities or temporal user entities.
Dialog Control: This allows you to control the flow of the conversational experience between the customer and the virtual agent so that you can optimize the dialog to quickly and accurately collect the information needed to respond to their request.
Common Use Cases and Cost Benefits
Natural Language Call Steering
Many businesses use IVAs to steer calls to the correct person or department (“Please tell me who you’d like to reach”). Calls can be routed quickly and easily without requiring the caller to wait for a receptionist.
Insurance Enrollment
An organization offers health benefit enrollment through IVAs processing 350,000 calls per month. Automating enrollment enables them to scale up during busy open enrollment periods while lowering labor costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars each month.
Appointment Scheduling
Customers, including health care providers, use IVAs to schedule appointments and send reminders. This improves the customer experience by allowing customers to book appointments at any time of the day or evening. It also lowers the cost to serve by reducing the need for more front office staff.
PCI-Compliant Payment Processing
A large state government organization uses IVAs to process payments for all kinds of services, including renewing drivers’ licenses and paying fees. The customer handles up to 500,000 calls every month. By automating payment processing, they have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars each month in labor costs while ensuring that payment processing complies with PCI-DSS regulations.
Virtual Concierge
A major hotel chain allows consumers to manage reservations through IVAs. It handles more than 600,000 calls each month and improves the service experience by enabling travelers to make and change reservations more conveniently.
To learn more about this exciting technology and start delivering extraordinary customer service, fill out the form and and we will get back straight away or call 1 877 736 2842 or 905 952 2540