This LA Company is Changing AI-Driven Bots. Here’s How.

There are many ways a person could explain to a bot that they are interested in health insurance.

Maybe they just say the word “reschedule.” Or maybe, they’re more specific: “I’d like to reschedule my appointment.” Perhaps they go with something vague, like “appointment.” Regardless, modern bots need to be trained to decipher the intent behind every inquiry or comment from the user in order to deliver an effective self-service experience.

This requires the art of natural language understanding (NLU), a practice that LA-based Convoso is quite familiar with. The company produces omnichannel contact center software that sales and lead generation teams use to improve customer success through the help of AI-driven virtual agents.

The latest development? Their bots have the ability to use state-of-the-art speech to text and AI technology to help drive more efficient and personalized consumer experiences. Additionally, latency issues with voice bots, in which it takes too long for a bot to reply, can be very frustrating for consumers. Their team has purposely built their bots to be quick with no latency between receiving an answer and asking another question because consumers today want answers without delay.

But that’s not all.

Moving forward, Convoso hopes to further build out its bot functionality on other channels such as SMS/text messaging and social platforms. The omni-channel AI interaction will make conversation more human-like and help drive conversation forward to an actual sale prior to involving a human agent. Additionally, research from Dynmark shows that 98 percent of SMS messages are opened, making that channel a highly effective way to interact with consumers.

Real-world application

Following along with the example above, Convoso’s bot ought to send a text message to the consumer with a link to the company’s webpage with the various health insurance plans. The consumer might reply back to the text message confirming receipt. The voice channel is aware of the text reply and asks the consumer additional questions like, “Now that you reviewed our health insurance plans, which one makes sense to you?”

To learn more about the exciting developments happening at Convoso, Built In LA sat down with VP of Product Jay Hill, who detailed what makes the company’s bots unique, the evolving industry and what’s on the horizon at Convoso.

Jay Hill

VP of Product Management • Convoso

Describe your role and responsibilities at Convoso?

My group listens to Convoso’s customers to understand their pain points and their business goals to determine how Convoso can help make them more successful. We collaborate with internal stakeholders such as customer success, sales, marketing and engineering to gather ideas on how to delight our customers.

We partner with marketing to investigate the market and competition to understand where the market is headed in order to develop innovative products that help our customers save time, money, and meet their key performance indicators (KPIs) while Convoso captures more market share and beats the competition.

What makes Convoso’s AI-driven bots unique?

Convoso’s personalized AI-driven bots are trained to listen for and interpret specific intents from consumers to help quickly determine if they are a good fit for our customers' products or services. In today’s environment, people (consumers and sellers) have little time to waste. They need answers quickly and don’t want to be bothered by impersonal and irrelevant conversations. Convoso’s AI technology not only listens for phrases or keywords such as, “Yes, I am interested,” or, “Not at this time,” but converses with the consumer with meaningful responses and additional questions in a human-like fashion.

Part of the uniqueness is our ability to personalize the interaction by gathering additional information such as preferred pronouns or other relevant information like local weather conditions. Since the AI technology is integrated directly in the Convoso platform, our customers can interact with consumers over multiple channels such as text messages and email to augment the conversation and immediately transfer to a live agent once a good fit is determined.

cutting down on spam

Ever get a phone call that reads “spam,” and you ignore it? Well, it’s not always spam. Illegal call spoofing is when criminals place calls using numbers they are unauthorized to use, and it has a negative impact on Convoso’s industry, leading to major carriers either blocking calls or adding flags such as “spam likely.” Convoso is trying to crack down on it. “We’re helping our customers implement better dialing practices to ensure they aren't misidentified as an illegal scammer, and helping them to react when their numbers are flagged or blocked by swapping out affected phone numbers quickly,” Hill said.

What new AI and chatbot technologies is Convoso using, such as conversational bots?

Convoso uses natural language understanding (NLU) as a major component of the AI chatbot technology. Natural language parsing (NLP) was a first step in AI-driven conversations where speech or text is broken into components to look for specific words. NLU takes human-bot conversations to the next level where the AI can interpret the consumer's meaning and respond with human-like phrases. Convoso also utilizes text-to-speech and speech-to-text to communicate interactively with the consumer over voice, text or email.

What’s on the horizon for the company? What about the industry?

While the AI bot primarily focuses on the voice channel, Convoso will continue to build out additional functionality focusing on other channels, such as SMS and text messaging and social platforms. Simultaneous conversations between all channels, for both AI or human, will be seamless and engaging, allowing consumers to communicate via their preferred method and enabling sales teams to never miss an opportunity to engage the market, all the while measuring and monitoring success.

Convoso will also focus on bringing additional value from data. Convoso offers industry-leading options such as predictive dialing and ClearCallerID tm. Many of these features will be further enhanced with predictive analytics and machine learning to recommend more efficient dialing strategies, optimal area code coverage, ideal number of and usage of outbound numbers, and more.

This LA Company Is Changing AI-Driven Bots. Here’s How.