Guests of the luxury hotelier Radisson Blu Edwardian have a new way to get fast self-service or assistance from the hotel staff. They start by texting their questions, concerns, complaints or requests to “Edward,” an automated Intelligent Assistant that is capable of fulfilling guests’ queries or forwarding them to the person who can. Built on the Interactive Text Response (ITR) Platform from Aspect Software, Edward enables guests to explain themselves, through text, using their own words. Its conversational front-end is able to extract meaning and understand the intent and then act accordingly.

“Edward” will go live this week and will be launched formally next week. The ITR runs on Aspect’s CX Platform, supporting the “silent channel” that Tobias Goebel, Director of Emerging Technologies at Aspect, and I discussed in this Webcast in August 2015.  During the Webcast, we discussed how “messaging,” had already become the preferred format for Conversational Commerce, making it a powerful, proactive way for companies and brands to respond to requests from customers and prospects.

Now, in April 2016, we have entered the “Mobile Spring.” Radisson Blu and other top brands are responding to demands from mobile customers asking the simple question: “How can I text your company?” In response, Tobias posted this account of Edward’s evolution.describing how the COO and head of IT at Radisson Blu recognized the value of text based communications with their guests and how it could provide a level of self-service (which many guests prefer) and support intelligent transfers to the right staff member as required.

Radisson and other hotel chains recognize that “being on the road” equates to “going mobile”. Mobile phones are their guests’ portals to the digital world; with the recognized ability to answer questions, conduct searches, provide navigational directions and check for updates on social networks and messaging platforms. Like their cousins in the travel industry, airlines, the leading hotel chains have introduced apps that expedite the reservation, check in and check out processes for frequent guests and members of their loyalty program. In the interest of efficiency and consistency, such apps leverage the existing logic that drives their Web sites.

Messaging platforms offer a more immediate, always-there resource that supports a comfortable, conversational user interface. The text-based front end can leverage dialogues and business rules developed for the company’s interactive voice response (IVR) system or it can be powered by the same analytics, knowledge management resources and databases that are used to serve screen pops or prompts to the best live agents. The magic is in the natural language understanding (NLU) and the conversational nature of the interaction.

Edward is initially offered through SMS-based text messaging, but the conversational model extends to any messaging or virtual chat platform. This very day at Facebook’s F8 developer conference Mark Zuckerberg pointed out in his keynote that the 60 billion messages sent over Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp each day is already 3-times the total, global volume for SMS. The rest of the story is that Facebook and its cohort of enterprise messaging platforms, like Slack, Spark (from Cisco) and Skype for Business (from Microsoft) are encouraging the integration of automated Intelligent Assistants – which they refer to as ‘bots and they get smarter and more responsive every day by handling their share of the billions of queries sent their way.

Radisson Blu’s Edward will succeed because it enables guests to communicate without opening an app or visiting a site. However, with text-based input as the great equalizer, it can also work with any messaging platform, especially in this age of APIs (application program interfaces) and other open connections among services and platforms, expect to see dramatic growth in the number of companies and brands who join Radisson Blu by answering “yes” when asked, “Can I text your company?”

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants

Tags: conversational commerce, Mobile CX, Intelligent Assistance, Interactive Text