On September 18 and 19, Opus Research hosted its sixth Intelligent Assistants Conference. Every event evidences the continuing evolution of natural language-supported customer self-service solutions. This one was no exception, with customer case studies that highlighted the maturing nature of conversational intelligent assistance. In addition, the program featured for the first time on stage, early entrants into the emerging Conversational Marketing ecosystem.

Lucy Villaflores and Kenneth Shiu of Royal Bank of Canada wowed the attendees with a flawless live demo of the bank’s voice assistant, powered by Omilia’s conversation platform. RBC customers who call into the bank’s support number can ask the automated assistant any question related to their credit card accounts. There’s no pre-established call flow or prompts. Instead, the callers just say what they want in their own words and the NLU engine understands the intent and provides the best response.

The team at IP Australia showcased Alex, the intelligent assistant that underpins a radical digital transformation at the government agency. Alex, which is an integration of Nuance’s Virtual Agent technology by Datacom, is equipped to handle nearly any inquiry related to trademarks, providing businesses with greatly improved access to important information that can assist them in protecting their intellectual property. IP Australia has made Alex pervasive across all of its messaging channels, including emails and digital content marketing. The result has been a huge upswing in percentage of customers who engage with IP Australia via digital channels.

DBS digibank demonstrated how they are using Kasisto’s KAI solution to provide fully automated banking to their customers in India. Digibank is a mobile-only solution that offers superior customer service with a fraction of the infrastructure costs required by a traditional brick and mortar bank. The mobile banking solution, with its conversational virtual assistant, continues to grow in popularity and DBS is rolling it out in other regions of APAC.

Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) showed how they are using IPsoft’s Amelia solution to provide in-house IT support teams with a massively talented digital employee. Amelia leverages “her” smart software brain to learn key enterprise processes and assist human team members with daily activities. Amelia can field questions coming into the IT service desk, freeing up her colleagues to focus on more complex tasks. Amelia recently proved her value during a disaster recovery experience.

Gina Maiden of FedEx demonstrated the multinational courier’s commitment to customer self-service. The company recently launched a FedEx-branded assistant that’s available in 15 languages on FedEx’s websites. Customers can ask the assistant questions about their packages and other common services and the assistant provides succinct answers. Maiden provided compelling metrics to prove that the investment in NLU-supported self-service is benefiting both customers and the company’s bottom line.

Witnessing The Dawn of Conversational Marketing

The exciting new development at this year’s conference was the recent growth in the promising area of Conversational Marketing. Dan Harbison of Nike’s Jordan brand discussed the company’s Jordan Breakfast Club campaign. The campaign was launched as a conversational experience on Facebook Messenger’s bot framework. Aimed at elite high school athletes, the campaign developed in conjunction with Snaps, a conversational marketing agency, offered daily workouts and motivational pokes to incentivize young athletes to improve their conditioning.

Conversational Commerce veteran Andy Mauro, now CEO of Automat ai, introduced Martin Aubut of L’Oreal, who provided insights into the beauty brand’s Facebook Messenger Beauty Gifter bot. Leveraging the bot framework, the Beauty Gifter solution enables Messenger users to search for beauty recommendations for themselves or a friend in a natural, conversational manner. L’Oreal has found it to be a great program for engaging customers, a quantum leap beyond email marketing. In a true win/win, gift recipients are treated to product recommendations that are truly personalized. At the same time, L’Oreal gains valuable insights into each customer’s beauty needs and preferences.

Conversational Marketing interactions deliver insights that inform and  improve future recommendations. This, in turn, increases the likelihood of purchases from truly engaged customers. The move to Conversational Marketing is a trend that will be tracked in future Opus Research events. Presentations will be available to view on the opusresearch.net web site. Visit often.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles