On April 25th, Interactions LLC convened its first summit for Industry Analysts. In addition to Conversational Commerce, attendees were stalwarts from the Contact Center, Customer Experience, Cloud Services, Knowledge Management and even product and service Quality Ratings (J.D. Power was in the house!). It was an eye-opening session for many, starting with a disclosure of top-line revenue that place the company at or near the top of the list of companies specializing solely on providing a platform for Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs). This reflects dramatic growth in revenue, especially over the past two years.

The day-long session gave top executives a chance to share the secret of their success and their vision for expansion in service delivery infrastructure and personnel, product enhancements and sales/marketing to foster future growth.

The Path to IVA at Scale is Paved by Good Intent Analysts

Interactions was founded in 2004. It came to market touting “Adaptive Understanding,” a proprietary process that captures spoken phrases and parses them into discrete utterances which, under certain circumstances are forwarded to “Intent Analysts” for rapid disambiguation. Their proprietary approach makes it possible for enterprises to employ Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) without allocating calendar months or developer hours for initial training or so-called “supervised machine learning.” Intent Analysts can be involved in every call and immediately obviate the need to transfer out of an automated platform just because there’s background noise, a difficult proper name or an individual speaking with a heavy accent.

In 2014, the company acquired the Watson speech processing portfolio from AT&T, as well as an impressive cadre of researchers and developers. Accurate automated speech recognition and life-like text-to-speech rendering were vital because they enabled the company to scale its ability to automate billions of natural language conversations.

The company is poised to offer its services to disrupt the conversational customer experience and contact center space on a global basis. It’s platform now operates in data centers on three continents, speaking seven plus languages in production. Adding new regions may require the hiring and training of Intent Analysts who are proficient in those languages. Yet, because they do not require specific knowledge of the parlance of a particular industry or familiarity with a company’s branding or nomenclature, Intent Analysts can get up to speed in days or weeks, not months. For this reason the company has seen its ability to handle calls double, while contracting with the same number of Intent Analysts (roughly 1,500).

Pursuing a Roadmap for Sustained Growth

The company has an impressive roster of clients in communications services, travel and hospitality, finance and insurance, retail, utilities and government. It has built its direct sales force on a global basis but has also worked with several resellers. It is also compliant with GDPR and PCI-DSS Level 1 (which is required annually).

It is also one of the few solutions providers that relies exclusively on a “success based” pricing model. Together with clients, the company defines what comprises a successful transaction and agrees on a price for completing that transaction, be it answering a question, closing a sale completing tasks for upselling or cross-selling. As volumes increase, so do savings on the part of a customer and revenues to Interactions. The engagement model includes professional fees for getting started but, subsequent to that, customers do not pay annual maintenance fees or cover the cost of ASR tuning, onsite maintenance or hardware upgrades. It is proving to be a winning model.

The hidden benefit of its Adaptive Understanding and the IVA Platform is the proven ability to integrate with a multiplicity of back-end data and processes. Its customers are in verticals that have notoriously complex legacy systems. It has successfully integrated with billing systems, CRM, Operations Support Systems, Knowledge Bases and Case Management Systems as well as the routing fabric that makes intelligent transfers to live agents possible. In the fast-food business, the company has launched a highly-distributed platform to support ordering for drive through, over the web, in kiosks and #VoiceFirst devices, among other compelling use cases.

All growth is predicated on applying its brand of “AI” to disrupt the Conversational Commerce and Contact Center space.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants