Opus Research was proud to host the Conversational Commerce Awards at last week’s C3 San Francisco event at the Four Seasons Hotel. The CC Awards are intended to showcase excellence and achievement for real-world enterprise customer deployments of conversational technologies.

A team of five judges (including Opus Research analysts and industry expert Nicolas de Kouchkovsky) evaluated the 2018 award nominations based on the following criteria:

• Business Value: Metrics and proven ROI, user adoption, growth & scalability, ability to integrate or leverage enterprise systems
• Customer Experience: Accuracy and consistency of conversations, ability to deliver across devices and channels, personalization, predictive qualities
• Innovation: Superior NLU, real-world AI capabilities and advanced technology, compelling avatar or persona, moving from assistant to advisor
• Productivity: Digital employee efforts, conversational analytics, operational efficiencies, integrated knowledge management

(Previous winners for Opus Research Awards can be found here.)

In receiving more than 20 submissions, from multiple industries and across the globe, the winners of the 2018 Conversational Commerce Awards are:

Alight Solutions
A leading provider of cloud-based HR and healthcare benefits solutions, Alight’s challenge was to create a seamless, people-centric experience for 19 million people and their families spread across 1400 companies. Starting in July 2017, Alight implemented an intelligent virtual agent (Lisa), built on Alme, Verint’s conversational AI platform, to give employees HR and benefits guidance and support. In its first year, Lisa has chatted with over 1 million different people, had over 2 million interactions, answered 30% of questions outside normal business hours, and provided answers for the top 5 chat topics: annual enrollment, health savings accounts, password issues, medical benefits, and retirement benefits.

USAA
USAA is a world-renowned insurance and banking leader in CX and digital initiatives, and early adopter in driving virtual and human assistance, biometrics and analytics. USAA moved to a single knowledge management system with Nuance which delivers a similar experience for members on both usaa.com and mobile. With a target 12 million+ USAA members, as well as potential future members, USAA launched a virtual assistant (VA) to provide a personalized customer experience and help members self-serve or escalate to appropriate human agents as needed. USAA’s VA solution has become an integral part of the company’s member engagement strategy. The results have been staggering with approximately 3 million members launching the VA per month (60% repeat users) and is on target to mitigate 4.5 million conversations at the end of 2018.

Royal Bank of Canada
RBC is the largest bank in Canada and one of the largest banks in the world, with more than 16 million clients and 80,000 employees worldwide. RBC’s contact centers serve millions of customers per year and, until recently had been relying solely on traditional DTMF (dual-tone multifrequency) and interactive voice response (IVR). To improve customer experience and create efficiencies, RBC introduced an artificial intelligence-powered, advanced speech platform for self-service applications built Omilia’s DiaManT software. Operational improvements have included a double-digit increase in the rate of successful completion of self-service tasks, increased call capacity and customer satisfaction, and business insights to better serve customers.

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