At this week’s Conversational Commerce Conference, Opus Research unveiled the recipients for the 2019 Conversational Commerce Awards. In its fifth year, the Opus Research awards are intended to showcase excellence and achievement for real-world enterprise deployments of conversational AI technologies that are focused on customer experience and business value.

As before, this year’s submissions were evaluated 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

Past winners of Opus Research awards have included FedEx, Royal Bank of Canada, Amtrak, USAA, Hyatt Hotels, Domino’s, TD Ameritrade, U.S. Army, Alight Solutions, and others.

With dozens of nominations from multiple industries across the globe, here are the winners of the 2019 Conversational Commerce Awards:

Citizens Bank
Based in 11 states in New England, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest regions, Citizens Bank is one of the nation’s oldest and largest financial institutions, with $162.7 billion in assets. The company recently invested in creating more efficient channels for engaging with bank customers with virtual help and assistance. With an intelligent engagement platform, Citizens Bank has been able to increase customer connections and online customer acquisitions. With intelligent virtual customer service, Citizens Bank garnered a 14% interaction conversion rate resulting in 46% incremental sales rate. In addition, the firm has expanded into mobile chat and additional customer engagement channels.

Frontier Communications
Frontier Communications, one of the largest multichannel video service providers in the U.S, developed a strategy to target high value prospects across regions with tools to track and analyze its customer data based on business conversations. With a conversational analytics platform, the company was able to effectively identify and engage with the most promising customer prospects. Frontier saw impressive metrics as campaign response rates improved by 66%, revenue increased by 50%, and cost-per-sale went down by 58%. All told, the firm was able to generate $4 million in additional revenue.

Comcast Xfinity Home
Comcast Xfinity Home has witnessed a massive growing user base, with over a 1 million customers using their app to connect with their home security devices. With this growth, Xfinity Home was intent upon driving customer support traffic through their app as opposed to over the phone. By introducing a messaging and automation platform, Xfinity Home saw a 40% increase in using AI to label and categorize issues, a 166% increase in using a bot to engage with customers (as opposed to agent handling), and a 191% increase in total bots deployed. All this while still maintaining an impressive customer satisfaction rating of more than 4 on average.

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