Periodic Reporting for period 1 - USERBOT (Artificial Intelligence for Customer Service)
Período documentado: 2019-03-01 hasta 2019-08-31
Companies are facing an ever-increasing demand for customer communication through their websites, call centers, various messengers and apps, e-mail, and increasingly voice assistants. It is far too expensive and impossible to meet this demand through human-operated services. Therefore, it is essential to offer a rapid, immediate and efficient customer support service. Today, customers want to get information and resolve their problems quickly, so companies must make their customer service practical and easy to contact. The customer service agents are used like machines to always answer the same questions thousands of times. Chatbots, either for text-chat or voice-based, provide the means to automate large parts of this communication in a cost-effective way. However, chatbots are isolated systems, unable to empower human agents thanks to an Artificial Intelligence layer, they are often unable to understand natural language and can’t customize the user experience in real time based on customers data. USERBOT provides Artificial Intelligence for Customer Service. The company has developed an innovative technology platform based on Machine Learning, Deep learning, Artificial Intelligence and Sentiment Analysis to interact with customers in a natural language on every digital channel. Userbot uses a proprietary AI technology. The service can be installed on-premise, ensuring a high level of data privacy and in-cloud, allowing also remote installation and machine training with an engineered learning model. Training of the neural networks is performed both with conversation logs provided by the client and in real time trough human agents answers, ensuring constant machine learning and knowledgebase update. In each text iteration, Userbot’s Artificial Intelligence is capable of recognizing the meaning, understanding the context and gathering information such as priority and user sentiment. If the user sentence is understood by Userbot, the answer is automatically provided, otherwise an available human agent is invited into the conversation and Userbot learns from his answer. Userbot has been optimized for non-technical users with no need for coding skills as the bot designer provides graphical editors for designing and testing bots. By the forecasted advancements Userbot will provide a simple and intuitive product, both to to SMEs and to enterprises, adding new features and AI learning techniques and beginning a multi-country trial to demonstrate the reliability of the technology and the potential for widespread market uptake.
During the Phase 1 feasibility assessment, Userbot accomplished a full analysis of the technical and business potential of Userbot solution. Throughout the duration of the project, Userbot expanded its knowledge of the global chatbot market, including regulations, standards, market size and competitors. During the Feasibility Study, the requirements to bring the current small-scale solution to an industrially-relevant Minimum Viable Product were identified based on opinions of important partners, such as system integrators companies, digital agencies, influencers and potential customers; a clear go-to-market strategy in terms of identifiying the key target application (conversation agent implementation), their market position as tech provider, customers (SMEs and startups active in business services, utilities and retail) and business model/commercial partnership (Subscription SaaS) was accomplished. Userbot established all technical activities and criteria for success that need to be implemented in order to achieve the target large industrial capacity and performances. The product development was decided accordingly, foreseeing the need to conduct end user trials with few selected startups in the field of e-commerce, digital agencies. In addition Userbot has decided to pursue a more impactful commercialisation strategy availing of larger innovation platforms providers, with a stronger customer outreach at European and international level. Userbot technology, with its competitive advantages, puts its solution in a strong position in the chatbot and conversation agent market, first of all for its novel concept of managing autonomously the most repetitive questions asked by users, learning from the agents’ answers increasingly personalizing the response to the customer it is interacting with.
Userbot wants to overcome the main issues associated with AI driven chatbots’ implementation and development, such as the complexity (need for coding skills), high cost of the required investment for an efficient CRM, and the difficulty of scaling up these technologies bringing benefits to the entire conversation agent supply chain. Userbot technology will have a clear impact addressing issues related both to the environment and the society. In fact, due to its technical innovations it will strongly reduce the environmental impact of the current CRM activities (i.e. office units open 24/7) by cutting down on wasted energy but also reduces overall utility costs and employee overhead. In addition, as a result of greater user acceptance, it will assure the creation of scalable markets and improve the competitiveness of the EU AI technology sector increasing opportunities for growth, diversification and job creation for the sector in general and SMEs in particular. Userbot will be the only company offering Human and Artificial Intelligence proprietary solutions for the automation of Brand-Consumer conversations. This will never leave alone the customer but instead engages a human operator in the conversation and learns from his answers.