COALA - Cloud-based AI-driven and Language-agnostic Customer Support Assistant

Project Information

COALA

Grant agreement ID: 873904

DOI

10.3030/873904

Project terminated on 7 September 2021

EC signature date 9 October 2019

Start date 1 September 2019

End date 28 February 2022

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 2 169 896,25

EU contribution

€ 1 518 927,38

Coordinated by

CLEVERLY, LDA
Portugal

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - COALA (COALA - Cloud-based AI-driven and Language-agnostic Customer Support Assistant)

Reporting period: 2020-09-01 to 2022-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Customer support industry suffers from huge inefficiencies, as support agents spend at least 20% of their time at work looking for information in order to answer customers. This translates into an annual cost of €10,400 per support agent and €9.9 Billion in lost productivity worldwide. Moreover, customer service turnover is reported to be at 40% to 50%, resulting in increased cost due to constant hiring and training new employees.

COALA is a disruptive language-agnostic AI-based customer support assistant, developed on proprietary next generation Knowledge Powered Recommendation Technology. Taking advantage of the latest developments in the AI field, our software is capable of understanding conversations, automating repetitive tasks and personalizing user interactions. COALA provides up to 60% of cost savings annually.

Zendesk Inc. acquired Cleverly earlier this year, because Cleverly has a similar vision for the future of incorporating AI within customer service products and services. Both companies want to offer practical solutions to AI, so that customers can get started with AI right out of the box. Going forward, Zendesk and Cleverly will combine forces to further enhance Zendesk’s products by integrating some of the results described above across Zendesk’s platform

While the solution was initially available on Zendesk, Salesforce, Freshdesk, Intercom and other modern Help Desk platforms, from now on only Zendesk customers will benefit from it.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Cleverly is developing a language-agnostic AI-based customer support assistant - COALA. Through the development of our Knowledge Powered and General Understanding Technology, we can understand conversations, automating repetitive tasks and personalizing user interactions.

Our technology is not only a technology platform that can be used by customer service teams to make them more efficient, it comes trained already so managers don’t need to spend time training systems. That makes Cleverly an “as-a-service” solution that can be used by small and medium businesses.

Our technology is used by companies in Europe and the United States to triage requests, manage knowledge, deflect requests via self-service, automate workflows and assist agents in being more productive. This has resulted in productivity improvements of 2x and cost savings of 10% to 60%.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Since the beginning of the project Cleverly created 10+ jobs, all of them in Portugal and with the acquisition, the team growth and expansion is likely to accelerate. By 2025 we expect to have created 90+ jobs, most of them in Portugal.

By building a generic AI system that can be used by SMBs without the need to have any technical knowledge, Cleverly is democratizing access to this otherwise expensive technology. That will make big and small companies more productive, saving them costs and with minimum upfront investment.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, several companies relied on Cleverly to process customer’s requests faster, train new agents and make the customer service work less overwhelming. This has been especially relevant at a time where the remote work situation caused additional stress at this job, especially in sectors like retail and e-commerce whose volumes have increased significantly. We expect to have an impact by significantly relieving the pressure in the customer support departments of our customers helping them be more efficient and creating more meaningful jobs for agents.

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