18 June 2019, Johannesburg โย Saicom has launched anย intelligent virtual agent offeringย to automate common interactions between its clients and their customers. Developed byย Inference Solutionsย and integrated across itsย Cisco Broadworksย platform, the virtual agent platform allows Saicom to couple services with itsย Cloud PBXย that are not natively provided or usually expected from a cloud-hosted PBX.
โAutomation, especially on repetitive tasks, is becoming a business requirement, and the integration of Inference Intelligent Virtual Agents on our platform means we can assist our clients to redeploy live agents elsewhere in the customer service cycle,โ says Charl van Vollenhoven, Infrastructure Manager at Saicom.
Available to all Saicom clients, the Inference Solutions integration currently leverages Text to Speech (TTS); Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, all geared towards making it easier for businesses and their customers to interact with the system. Furthermore, Inference Studio makes it easier to add services without having to go through subsequent development cycles.
โWeโre pleased that Saicom chose to build its intelligent virtual agent capabilities on the Inference IVA platform,โ says Callan Schebella, CEO at Inference Solutions. โSaicom can now offer its business customers a ready-made virtual agent solution to automate common interactions, with a drag-and-drop workflow that enables them to further customise their customersโ IVA capabilities without the need for additional development resources.โ
Biometric capabilities enable customers to authenticate users without requiring a passcode, or asking multiple security questions.
โIn addition to the interaction capabilities, the ability to run outbound campaigns enables notifications and reminders to be sent to a customer base. For example, using outbound campaigns Virtual Agents could notify customers of a network outage, as well as capture their response to the notification and/ or transfer them to another agent (virtual or live) based on their response,โ adds van Vollenhoven
Saicom selected the Inference Virtual Agent solution because it is HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant and as such are able to collect sensitive customer data without revealing any information to human agents.
Concludes van Vollenhoven, โwe are all about finding a better way to help our customers automate parts of the business, which in turn drive cost and resource efficiency and ultimately deliver client service excellence. If we can do this through the technologies that we integrate onto our platform, then we believe we have delivered a success trifecta.โ
