Artificial Solutions announced today that one of its Teneo Virtual Assistants has been shortlisted as a 2011 finalist in the Best Use of Technology category, in the prestigious European Call Centre and Customer Service Awards. Emma, Telenor Sweden’s busiest customer service agent, answers nearly five thousand questions everyday on Telenor’s website. Developed in response to Telenor’s rapidly growing network, a Scandinavian wide price war and a need to provide 24/7 online support, Emma answers all kinds of questions from mobile services to troubleshooting SIM card issues. As a Teneo Virtual Assistant, Emma uses the world’s most robust natural language interaction (NLI) engine that enables her to reason like a human using advanced linguistic and business rules to decide how best to respond a customer’s request. With each interaction Emma dynamically re-assesses content to understand what has changed and give the right answers.
Emma is also able to refer dialogues to live agents in the service centre, either because Telenor has asked her to do so under certain situations such as a subscription cancellation or because she is unable to resolve the issue and needs the assistance of a live agent. Although Emma typically refers less than 4% of queries to live agents illustrating the depth of knowledge she developed, this facility is crucial in offering choice to the customer. Interestingly, the referral is usually handled using Telenor’s live chat facility – an important aspect in allowing the customer to continue to communicate using their chosen online channel, rather than requiring them to switch to the phone.
“We’re thrilled that Emma has been shortlisted for this award,” says Andy Peart, Chief Marketing Officer of Artificial Solutions. “Emma demonstrates the benefits that organisations can achieve by embracing virtual assistants, so much so that in the future Telenor anticipates that Emma will also work on the sales side of its website answering questions and helping customers with their online purchases.”
Artificial Solutions builds the world’s most humanlike, intelligent and capable virtual assistants, available on any platform, in any language, anywhere. Teneo Virtual Assistants are able to understand and interpret the meaning and context of customer queries using a wide variety of channels such as email, live-chat, SMS or social networks. Equipped with the intelligence to learn, reason and understand, and then apply this knowledge to real customer interactions, Teneo Virtual Assistants can resolve queries, answer questions, provide links to information or resources, log issues, book service calls, even complete transactions through back-end or e-commerce systems, and update databases - all at the same time.
The winners of the European Call Centre and Customer Service Awards will be announced later this year.
