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Next Level Conversational AI: In conversation with Cognigy

Mar 10, 2022 | 5 min read

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Roboyo

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Roboyo sit down with Marc Schneider, VP Partner at Cognigy, to discuss the real world uses and advantages of the Cognigy platform for Roboyo customers.

Roboyo: IDC recognizes Cognigy as the world’s leading provider of Conversational AI – and your offering has been positioned by Gartner® as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms. You guys are growing at an incredible rate and Cognigy.AI is being used successfully by well-known players such as Daimler, Bosch, Henkel, Lufthansa, Salzburg AG, etc. What differentiates Cognigy from other bot providers?

Marc Schneider: Probably that we are not simply a bot provider. We offer a low-code conversational AI platform that enables companies to automate their customer and employee communications at all touchpoints: worldwide, and for all use cases. They can easily set up intelligent virtual agents that can conduct natural dialogues in over 100 languages, whether by phone, chat or message. In addition, we offer outstanding AI that understands written or spoken requests extremely well – and in a wide range, just as the customer expresses themselves. So, our international customers can easily scale to other countries and markets and answer recurring questions and concerns in an automated way.

Roboyo: Knowing what a customer or employee wants and being able to have natural dialogs with them is the basis for automating any process. How are these virtual agents networked in existing system landscapes?

Marc Schneider: An important point! For this we offer the Cognigy Extensions. This is an open integration framework with which any system can be easily integrated. This allows users to focus on the conversation design and the success of the automation. The networked bots have real-time access to knowledge about products, services and even customer history via the connection to CRM, HR solution etc. As a result, they can provide personalized information or actively do something for the customer. For example, it can change an address or an order quantity, cancel a booking, make a callback, and so on.

Roboyo: And here we come full circle to a new, extended form of automation. Whereas inputs and devices were previously required to start RPA processes, they can now also run in dialog with bots. Conversational AI is thus becoming an important part of automated business processes.

Marc Schneider: Absolutely right. To start an automated process, the user begins a dialog with a virtual agent. This can be by phone, chat or message. In the process, Cognigy collects all the information needed to have an adjacent task performed using RPA. If the user gives unclear answers, the virtual agent can ask if it understood everything correctly before transmitting the information to the RPA Bot. The RPA bot then starts the process and returns information to the user as needed.

A simple example from HR is the automated processing of a vacation request – a user starts the process by talking to their company’s virtual HR agent and telling them they want to submit a leave request. The rest is automated!

However, our customers are already implementing much more complex automations. In principle, there are no limits to creativity here. The important thing is to bring together an understanding of RPA, Conversational AI and the automation possibilities for the customer. And that is why the partnership between Cognigy and Roboyo is a real game changer for both our customers.

Roboyo: What else differentiates Cognigy from other Conversational AI providers?

Marc Schneider: From an IT perspective, the freedom to choose between software-as-a-service, i.e., a cloud solution, and operations on their own servers (“on-premises”). This is still an important criteria for many of our customers. When it comes to this and other enterprise capabilities, the market becomes very manageable. Cognigy.AI is also DSGVO / GDPR compliant and AIC4 audited. The AIC4 criteria catalog of the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) is the only globally recognized, relevant security standard for AI-based applications.

From the point of view of users in specialist departments – they can easily set up and adapt dialogs and processes of voice and chatbots with our graphical editor after a short introduction without IT background and any IT involvement. They can therefore concentrate on the optimal flow of automated communication and fine-tune the dialogs and bot related processes.

From a business perspective, with Cognigy Insights we offer a powerful analytics suite. Virtual assistants generate millions of data points every day. But leveraging this data remains a challenge for organizations. With Cognigy Insights, they can easily access and analyze conversational data to uncover actionable insights to optimize conversations and processes across their customer and employee services – fully integrated in the Cognigy platform. To use a Roboyo phrase, Next Level customer service, so to speak.

Roboyo: Right up our alley! What do you mean by this?

Marc Schneider: In the future, it will be primarily about optimizing the team performance of humans and virtual agents and achieving a new service experience. The virtual agent will increasingly be the first point of contact for customers 24/7. And then begins a chain of individual dialog steps in which the virtual agent answers recurring concerns, performs self-service or hands off to the contact center staff if necessary.

Our customers want to have a clear idea of what is happening along the way. They want to know how their customers are reacting and why, at every step of the dialog. So far, Conversational AI solutions have been able to identify an intent in the dialogue, and then measure in how many cases that intent was ultimately fulfilled. But we wanted to go further and clarify what exactly happens in between and how each step can be improved. That was always a black box before because analytics was decoupled. But we now collect data in our platform and analyze it there as well. We can use it to show quantitative KPIs like goals achieved, average conversation duration, ratings, number of handoffs to employees, or even messages understood in the dashboard. And zoom deep into the details.

One can thus optimize in real time or even introduce A/B tests in the process chain or dialog steps. A change in the process has a direct impact on the conversation – and thus on the customer’s satisfaction in the dialog. Collecting insights, generating knowledge, deriving optimization, and reading off successes thus become a transparent process chain.

And the analysis is not limited to voice and chatbots, but also supports all interactions after a handover to human agents. Even follow-up in third-party systems is possible. For example, a telco customer of ours automatically sold Internet upgrades via bots during the Covid-19 lockdown. In this case, it was possible to analyze the success of the dialog in the respective channel and look at what happens in the linked ordering system. Are there any unexpected cancellations there, for example? Or can other offers be linked to the Internet upgrade and what effect does that have? There are so many uses cases with added value.

Roboyo: Thank you for such an interesting conversation, Marc. Here at Roboyo, we are looking forward to working with you and together bringing Next Level Conversational AI to our clients.

If you’re looking to drive value with every customer touchpoint, our expert Automation Engineers can help.

Contact us to book an introductory call.

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