Intelligent Conversational Automation in 2020: LivePerson Unveils Its Conversation Cloud

LivePerson launches Conversation Cloud to drive better CX outcomes for brands

LivePerson, yesterday announced the launch of its enterprise-grade Conversational Cloud, where brands can run AI-powered automation over popular messaging channels such as SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, Google RCS, LINE, WeChat, and native messaging on brand website and mobile apps.

Conversation Cloud will enable brands to instantly respond to messages, answer questions, resolve customer intents, and route to human experts as needed. Conversational AI applies natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize speech, text, and intent. It helps marketers deliver personalized, high-touch experiences that consumers demand – all on the same messaging channels they use.

Also read: Top 2 Customer Support Strategies That Will Last Beyond COVID-19

Conversation Cloud also helps marketers uncover customer intent through its intent recognition engine – Intent Manager. The engine uses real-time intent recognition and classification to analyze customer intentions at every turn of the conversation. Intent Manager is also powered by LivePerson’s proprietary natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities and machine learning algorithms, which are grounded in over 20 years of conversational data and more than one billion messaging transcripts across a variety of industries.

In a press release, the company stated that top brands are already using Intent Manager to gain real-time insights and take action to improve customer service, marketing, and sales automation.

Key benefits of Intent Manager include:

• Automatically understands about 50 percent of consumer intents with preconfigured, out-of-the-box intent models customized for telecom, financial services, retail, airlines, and other industries.
• Enables data scientists, content creators, and even nontechnical employees like contact center agents to fine-tune or configure custom intents from an intuitive interface.
• Empowers brands to make important policy, process, and product-related decisions.
• Routes conversations to the agent or bot resource best equipped to resolve them at high satisfaction levels.

Brands that use the Conversational Cloud can automate a high percentage of consumer interactions through LivePerson’s Conversation Builder, which empowers technical and nontechnical staff to build automated conversation flows with a simple point-and-click interface.

Also read: Your Guide to Omnichannel Customer SupportOpens a new window

With Conversation Builder, a single automated conversation flow can be configured to run on any messaging channel. If the automation needs an assist, human agents are automatically tapped to seamlessly join the conversation.

“Unmanageable volumes of consumer interactions have been burying brands since the start of the pandemic. While many initially thought of these changes as temporary, they’re very much here to stay; in the U.S. alone, we’re on track to close over 25,000 brick and mortar stores,” said Robert LoCascio, founder and CEO of LivePerson. “Consumers still want personalized experiences, and the only way brands can scale these is through Conversational AI. It’s clear that having an AI and automation strategy went from ‘business improvement’ to ‘vital for operations’ overnight.”

Data from the Conversational Cloud demonstrates the rapid growth of automation on the platform:

• The volume of automation-powered messaging conversations is up 100 percent from the end of 2019.
• Over the same time period, the volume of messaging conversations fully contained by automation (completed with no human agent needed) has tripled.
• Automation now plays a role in approximately 70 percent of all messaging conversations on the platform.

With over 40 APIs & SDKs, the Conversational Cloud gives developers full control to customize conversational experiences. Brands can easily integrate third-party applications, build new AI-powered applications and automations, create workflows, and read/write data to any system.

“We kept developers top of mind as we built the Conversational Cloud because we knew they’d be the key to unlocking its true power,” said Jennifer Kline Shernoff, Vice President, Product Management at LivePerson. “Integrating with CRM, billing, and other backend systems means developers can now easily automate how brands handle common intents like ‘What’s my order status?,’ ‘Pay my bill,’ or ‘Schedule an appointment.’”

Also read: Your Customer Support Department Would Kill for These Contact Center Features

LivePerson Functions makes the Conversational Cloud even more powerful, with the ability to create custom workflows that can be triggered by a variety of conversational events. For example, by integrating with external systems, customers with VIP status can be routed to dedicated experts before the conversation even starts. As functions runs entirely in the Conversational Cloud, it also eliminates the costs for hardware and infrastructure overhead typically required by brands to integrate with platforms.

Based in the cloud and requiring less bandwidth than voice calls, the Conversational Cloud is ideal for the distributed workforce.

New iOS and Android mobile apps for the Conversational Cloud are now available enabling work-from-anywhere agents and in-store associates to provide safe and convenient services via messaging, like contactless curbside pickup — with little-to-no training required.

The Conversational Cloud works across all channels, making it the single place to connect all of a brand’s conversations, from messaging channels to mobile apps, websites, social media, and email. Brands can also use features like LivePerson Voice to Messaging and Apple’s Chat Suggest to shift consumers who call on the phone directly into more convenient messaging conversations.

The Conversational Cloud includes Conversation Analytics, a performance dashboard that captures the most impactful conversational KPIs, from sales-focused metrics like overall volume and average order value to customer care, operational efficiency, and consumer experience metrics. Brands can easily compare their performance to industry benchmarks and take actions recommended by LivePerson’s AI to improve over time.

• Higher qualified leads that are 2.5x more likely to convert to sales.
• Up to 20 percent increases in average order value and online sales conversions.
• Labor costs reduced by 50 percent.
• CSAT scores increased by up to 20 percent.
• 50 percent decreases in agent attrition.

“AI-powered messaging is a win-win-win for customers, employees, and brands,” said Alex Spinelli, chief technology officer at LivePerson. “Consumers and agents benefit from the incredible convenience and efficiency of messaging, while brands benefit from developing direct, high-value relationships with their customers, which they own forever right in the same conversation thread where they first connected.”

Also read: 4 CRM Metrics That Will Improve Customer Support Engagements

Conversation Cloud: Why Do Brands Need It in a Post-COVID World?

The brand-consumer dynamic has changed considerably over the past few months. Consumers’ expectations from brands have evolved. Additionally, they’ve also become more picky about how and where they make their purchases. Given the changing brand-consumer relationship and depressed demand, businesses must put customer experience at the front and center of the corporate agenda.

While conversational commerce or conversational support has been around for some time, there are only a few companies that have been able to push the boundaries of conversational support with AI-enabled technologies. LivePerson has brought in Conversation Cloud at a very crucial phase in brands’ response to the unfolding pandemic and its economic implications.

By addressing key concerns like optimizing agent productivity and engagement when working from home, intent analysis, integration with existing MarTech infrastructure, and advanced analytical capabilities, LivePerson has come up with a particularly compelling solution for CX leaders looking to streamline customer support during these turbulent times.