Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

March 05, 2008

Astute Solutions Patents Virtual Agent Technology

By Tracey E. Schelmetic

Astute Solutions announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a Notice of Allowance for the company's RealDialog patent. The patent covers automated customer service via an intelligent virtual agent that is trained using customer-agent conversations.
 
Human-assisted support has traditionally provided a higher quality of customer service than machine-assisted support, but it is far more expensive due to labor costs such as high turnover rates, training expenditures and rectifying human errors. To avoid these escalating expenditures, companies are opting to reduce costs by implementing self-service solutions. Self-service, however, can go only so far in rectifying customer issues.
 
Astute Solutions’ RealDialog is a Web-based conversational agent system for enterprise knowledge management and self-service that enables end users (Web site visitors, contact center agents, employees, or partners) to ask questions or enter comments as they choose – in “natural” language. RealDialog engages users in productive, human-like conversations to deliver the specific information they need at a much lower cost than traditional support channels. 
 
Through RealDialog’s self-learning capabilities, its ability to identify specific gaps in the knowledge base, and powerful non-technical authoring tool suite; Astute Solutions’ RealDialog customers have achieved information accuracy rates consistently exceeding 98 percent.
 
“Companies struggling to achieve service excellence against efficiency and cost measures are finding out the hard way that traditional key word search and FAQ solutions cannot meet their multi-channel needs,” said Astute Solutions’ President and CEO, Joseph Sanda. “At Astute Solutions, we have an innovative approach that provides dependable answers to end-user questions—no matter how they contact the company. The RealDialog patent validates our customer commitment.”
 
RealDialog also offers organizations more control over the messages and content delivered across all channels.  It can provide answers and guidance in the sales process, which can lead to a higher closure rate, particularly for complex products being sold to novice customers.  Moreover, by capturing and analyzing word-for-word conversations, RealDialog helps provide useful “voice of the customer” insight, which assists organizations in identifying opportunities, trends and threats.
 
For more information, visit www.astutesolutions.com
 
Tracey Schelmetic is editorial director for CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions. For more articles please visit Tracey Schelmetic’s columnist page.

Don’t forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers whitepapers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users. Today’s featured white paper is IP Enabled Contact Centres , brought to you by Avaya (News - Alert).


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