Avaya announced it will demonstrate the first social platform for chatbots at GITEX Technology Week starting today, taking a giant leap in customer self-service. Drawing parallels from traditional social media, Avaya’s innovation provides a structured platform for bots to interact securely, aiming to extend each chatbot’s expertise.
A 2018 global Avaya survey of 8,000 consumers found that 80% expect an immediate response on their queries, highlighting the need for efficient customer service. “With automation, organizations can overcome their human resource limitations and meet customer expectations by delivering seamless experiences across all touch points. Bots are becoming one of the most powerful means to positively impact customer service,” said Laurent Philonenko, Senior Vice President, Innovation at Avaya.
While acknowledging the growing customer acceptance, a key shortcoming of enterprise chatbots is that they are domain-specific. This drastically limits their ability to efficiently service customers’ requests when they face questions they haven’t been trained to answer.
“What if we could enable chatbots from different industries to collaborate via a highly regulated platform? We could securely link enterprises, significantly expanding bots’ efficacy, thereby enabling organizations to deliver exceptional customer service, reducing the need for human intervention and supervised learning,” added Ahmed Helmy, Senior Director of Solution Architects, Avaya EMEA & APAC.
GITEX delegates will witness how Avaya’s platform allows enterprises to register its chatbots with unique profiles and ‘friend’ other bots from different domains. This platform will enable chatbots to rate each other and store confidence metrics based on the quality of information received, and feedback from end customers, constantly improving each bot’s quality and speed of customer service.
Avaya envisages two scenarios for handling real-time customer-bot interactions—either the original bot contacts a friended bot on the customer’s behalf and delivers the received answer, or the original bot connects the customer to a friended bot in the style of a conference call. “This is a huge step in addressing the information and service bottlenecks of chatbot systems,” said Helmy. “The social platform allows Avaya’s customers to increase the value of their chatbot solutions without having to engage in lengthy data curation or warehousing projects.”
Avaya is incorporating this groundbreaking, patent pending capability in its Avaya Ava™ smart self-service platform, which provides a chatbot and messaging framework about natural language processing and machine learning.
