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News Briefs

By TMC  |  October 27, 2016

Inbenta Provides Chatbot Plugin

There has been a lot of action lately on artificial intelligence/chatbot front lately, as a slew of companies have introduced new solutions and features on this front. For example, Inbenta in July announced the availability of its Chatbot Development Platform for Facebook (News - Alert) Messenger, Skype, and websites. It’s a plugin that integrated with Inbenta’s semantic search technology, and it enables a company to leverage its existing knowledge base to create the chatbot experience. "Research shows that a growing number of customers prefer self-service channels to answer questions, resolve issues or complete transactions,” said said Inbenta co-founder and CEO Jordi Torras. “We make it possible for businesses to easily meet that demand without the need to develop in-house. Our white-label chatbots are running in a matter of hours, not months.”

TouchCommerce Turns Up TouchAssist

Meanwhile, TouchCommerce has come out with its TouchAssist chatbot. The solution, which is powered by Nuance Communications (News - Alert), helps customers get to where they want to go via automated text capabilities. "Intelligent bots are redefining digital commerce and customer care as enterprises seek to provide an engaging customer experience using natural language understanding, machine learning, and artificial intelligence," said Bernard Louvat, president and CEO of TouchCommerce. "TouchAssist blends our powerful targeting, routing and agent-to-consumer communication technologies with the industry's leading virtual assistant technology to help brands target, engage, and converse with consumers in a more cost-effective way at the time that customers need assistance with their self-service experience. The power of TouchAssist resides in the fact that the agent and robot collaborate, improving knowledge and accuracy over time.”

Verint Introduces Robotic Process Automation

The Robotic Process Automation solution from Verint is yet another new entry in the automation realm. It helps organizations significantly reduce the need for manual processing of routine tasks or entire multi-step processes to improve the quality and consistency of transactions, Verint said. “By automating and executing these tasks, robots free up valuable human resources to handle more value-added processes and customer-focused work,” said Kristyn Emenecker, global vice president, product strategy group at Verint Enterprise Intelligence Solutions. “This translates into an ability to boost efficiency and the automation of tasks, as well as employee engagement by creating and shifting more interesting and less repetitive activities.”

Zendesk Delivers Automatic Answers

The new feature Automatic Answers from Zendesk Inc. employs automation and machine learning as well to help customers solve their inquiries faster and enable businesses to have more efficient support teams. It uses machine learning capabilities to analyze customer and agent actions over time, learning which articles solve tickets associated with specific keywords and topics. If a customer indicates his or her inquiry has been solved successfully, the ticket is closed. Tickets that remain unsolved proceed to the customer service team.

Accenture (News - Alert) Climbs to No. 3 on Everest List

Xerox and ADP are the first and second largest companies in the business process services arenas, and Accenture is third, according the latest edition of The Everest Group BPS Top 50. The global BPS industry is valued at more than $150 billion, and includes more than 200 service providers with more than $50 million in revenues, according to the firm. Down from No. 3 last year to No. 4 this year is Teleperformance, followed by Capita, Convergys, Arvato Bertelsmann, Paychex, Aon Hewitt, and IBM (News - Alert).

Zoho Launches SalesInbox

A solution called Zoho SalesInbox is an email client designed exclusively for salespeople. Using customer data in Zoho CRM, SalesInbox automatically prioritizes customer conversations, ensuring salespeople do not miss an important email, and it provides context for every email conversation. It works with GMail, Exchange, Yahoo! Mail, Zoho Mail and other standard email hosting services. "Email and CRM are the two pieces of software that are the most critical for salespeople. Yet, they usually don't work together very well," said Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist of Zoho. "With Zoho SalesInbox, we're solving that problem and creating a new product category that transforms how salespeople use and interact with email."

Toshiba Offers Integration with Salesforce

Toshiba America Information Systems Inc., Telecommunication Systems Division now has native integration with Salesforce on-demand CRM software-as-a-service for its IPedge unified communications system and application server. This integration is supported in the IPedge R1.7.1 upgrade and available via the Salesforce App Exchange.

RightAnswers Enables P2P Support

Knowledge management, web and mobile self-service and social knowledge software provider RightAnswers has a social customer service channel and social intranet tool for peer-to-peer support. “We leveraged our expertise in knowledge management to design a social product that combines existing knowledge with community discussions, delivering a great self-service experience to customers,” said Simon Yelsky (News - Alert), vice president of product management and presales at the company.




Edited by Alicia Young
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