Chatbase Enterprise Edition helps contact centers build their best AI-powered virtual agent

By Ofer Ronen, Chatbase GM

(Note: As of Oct. 30, 2018, Chatbase Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition are now known as Chatbase Virtual Agent Modeling and Virtual Agent Analytics, respectively).

When Chatbase started its journey in 2016, our goal was to help you more easily analyze and optimize any conversational experience (otherwise known as bots). As we described in a recent post, we have a unique vantage point for understanding who builds bots, why they build them, and what makes them succeed or fail. Plus, working with companies like Ticketmaster, Best Buy Canada, and Keller Williams Realty have provided valuable insights about enterprise requirements and expectations.

We (and most of the industry) are now convinced that customer service will be the leading enterprise use case for bots. With that in mind, we’re excited to announce the availability of Chatbase Enterprise Edition (now called Virtual Agent Modeling) through an Early Access Program (EAP). Enterprise Edition builds on the deep machine learning capabilities in our current product, Standard Edition (now called Virtual Agent Analytics), to help contact centers design, build, and optimize the best AI-powered virtual agent for their customers.

Next, I’ll explain the significance of this announcement.

Opening the Black Box

It will soon be standard practice for innovative contact centers to complement their human agents with AI-powered, voice-based virtual agents (also known in the industry as conversational IVR, or interactive voice response) that help customers effortlessly get answers to simple, common requests (“How do I update my address?”) around the clock, and at a low cost. Furthermore, that capability frees human agents to focus on resolving complex, high-touch issues (“I need to report a fraudulent transaction”) to build brand loyalty.

But the critical question for most contact centers is: Which bot to build, and why? Today, most can’t answer it without a cumbersome, manual discovery process, largely based on anecdote and intuition, that uncovers only a percentage of opportunities for augmenting human agents with virtual ones that provide 24/7, non-queued customer service. Consequently, many use cases for a virtual agent remain locked inside a "black box".


Chatbase Enterprise Edition opens that box. It uses Google’s machine learning capabilities to unlock critical insights about drivers and intents from voice and chat logs to inform bot development (using Dialogflow or another bot development tool), in a fraction of the usual time and in a data-driven way. After the bot has been deployed, users rely on Chatbase conversational analytics to analyze and optimize bot performance over time. (Chatbase Standard Edition will continue to focus on that post-deployment phase of the life cycle.)

For a large enterprise participating in the Chatbase Enterprise Edition EAP, these capabilities have been invaluable: In a couple weeks, the service was able to discover, and then group, hundreds of intents across close to 60,000 interactions, providing critical insights relatively quickly about what type of virtual agent to build. According to a senior leader at the company, this new approach will speed up the bot development process by over 10x.

There’s more: starting now, machine learning capabilities for detecting missed messages and suggesting necessary fixes are in Beta and available in Standard and Enterprise editions for bots operating at a certain scale.

Working with Google Cloud to bring AI to the contact center

We’re tremendously excited about how Chatbase Enterprise Edition will help contact centers design and improve virtual agents to provide effortless customer experiences. With this announcement, Chatbase also becomes an analytics provider in the new Google Cloud Contact Center AI solution, complementing its topic modeling capabilities to help contact centers analyze and understand customer interactions. (If you’re at the Google Cloud Next conference this week in San Francisco, attend the session "AI Powered Contact Center Analytics" on Weds. July 25 at 11am PT for more details.)

Click here to request a demo and learn about the Enterprise Edition EAP! Also, for a deeper dive and live Q&A, register for this live webcast airing on August 14 at 9am PT.

About Chatbase
Chatbase is a cloud service for more easily building, analyzing, and optimizing AI-powered customer service virtual agents. Powered by Google machine learning and search capabilities, the Chatbase approach is faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive than manual methods, helping contact centers more quickly deploy and improve a virtual agent that improves customer satisfaction. Chatbase is brought to you by Area 120, an incubator operated by Google.

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