Tag Archive for: case study

A Look Back: 2022 in Review

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

As the end of 2022 draws near, it is time once again for Creative Virtual’s annual year in review blog post. Every year we take this opportunity to reflect on the hard work of our team, our contributions to the conversational AI industry, and a few of our company’s biggest highlights from the past 12 months.

Two of the things we are proudest of at Creative Virtual are our experienced, dedicated team and the unique expertise we provide to our customers and partners. Whether it’s through our product development or our collaborations with individual clients, it’s important to us that we consistently deliver the best solutions possible. Having an analyst group recognise us for this is always an exciting bonus – and that’s what happened again this year.

AIxOutlook conducted an independent assessment of the major conversational AI vendors in the market and found Creative Virtual to be the Innovation Excellence Leader!

“Creative Virtual is the clear Innovation Excellence Leader in a crowded and competitive conversational AI industry. Businesses collaborating with them benefit from their expert consultation, resulting in customised, integrated, and personalised solutions that deliver real business value.”

This Innovation Excellence Leadership award recognises us as the foremost conversational AI innovator driving the industry forward. You can read more about AIxOutlook’s full evaluation by downloading the report for free here. This honour means even more as we prepare for the upcoming launch of the next innovative release of our V-Person™ technology.

The analysts at Celent conducted their own evaluation of intelligent virtual assistant platforms as well, focusing in on the technology within the retail banking space. Creative Virtual was one of ten vendors included, and we are proud of our ‘Luminary’ ranking in the final report. This means we excelled in all three of the dimensions evaluated: Advanced Technology, Breadth of Functionality, and Customer Base and Support. Celent clients can access the full report here.

We were also awarded ‘Best Conversational AI Solutions’ in the SME News 2022 IT Awards. These awards recognise companies driving for innovation and focusing on client-centricity while also remaining true experts in their industry. Being recognised as the best in conversational AI made our Founder & CEO, Chris Ezekiel, contemplate what makes a virtual agent or chatbot a true conversational AI solution and share his insights in a blog post.

women leaders of conversational AIIn October I was recognised for my contribution to the conversational AI industry by being included in the Women Leaders of Conversational AI, Class of 2023! I’m honoured to have been selected to be a part of this inaugural class and am looking forward to attending the ceremony at the Project Voice Women’s Summit in April. The This Week in Voice podcast host, Bradley Metrock, dedicated an episode to introducing each of the women selected – you can listen anywhere you get your podcasts or check it out on YouTube here.

Age UK, a Creative Virtual customer since 2017, collaborated with us on a new case study exploring the four main goals they are achieving with our V-Person technology: improve discoverability of a large amount of online content; give people more ways to easily interact with and find information; resolve easy-to-answer queries online to reduce Advice Line calls; and be proactive in testing new innovations to better meet the charity’s objectives. Check out the full Age UK success story here.

In May we announced a new partnership with Service Management Group (SMG) to deliver an industry-first dynamic assistance capability. Dynamic assistance integrates V-Person conversational AI with SMG’s digital experience solution to deliver real-time support to users as they encounter issues during their online purchasing journey. Learn more about the partnership and dynamic assistance here.

2022 ALGIM conferenceWe joined our partner Enghouse Interactive in Christchurch, NZ in November for the ALGIM (Association of Local Government Information Management) 2022 Conference. Creative Virtual’s Patrick Gallagher co-presented a well-attended session on creating award-winning chatbots in local government.

Also in November, Mugdha Desai, our Head of India Operations, took part in the Agile Mumbai 2022 Conference. The event theme was ‘Artificial Intelligence for Business Agility’, and Mugdha was a featured panellist for the session titled, ‘Benefits of AI for End User’.

Founder & CEO, Chris shared his conversational AI insights through a variety of articles, podcasts, and interviews this year, including:

The Creative Virtual team continued our tradition of sharing our expertise through our annual Blog Post Celebration for Customer Service Week and CX Day in October. This year’s posts covered multi-lingual digital customer service, the members on a conversational AI team, the battle between humans and technology, and setting customer service projects up for success. You can find the whole 2022 collection here.

We aim to publish interesting and educational posts on our blog throughout the year. This year I’m proud to have two of my blog posts selected as finalists in the 2022 Customer Experience Update MVP Awards: Composable CX: Becoming Agile and Flexible in the CX Strategy category and Can Conversational AI Make Your CX More Human and Empathetic? in the CX Technology category. Voting for the MVPs – most valuable posts! – has ended, and the winners will be announced later this month.

One of the industries in which the Creative Virtual team has extensive experience is the Insurance sector. We collaborated with Insurance Thought Leadership (ITL) to produce a whitepaper exploring how conversational AI is enabling insurance companies to greatly improve their customer experience while also slashing costs. You can get your own copy of ‘The Virtual Insurance Agent’ whitepaper here.

We also put together a short, animated video to explain V-Person for Insurance, our conversational AI solution designed specifically for the insurance industry:

Another area in which we have extensive experience is improving existing chatbot and virtual agent implementations.  We published an eBook – Conversational AI Issues & Solutions: Transforming Ineffective Chatbot & Virtual Agent Projects – that explores six of the most common reasons business leaders have given for being unhappy with their conversational AI projects and ways to overcome those challenges.

2022 has been a busy and productive year for us at Creative Virtual and, as the year comes to an end, we are excitedly looking forward to 2023. We hope you’ll stay connected by subscribing to our Blog on this page and signing up here for our Monthly Newsletter.

Content Repositories and Party Menus Mean Nothing if You Aren’t Serving Your Guests at the Right Time

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Anyone who has ever planned a wedding, a surprise birthday party, or a family reunion knows how difficult it can be to get everyone and everything involved coordinated. All the pieces are interconnected, and good communication is essential to putting your plan into action. Often, even seemingly small details can be key in making sure all the moving parts are in sync.

The same is true for customer service strategies. Those that achieve real success are part of a bigger customer experience (CX) approach that is designed to create an integrated, coordinated strategy. Every piece is important and must be linked together to create a cohesive, seamless experience.

Within many companies, the digital customer service experience has evolved slowly and separately from other pieces of the support puzzle, such as the contact centre. For many years, when having a static set of FAQs on a website was enough for online self-service, organisations could get away with that siloed approach. Today that’s not the case. Customers expect a connected and more sophisticated digital service experience.

It’s not unusual for companies, especially large enterprises, to struggle with delivering an integrated customer support experience. Often, they have many of the pieces they need but aren’t sure how to link those pieces – or silos – together.

A good example is an organisation that has built up a robust content repository to house all of their customer help information. This was an important step in their journey to create a more consistent experience because it established a single place for them to manage content. They even enabled visitors to their website to leverage this repository by adding a simple search tool on the help page.

Now the company acknowledges that forcing users to scroll through a list of search results and read through long information articles is not delivering the online self-service experience they want to give existing and prospective customers. It’s the same as selecting a caterer and deciding on a menu for your party, but not making arrangements for the food to be delivered to the right venue at the right time. Despite all the effort you put into the food, you end up with a poor experience – and hungry guests! – because you haven’t put together the pieces of the puzzle behind the scenes.

Rob Foster, Knowledgebase Engineer and a conversational AI expert, shares a way to deliver a better self-service experience with a virtual agent that utilises an existing repository of help content. He explains:

“If you already have an existing content repository in use, consider integrating with it rather than spending time transferring all the data to a separate knowledgebase. With this option, your virtual agent recognises the user intent and makes an API call to retrieve the relevant information directly from the repository. This simplifies content management for you because you aren’t juggling multiple systems. It helps ensure accuracy because when content is updated in the repository, the changes are instantly reflected in the virtual agent. The integration also removes the danger of having conflicting information between the virtual agent and other online help pages since everything is managed in a single place.”

In 2017, a large Telecommunications Company took their first steps to do just this. They had already invested in an Oracle Knowledgebase that housed about 3,000 information articles. They wanted to provide a better user experience for their online help by adding a virtual agent to their website but did not want to move or replicate their help content. Their solution was to set a challenge as part of their conversational AI vendor selection process: 24 hours to build a working integration with their existing content repository.

You can find more details about that 24-hackathon and how their conversational AI solution currently works in the full Customer Success Story. Their approach is saving them an estimated £3 million per year from reductions in support calls and delivering better insights into their customer needs. It is also helping them make the most of their CX investments by linking up the pieces of their customer service strategy for a consistent, seamless experience.

You wouldn’t let your party guests go hungry, so why would you let your website visitors struggle to find information you could easily serve to them with the right tools?