CONVERSATIONAL AGENTS AND QUESTION/ANSWER SYSTEMS

To cut costs and improve the quality of the multichannel interaction with their clients

Companies and organizations are obliged to keep open a dialogue with their clients 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The contact centres and any type of online channels (including the new social media) are the more usual means of contact and not only in order to help and serve their current users (through assistance and support activities): the acquisition of new clients through marketing and online sale is also an important side of the current context.

For the organizations of all the fields (banking, telecommunications, utilities, civil service, etc.) that want to optimize those not in-person contact channels, the conversational agents and the question/answer systems provide an alternative of greater quality and lower cost than the ones existing. The conversational agents and the question/answer systems are software applications using technology of language processing to understand the questions or requests that the users make, expressed in natural language, and provide them the answer or the most adequate instructions among the ones that are in a knowledge or information base. A conversational agent adds to the question/answer systems the presence of a virtual avatar (an animation with a human or other physiognomy) that provides interactivity to the dialogue with the user.

Why a Daedalus conversational agent — or a question/answer system?

The Daedalus solutions of conversational agent and question/answer systems use specific technologies that make possible a more intelligent interaction between the company and the user: process of natural language, advanced search and information retrieval (semantic, fuzzy and multilingual), expert systems, technologies of voice recognition, clustering and classification of information, rules engines, virtual avatars. Thanks to these technologies, the system uses the meaning of the user's request (to understand what he needs, to a certain extent), as well as of the possible answers (to associate at every moment the more adequate one to the consultation).

Advantages of the Daedalus technology

In front of the alternative solutions that suppose an exhaustive use of human operators or traditional search technologies and retrieval of information, the Daedalus conversational agents and question/answer systems provide very significant benefits:

• Costs cuts as it makes it possible to free the specialized staff of repetitive tasks and assign them to tasks of greater value added
• Capacity to deal with the ambiguity and the errors inherent of the natural language
• Greater scalability and possibilities of growth that are practically lineal with the demand
• Simple and powerful multilingual processing
• Capacity to exploit and make the most of extended knowledge base, by providing always the most adequate answer to the consultation meaning
• Increasing in the quality of service to the clients and homogeneity, independently of the availability of the staff, the geographical area or the hours
• Possibility of registering automatically the interactions and analyzing those data in order to detect problems and opportunities of improvement
• Applicability in contact centres as well as in websites and social media