IntelliResponse has released the IntelliResponse Virtual Agent (VA) for Salesforce.com on Salesforce1 AppExchange, which provides users with a consistent contact center experience regardless of channel.
"IntelliResponse provides the ability to have an answer that's scripted for the agent, but it all comes from the same location [so] that you can get that consistency of one right answer," says IntelliResponse CEO David Lloyd. "Salesforce has all this great data on customers from a CRM point of view, but a lot of these CRM solutions don't touch the customer's customer."
To that point, the new solution branches out from IntelliResponse's virtual assistant technology, used to directly interact with consumers to help them through different customer experiences, such as answering questions for them and guiding them on their customer journey.
Salesforce itself doesn't have an embedded virtual agent, Lloyd says. "That's why we partnered with them, to provide our virtual agent linked tightly into their CRM solution," he says.
Lloyd explains that when enterprises think of CRM software, it's typically in terms of business to business, rather than business to consumer.
"What we do with our virtual agent is that we front-end that experience so now we're literally taking Salesforce and providing a business-to-business-to-consumer approach, which means that our virtual agent interacts with the end customer, and we pass that data back through into Salesforce to become part of the CRM that they track," he says. "What we're really trying to do is make the contact center the most productive business function possible while enabling customers to fundamentally self-serve in that same environment with consistency."
According to the company, recent research from Frost & Sullivan points out that 60 percent of repeat customer service calls are tied to problems with staff training or processes. With the IntelliResponse Virtual Agent (VA) for Salesforce [solution], contact center agents can get additional input from Salesforce articles, cutting back on repeat callers who want additional information. Additionally, Lloyd says that IntelliResponse is also excited that the app helps with not just a customer question at hand, but can provide predictive responses for both the customer and the agent, and[that it also has] a 90 percent accuracy rate.
"What is the next likely question the consumer or agent will ask? You can do an even stronger job of not only answering that top-of-mind question, but also it can tell you what the next likely questions are so that the second phone call doesn't have to happen. This has a big impact on not only on your voice of customer rate but your customer satisfaction rate," Lloyd says.
Dan Miller, senior analyst at Opus Research, agrees that virtual agent capabilities coupled with Salesforce technology is a good match.
"Salesforce Service Cloud has proven to be a popular platform for firms of all sizes to build applications that address customer experience issues," Miller says. "IntelliResponse is taking an approach that can make intelligent virtual assistants more prevalent guides through their customer care and support activities."