Nuance IQ Innovation Quarterly Magazine
July 2020 / Volume 2, Issue 2
INSIDE
Inside the DIY revolution The DIY revolution: An executive perspective Time to Mix things up On the innovation frontlines From ‘Hello World’ to ‘Hello Customer!’ The evolving role of Professional Services
If you build it, they will come.
July 2020
In this issue Catching the innovation wave @Nuance p3 Issue spotlight The DIY revolution for customer engagement: an executive perspective. p4 Solution showcase Time to mix things up. p6 Front line On the innovation front. p8 A new role for Professional Services. p9 Innovation heroes Telus. p10 311 at your service. p11 Inside innovation From ‘Hello World’ to ‘Hello Customer!’. p12
Welcome Welcome to our latest edition of Nuance Innovation Quarterly, where we’re exploring the latest trend in customer engagement—DIY development. We’ll be looking at what’s accelerating DIY in the industry today, and how organizations need to adapt to keep up. As part of this trend, we’ll be taking a close look at our latest innovation—Nuance Mix, our enterprise-grade tooling and API platform. You’ll hear all about its ambitious journey from the people that helped shape it, and you’ll get an executive view on how the platform is changing the game for DIY. We’ve even got one of our Professional Services superstars to reveal how it’s changing our relationship with customers. And that’s not all. You’ll also discover how some of our trailblazing customers are shaking up their sectors with standout customer engagements.
What’s new @ Nuance p14 In the know Read the latest from our blog. p15 Comic relief DIY, but not alone. p16
A catalyst for CX success Get insights on how organizations can better manage customer engagement amid disruption—and beyond.
Until next time,
Nuance IQ Innovation Quarterly Magazine
Tony Lorentzen GM and SVP, Intelligent Engagement Nuance Communications, Inc.
View past editions of Nuance IQ
INNOVATION 3
Catching the innovation wave @Nuance
Innovation is at our core. Check out what we’re delivering to drive better business outcomes and more intelligent customer engagement. To learn more about these and all our innovative solutions, visit www.nuance.com/ enterprise.
Voice-to-agent messaging
Google’s Business Messages
Hate being put on hold? So do your customers. With Nuance Voice-to-Agent Messaging, organizations can allow customers to leave voice messages of any length to explain their issue or request. After the customer leaves a message, Nuance Voice-to-Agent Messaging uses Conversational AI Services, such as Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding, to transcribe the message and process the customer’s request.
Google’s Business Messages lets you offer messaging from within the Google ecosystem—available anywhere a customer would usually find a call option, such as search results and Google Maps. It enables enterprises to reduce call volumes by providing engaging messaging experiences instead—all while quickly and efficiently handling incoming inquiries.
The note is then sent to an appropriate agent who can read it, research all the information they need to answer the question, and reach out to the customer, whether it’s through text message or an in-app notification. And if the customer needs to follow up, they can easily message back through the app or by SMS.
With a diverse range of messaging capabilities— including conversation starters, interactive media, and automated hand-offs to live agents—Google’s Business Messages helps you make the experience seamless for both customers and agents. And with the ability to engage in real time, or asynchronously, the conversation is always convenient, effortless, and on the customers’ terms.
Learn more.
Learn more.
Nuance Mix Nuance Mix is a conversational AI tooling platform that offers organizations the same market-leading tools we use at Nuance for creating advanced conversational experiences. Using Nuance Mix, organizations can take a do-it-yourself approach to conversational AI and create natural and engaging experiences for every channel. With one tooling platform across the full software development cycle, enterprises gain greater control, accelerated development time, and increased business agility. And with in-depth tutorials, prebuilt expert design models, and Nuance expertise at the ready, anyone can create innovative experiences in Nuance Mix regardless of their development experience. Learn more.
4 ISSUE SPOTLIGHT
David Ardman, Senior Vice President of Enterprise and Core AI Platform R&D at Nuance, takes us inside the DIY revolution, revealing why DIY is such a compelling option for enterprises today, and what its future looks like.
Building an application prototype is relatively easy. But creating a good user experience that’s validated by real customers and with real data is a tough challenge— one that too many enterprises underestimate.
The DIY revolution for customer engagement: an executive perspective DIY is a hot topic in customer engagement today—but it wasn’t always this way. Just a decade ago, it was an approach taken by only a select few organizations with unique capabilities. Designing conversational AI—or any AI for that matter—required highly specialized skills that many businesses simply didn’t have in-house. If they wanted to build an enterprise-grade AI application, they would need to find an expert vendor. But that quickly changed. The rise of machine learning has made the tools and intellectual property—which were once the realm of experts alone—available to the public. Suddenly, AI expertise is more readily available, and the decision of build vs. buy is no longer limited to those select few businesses: it’s something every organization now considers. The rise of the in-house AI team One of the biggest accelerators of the DIY trend is the growth of in-house AI skills. More enterprises are spending the time and resources to hire specialist talent and build their own expert development teams. And it’s easy to see why.
Customer experience is one of the biggest differentiators between brands today, and those that have the in-house skills to create engaging experiences have a big advantage over those that don’t. They can adapt quickly, and they’re not reliant on an external vendor to express their brand and respond to the fast-moving market. But it’s more than just agility that brands are looking for. Data is a key asset in understanding customer behavior, and brands are becoming more protective of it. If data is the new software, then it’s understandable why many enterprises prefer to keep it within the company. These benefits don’t come without challenges though. Even with plenty of in-house skills, creating engaging customer experiences with a DIY approach can still be difficult. New approach, new challenges Engineering VPs and CTOs have the ongoing challenge of keeping up to date with the AI landscape. There are new breakthroughs almost every day, and it can be difficult to know what technology your organization should be using.
ISSUE SPOTLIGHT 5
I can help you with that...
AI platform that enables teams across the development cycle to collaborate in ways they haven’t before. With Mix, business analysts can generate and test machine learning models based on their requirements, and designers can generate and test code for their designs. The Mix platform also enables enterprises to choose where they want to spend their money, which tasks to assign to their own AI team, and when they want Nuance’s support. Most importantly, the Mix platform leverages the latest, marketing-leading conversational AI technologies, advanced in production an average of ten times per day. That all adds up to a more intuitive way to create seamless omni-channel experiences. And we think this new way of working will create big changes in customer engagement.
Newly emerging technologies that show promise are sometimes found to be unsuitable for various reasons. What works on academic data may not work for real-world applications in terms of robustness, performance, processing time, and cost. And the challenge is even bigger when you’re going down the DIY route. It’s no longer a case of finding a reputable vendor, it’s about finding the right tools to create the best customer experience for a given application or industry. By default, many organizations look to the tech giants for tooling platforms, or they leverage open source software to quickly build prototypes. Unfortunately, in the long run, these approaches often fall short. Building an application prototype is relatively easy. But creating a good user experience that’s validated by real customers and real data is a tough challenge—one that too many enterprises underestimate.
Over time, enterprises realize that AI isn’t solved “across the board.” It’s solved per application, and it requires DIY tools and technologies optimized for each class of applications. A new focus on the customer journey To create a great user experience, you need to think about the entire customer journey, not just the application you’re currently building. You need to think about how the application integrates with your other channels, how it meets your customers’ needs, and how it responds to their behavior. And that’s easier to do when you’re working on a tooling platform that offers good developer experience. For conversational AI, that means support for the complete software development lifecycle. It’s not just about the innovation engineers ripping through a prototype in a week, it’s about business analysts, user experience designers, developers, and testers collaborating in a single enterprise space. That’s one of the main reasons we created Nuance Mix. We wanted to create an omni-channel conversational
The start of a DIY revolution As DIY becomes a more accessible route for enterprises, we’ll begin to see exciting innovations across every sector. We’ll see a more intelligent blend of human and virtual agents collaborating to provide a smarter customer experience that neither could offer alone. We’ll see 5G networks coupled with new technologies to deliver groundbreaking customer service using video and augmented reality. And these interactions will be enhanced through seamless integration of voice with computer vision and sentiment analysis, all secured through advanced audio and videobased authentication methods. And that’s just the start. DIY is removing barriers for ambitious enterprises, and we’re excited to see what happens.
6 SOLUTION SHOWCASE
Time to Mix things up Rachel Ashby, Director, Solutions Marketing, Nuance, reveals how a new approach to DIY can help drive value through every engagement channel.
Intelligent omni-channel experiences are now table stakes for brands that want to compete. And with the launch of Nuance Mix, creating those experiences just got much simpler. Some changes are here to stay As we move beyond the pandemic and into whatever the future might bring, there’s one thing we can predict with certainty: customer journeys will never look the same again.
Brands need to get serious about omni-channel— and fast.
With traffic volumes causing meltdown at many contact centers, customers were forced to learn to use more digital channels. Now, they’ve got comfortable with using messaging, mobile apps, live chat, and virtual assistants to interact with brands, and those new habits are here to stay.
video? It just felt unnecessary (and a little strange). But when we couldn’t meet face-to-face, it didn’t take long for all of us to start using video conferencing to hold meetings, meet with friends, and stay in touch with our families. Now it feels strange to not use video.
Think about video conferencing—six months ago, how many of us were using
The same is true of digital engagement channels. Enterprises have found success with those channels when they
SOLUTION SHOWCASE 7 needed support in a crisis, and they’ll naturally keep on using them as normal life begins to return. That means brands need to get serious about omni-channel—and fast. The organizations that offer customers choice about how they engage will see success in whatever “normal” looks like next. Contact centers (even dispersed, workfrom-home ones) will still be a vital part of any engagement strategy, but they’ll combine voice, live chat, messaging, chatbots, and more to guide customers to the fastest path to resolution. A new mix for omni-channel That’s why we are so excited to bring Nuance Mix to market—it gives our customers a new way to build the conversational AI apps they need to deliver those consistent, connected
With Mix, our customers can create what they want, when they want, using the same tools we use. platform for enterprises to access tools and APIs that support the entire application lifecycle. One of the most useful things about Mix is that it gives organizations the ability to quickly create tightly integrated omnichannel experiences. They can design a dialog once and tailor it for each channel (in multiple languages), all in a single project. That’s a step-change in speed
change, they can use the drag-and-drop interface on Mix to take care of it quickly, without any need for coding. Having access to these new capabilities will be essential for enterprises as they navigate their way through the changes in the coming months and years. And having the assurance that they’re creating truly enterprise-grade experiences, not just quick fixes, will be equally important. During the crisis, we’ve seen how essential it was for organizations to be able to guide customers away from the voice channel where appropriate. Automating self-service and increasing agent concurrency with intelligent handoffs from the IVR to chat, messaging, virtual assistants, and callback management systems helped brands handle enormous spikes in call volumes. It stopped a bad day from getting worse for a lot of callers. But deflecting calls while still delighting customers is only possible if every channel offers a consistent, intelligent, conversational experience. That’s something organizations are going to find a whole lot faster and easier to achieve with Mix, and I can’t wait to see the innovative ways they put these new capabilities to use.
omni-channel experiences. With Mix, enterprises can create what they want, when they want, using the same tools we use at Nuance—and they can draw on our expertise in design and strategy services whenever they need it. Mix is one of those innovations that’s inspired by customers and driven by their needs. We found customers saying to us, “Your solutions are great, but we can’t call you in every time we want to change an IVR menu.” So, we began working on something that would meet that need for flexibility, control, and enterprise-grad quality, of course. And that something became Nuance Mix—a
and agility compared to the old days of having multiple teams working on experiences for all the different channels. Levelling up DIY Now, if organizations are experienced in AI, but not as experienced in UI, they can fill the front-end gaps with Mix. If they have plenty of coders, but no speech experts, they can tap into our core speech engines through APIs on Mix. Or if they want to make a simple IVR menu
8 FRONT LINE
On the innovation front What does the launch of Nuance Mix change for organizations? How are customers using Mix to solve their challenges? And just why is DIY so important today? We spoke to Andreas Volmer, Senior Principal Product Manager, Nuance—our resident Mixologist—to find out. Why is DIY so important today? I think it’s important to remember that DIY isn’t a new customer engagement trend. We’ve seen organizations tackling customer engagement applications and—more recently, conversational AI— by themselves for decades, with varying levels of success. In the past, expert UX designers and software engineers weren’t readily available for customer experience projects, and most organizations just didn’t have the necessary skills in place to take an effective DIY approach to application development. But today, it’s a very different landscape. Customer experience has quickly become one of the biggest—if not the biggest—differentiators among competing brands. And as a result, more organizations have hired skilled talent— both developers and UX designers—to make their experiences stand out.
What does Mix change for organizations planning to leverage conversational AI for customer engagement? So far, many enterprises who have ventured into building conversational AI solutions found this to be harder than first imagined. Many tools allow for quick wins, but fail to deliver a robust, customer-centric solution at scale because they don’t provide the flexibility, sophistication, breadth, and width that enterprises need. The Mix tools offer the same ease of use but support tight collaboration between the different functions in a project, from business users and UX designers, to developers and speech scientists—bringing every step of the development lifecycle onto one platform. This means whenever a challenge or change request comes up, it’s not simply down to a developer to solve it. Depending on what it is, it can be worked on by anyone in the team – or they can bring in our Professional Services team to help. How are customers using Mix to address their challenges? The Mix tools and APIs provide a platform for building a surprisingly rich variety of solutions, from TV voice control to apps on SmartSpeakers, from IVR to digital experiences on web and social media messaging channels. And unlike any other platform on the market, Mix provides central control of the experience across multiple languages and engagement channels. Our customers are starting to use the platform to orchestrate the entire
customer journey, with a single source of truth for reporting and analytics. Many already had IVRs operating at a fairly high level of automation, but with Mix we’re seeing them take their IVRs to new heights, replacing traditional directed dialog with a conversational approach that improves their CSAT, and ultimately their bottom line. Even more importantly, these IVR customers now have technology that lets them seamlessly expand from a voice experience to a similar, intuitive experience in digital channels, based on the same platform and toolset. We’re seeing our customers embrace this idea of defining the user experience once and then adapting to each digital channel’s unique characteristics. With the ability to design omni-channel experiences on a single tooling platform, we’ll see organizations combining channels too. Whether it’s something simple like allowing customers to use both voice and text on a web chat, or more complex like triggering an app launch while speaking to a customer on the phone. What’s next for Mix? Apart from constantly making the toolset more complete and powerful, we’re working on deep integrations of Mix into our IVR and digital solutions. Eventually, we want to bring together all these Nuance technologies into a single, integrated solution—so our customers can build, test and tune their own applications in Mix, and deploy seamlessly as both IVR and digital applications with a few mouse clicks, from a single UI.
FRONT LINE 9
Getting in the Mix:
A new role for Professional Services Behind every innovation at Nuance, there’s an all-star team. And for Nuance Mix, it’s our Professional Services teams guiding the way. Michael Gourlay, Software Engineering Manager at Nuance, reveals how Mix is changing their relationship with our customers. A different approach to DIY—
Nuance Mix gives users access to Professional Services expertise whenever they need it.
Meet the Nuance Professional Services teams The Professional Services (PS) teams at Nuance know everything about our customers. They’re the teams that work with them, every day, to understand their requirements. That figure out how to build custom solutions and solve unique challenges. That provide support every step of the way. Each PS team consists of designers, speech scientists, developers, QA testers, and a project manager, which means they’re well-equipped to handle every stage of an application’s lifecycle. For that reason, they’ve been invaluable during Nuance Mix’s development. Our PS teams knew exactly what our customers would benefit from, and their diverse skillset made them perfect testers for the new platform. But now that our customers can create enterprise-grade applications for themselves, what does that mean for our PS teams? Mixing up the customer relationship Previously, if a Nuance customer needed to add new Natural Language Understanding capabilities to its IVR, it would look to a PS team to guide the project, design the solution, and integrate it. With Nuance Mix available, that’s no longer always the case. But don’t worry, our PS teams won’t disappear. In fact, their role is more important than ever.
Expertise to fill the gaps Not every business has in-house developers, speech scientists, conversational designers, and QA testers—if they did, the current trend of DIY would have started decades ago. That’s why, unlike other DIY tooling platforms, Nuance Mix gives users access to Professional Services expertise whenever they need it. If an organization has the development resources, but are missing other skills, a PS team can help fill the gaps. Equally, a PS team can help build the initial implementation of the solution, and hand it over for expansion and iteration. It’s a flexible relationship that lets enterprises operate the way they want, without feeling like they’re on their own. Even better, with Mix, everyone uses the same platform—whether they’re a conversation designer or a business manager, a Nuance expert or a Nuance customer. This makes it easier to share ideas and updates, keep all the business logic together, and roll out new changes faster. A different approach to DIY From greater agility to greater innovation, we’re excited to see what this new way of working together unlocks for our customers. Just remember—doing it yourself doesn’t have to mean doing it alone.
10 INNOVATION HEROES
TELUS offers conversational customer experiences on its phone channel with Nuance TELUS, one of Canada’s largest telecommunications providers, uses Nuance Natural Language Understanding to recognize customers’ intents from conversational speech. Customers no longer need to answer a series of rules-based questions, and call routing is more accurate.
“Without awkward questions and menus, it’s much easier to introduce new service routes into our IVR as our product range continues to grow.” Julie Nimmo, Senior IVR Product Manager, TELUS
Challenge
Solution
Results
With over 13 million customer connections across Canada, TELUS offers a wide range of services, including internet access, voice, entertainment, business productivity solutions, and even healthcare— making it a unique provider for the country.
TELUS integrated Nuance Natural Language Understanding (NLU) into its IVR to streamline the experience for customers calling the contact center. Customers are now just greeted by the question: “How can I help you today?” All they need to do is simply respond in natural speech and their intent is recognized in seconds— without the need for rules-based questions and lengthy menus.
Soon after the launch of the NLU module, TELUS saw a 51 percent reduction in transfers of calls shorter than two minutes, indicating that more callers were ending up in the right service area.
Previously, customers calling the company’s IVR would need to navigate a sequence of rules-based questions to determine which service they were trying to access. But as the number of TELUS services continued to grow, this process became longer. TELUS wanted to create an effortless, conversational IVR experience that would reduce customer frustration, as well as cut costs across its contact centers.
With fast, accurate intent recognition at the start of the call, it’s easy for TELUS to direct customers to the service they want to reach. If it’s as simple as making a transaction related to their phone bill, the customer can be directed to a self-service option. Or if it’s more complex, they can be transferred to a live agent who’s ready to solve the problem.
To request the full case study, email cxexperts@nuance.com.
The updated IVR was proving popular with customers, too. In fact, TELUS saw a 74 percent rise in customers using the self-service IVR, and it has an 84.3 percent successful intent recognition rate. It also saved $3.8 million in 18 months with 50 percent of total traffic since implementing Nuance NLU. As more customers continue to engage with the IVR, the company has even been able to introduce a feature that prevents “pocket-dialed” calls reaching agents, deflecting over 60,000 calls in its first year.
INNOVATION HEROES 11
One of the largest 311 services sets the gold standard for municipal service platforms with Nuance The 311 service upgraded its legacy touchtone IVR to an intelligent, conversational platform that uses Nuance Natural Language Understanding.
“Nuance worked closely with us to understand every aspect of our organization. From initial implementation to ongoing support and optimization, it’s been a collaborative effort that’s shaped a standout service.” IT and IVR Manager at the 311 service
Challenge
Solution
Results
This 311 service offers nonemergency services, government contact, and responses to information requests for more than 8.3 million residents in its city—as well as the thousands of tourists that visit the city every year.
The 311 service designed and developed an updated IVR platform in cooperation with Nuance and its partner. Using Nuance Natural Language Understanding technology, the IVR can understand citizen intent from their natural spoken language, and either route them to the right service area, or immediately provide the information they’re seeking.
Since the launch of the new IVR, the 311 service has served more than 1.6 million callers across a wide range of service areas. And using Nuance Natural Language Understanding, intent recognition and call routing is more accurate, resulting in a 37.2 percent increase in its agents’ availability—giving them more time to focus on complex cases.
Without the four-button restriction of its previous touch-tone system, the platform can now handle up to 400 different call types—covering everything from heating complaints to tax-related services. In addition, the 311 service has the flexibility to add dynamic messages and update the IVR’s vocabulary whenever it needs to—making it easier to respond to unexpected events like weather emergencies and COVID-19.
Plus, it’s a service that never stops improving. The team at the 311 service has worked closely with Nuance to make major updates to the platform, including the addition of frequently requested services like auto pound and license plate lookup. And the team has even added the ability to serve customers in Spanish—the second most commonly spoken language in the city—making the service even more accessible.
Previously, citizens calling the 311 number would need to cycle through a series of touch-tone menu options using their telephone keypads before finding the service area they needed. Not only did it take a long time to capture the caller’s intent, it was also difficult to accurately route them to the appropriate agent. With thousands of different inquiries citizens could be making, and new inquiries coming in every day, the platform’s IVR needed a more intelligent and flexible solution for capturing customer intent.
To request the full case study, email cxexperts@nuance.com.
12 INSIDE INNOVATION
From ‘Hello, World!’ to ‘Hello, Customer!’ Vince Iannotti, Vice President – Enterprise R&D, explores how openness and collaboration are at the core of Nuance Mix, and reveals why the developer experience is crucial for delivering standout customer engagements.
Innovation always starts with ambition The idea behind Mix has been floating around Nuance for a couple of years now. We wanted to respond to the growing desire from our customers to have more control over the development process for their solutions. As we started to bring different Nuance teams together, we realized we wanted to build much more than just an enterprise-grade toolset. We wanted to create a complete toolbox consisting of all of Nuance’s core technologies— Automatic Speech Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, Dialog, and Text-to-Speech. We wanted Mix to be geared not only to the developer, designer, or tester, but for all the contributors over the entire development lifecycle. We wanted to take it one step further. We were aspiring to build something we’d never seen before, and we realized that we needed more than just a platform. We needed an open ecosystem in which users can learn, share, and collaborate.
Tools to fill a gap in the market When we looked at other solutions on the market, one thing stood out— nearly all of them focused solely on the individual developer’s point of view. As a developer myself, I know how important that point of view can be. But in today’s enterprises, developers aren’t working alone. They’re collaborating with a wide range of other teams in the business—from the designers shaping the direction of the application, to the QA testers evaluating the solution, and even the marketing team managing the brand’s overall image.
We wanted to make a platform that could be used by everyone in the enterprise, regardless of their role and development expertise. With this in mind, we wanted to make a platform that could be used by everyone
INSIDE INNOVATION 13 in the enterprise, regardless of their role and development expertise. It needed to be a platform where anyone from across the development lifecycle could look at a project, understand what’s going on, and easily adjust or suggest changes. But it still needed to be scalable, reliable, and enterprise-grade. Our professional services teams helped make this ambition a reality. By bringing together a diverse set of skills—including designers, speech scientists, QA testers and project managers—they helped us understand how our customers would use Mix. They contributed to the design of the platform to ensure its ease of use, and today they’re helping customers use Mix themselves (just take a look at this issue’s Innovation Heroes to find out more).
barriers found in traditional silo-based teams, encouraging rapid, agile development within cross-functional enterprises. And it’s only getting better. As customers continue to use Mix, they’re sharing best practices and sample code with each other on our online community forum, and they’re also giving us feedback on how to improve the platform directly from within the tool. New tools bring new creations Nuance Mix is the first innovation we’ve created where we’ve had to really think about what a strong development experience looks like. It’s helped us understand the challenges our customers face when taking a DIY approach to the development of conversational AI solutions, and it’s reminded us of some of our development best practices, too. If there’s one lesson that stood out,
If developers have the right tools, and the space to experiment, it’s more likely they’ll create something that stands out.” Seamless DX = seamless CX We engaged with real developers to help shape and build Nuance Mix— and as a result, we’ve been able to design a developer experience that truly empowers them to build the next generation of conversational AI customer experiences. With Mix, we’re speeding up developers’ time to “Hello, World!”—the time it takes from concept to a complete, end-to-end transaction—from days to hours. They can quickly create initial builds, deploy on the fly, and then test and tune. And it’s much easier to expand and iterate on applications based on results and input from other teams. Since the release of Mix, we’ve already seen customers shifting the way they work because of the platform’s design, and it’s reshaping what the development lifecycle looks like. It’s removing the
it’s that every step of the development lifecycle needs to be focused on how the user will interact with your application— whether it’s on a web, messaging, or IVR channel. And we’ve baked that idea into Mix by providing the ability to create omni-channel experiences in a single place, with a clear view of each point in the customer journey. As more developers are onboarded, we can’t wait to see how their ways of working evolve, how their relationships with other teams are strengthened, and how they think about their customers in new ways. We believe Mix to be a true catalyst for innovation within the enterprise, from rapid proofs of concept to live deployments in production.
Optimize Manage Test
Report
Develop Deploy Design
Nuance Mix supports the whole software development lifecycle and goes beyond developers and speech scientists. It allows the whole team including business stakeholders, testers, and Q&A to work within the same tool and accelerate time to market.
14 STORIES AND EVENTS
What’s new @Nuance See what’s new with us – and our people and places. Albertsons finds a new way to serve customers Demand for online grocery shopping sky-rocketed during the COVID-19 crisis, and it put significant pressure on retailers to adapt. That’s why Albertsons, one of the largest US food and drug retailers, is using the Nuance Intelligent Engagement Platform with Nuance Virtual Assistant and Live Chat to deliver real-time digital support to customers doing their grocery shopping online. Albertsons’ AI-powered application helps customers through their shopping experience, providing fast responses to their inquiries. As well as helping customers through the delivery process, the virtual assistant covers everything from item availability and order tracking to store locations and opening times. Find out more.
Opus Research’s perspective on Nuance Mix Nuance Mix was recently featured in an in-depth article by Opus Research, which offers an independent perspective on the DIY tooling platform. Opus looked at Mix alongside current industry trends and suggested that Mix responds to the “explosive growth in the numbers of in-house efforts to launch chatbots and virtual agents.” It also claimed that, “…with Mix, Nuance is taking the right approach by opening [development] up to non-professionals”. Find out more.
A close-up look at Mix from Voicebot.ai We’re not the only ones who can’t stop talking about Nuance Mix—it was also recently featured by Voicebot.ai in a deep dive blog post. Voicebot.ai explored how Nuance Mix is helping enterprises take a DIY approach to building customized virtual assistants and looked at how the design of Mix is making it easier for enterprises with limited development experience. Find out more.
STORIES AND EVENTS 15
Expert insights – Check out some of our recent blog posts. Contact centers are not dead Customers want choice over the way they engage with brands—and you can’t provide that choice without a strategically structured contact center. Instead of dying, smart contact centers are using conversational AI to evolve, and they’re creating more intelligent experiences. This blog post looks at how enterprises can course-correct the “death to contact center” approach and create powerful virtual engagement centers. Customer engagement lessons from a telco leader Over the past few months, we’ve been talking to some of our most forward-thinking customers as part of our new webinar series, Creating Compelling Customer Conversations. In this blog post, we’ve captured some of the key advice telco leader KPN shared with us about creating value in the contact center and meeting customers’ expectations. A virtual assistant that takes ride-hailing to new levels Another special guest in our Compelling Conversations series, Spain’s hugely successful ride-hailing service Cabify, revealed how it’s using Nuance Virtual Assistant to create standout experiences for customers and drivers. This blog post explores the company’s entire Nuance journey, from the challenges that inspired the project to the role of the virtual assistant today. View our latest blog posts here
Events – Visit us virtually! We hope to see you again soon, but for now, join us at some of the upcoming virtual Customer Contact Week events: CCW Executive Virtual Exchange August 17-19th Designed exclusively for senior CX and customer contact leaders, this virtual exchange will look at the strategic challenges senior executives face today and explore the new trends in customer and employee experience. CCW Think Tanks – Digital Customer Experience and Self-Service August 18-19th We’ll be taking part in CCW’s interactive Think Tank sessions, exploring the industry’s biggest operational issues, and looking at how customer contact executives are solving them today. CrmXchange webinar: “Meet Nuance Mix - Your Key to Faster, Simpler, and Better Conversational AI Development” Enjoy the replay of this July 23rd webinar.
DIY, but not alone.
About Nuance Communications, Inc. Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) is the pioneer and leader in conversational AI innovations that bring intelligence to everyday work and life. The company delivers solutions that understand, analyze, and respond to people – amplifying human intelligence to increase productivity and security. With decades of domain and AI expertise, Nuance works with thousands of organizations globally across healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, government, and retail – to create stronger relationships and better experiences for their customers and workforce. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com. Copyright © 2020 Nuance Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Nuance, and the Nuance logo, are trademarks and/or registered trademarks, of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. ENT_4077_01_M DIGITAL, Aug 4 2020