Technology

Nuance Digital Messaging Connects People with Brands One Billion Times a Year

Nuance announced a major achievement: The Nuance Customer Engagement Platform now powers one billion digital messaging interactions between consumers and enterprises each year. Today’s news marks an important milestone for messaging, showing that consumers are rapidly embracing it as a preferred means of engaging across nearly all industries, including banking, telecommunications, travel and more.

Messaging is popular worldwide, and with every age group. In the US alone, 75% of US adults send or receive text messages daily, and 62% choose to receive message notifications from apps (Source: Forrester, Vendor Landscape: Mobile Messaging Platforms, March 16 2017). Messaging is on the rise because it is easy, convenient and – for the consumer – essentially free. Messages can be real-time interactive, or people can respond to messages hours or even days later.

For enterprises, this trend means determining how to enable millions of customers to engage with them through potentially hundreds of millions of messaging conversations. Nuance overcomes this messaging “volume barrier” by combining virtual assistant messaging with AI tools for agent-assisted messaging, both in real-time and offline, also called asynchronous messaging. This combination allows enterprises to engage with millions of incoming messages with high levels of customer satisfaction, and without needing to hire multitudes of new agents or extend contact center hours.

The Nuance Customer Engagement platform:

  • Delivers as high as 85% first contact resolution through automated message conversation – using the conversational AI capabilities in the Nuance Nina virtual assistant to engage in real-time messaging with consumers, 24 hours a day, 365 days a week
  • Uses AI-Routing to send incoming messages to the precise agent or agent team best suited to deliver fast and accurate responses when the virtual assistant is uncertain, and the customer has a complex issue that requires the human touch
  • Provides a cloud-based Agent Desktop designed specifically for AI-powered messaging, supporting distributed agent teams, where they can engage in live message conversations, or if the agent is not on duty, engage later through built-in offline and asynchronous message management features
  • Leverages AI to provide agents with suggested solutions and a Learning Loop that uses confirmed agent answers to train the virtual assistant to automate similar conversations in the future, making the NLU technology smarter and more accurate over time
  • Enables AI and human-assisted customer engagement across IVR voice, web, smart speakers/IoT, Smart Home and Smart TV platforms, as well as connected car applications

“Nuance hitting the one billion mark shows just how rapidly digital messaging is becoming an important new way for people to engage with brands,” said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Division, Nuance. “It is no longer a question of if enterprises will leverage messaging for their millions of customers, it is how. Nuance’s success and leading technology provides proof that enterprises can affordably and effectively connect across the channels preferred by their customers – including digital messaging.”

The potential for enterprises to use messaging for customer engagement is large – and is not new. In Asia, messaging has been on the rise for years, with the popular WeChat messaging app allowing brands to message their bank, airline, doctor and government agency. Nuance recognized the potential for customer service messaging early, implementing a solution for one of the largest banks in China in 2013, and announcing support for WeChat in 2014. Nuance also recently announced that its AI-driven virtual assistant, Nuance Nina, powers Jetstar’s virtual assistant Jess on the web and Facebook Messenger. Jess is now capable of providing real-time conversations via Facebook Messenger to resolve customer queries across Australia, New Zealand, and Asia.

Over 6,500 enterprises have selected Nuance as a part of their customer engagement solutions, including Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, FedEx, The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Swedbank, TalkTalk and USAA. Nuance automates and enhances an estimated 16 billion customer interactions a year across voice, text and digital channels.