SmartAction, the top-rated AI-powered virtual agent solution for contact centers announced the appointment of David Dougherty to its Board of Directors. Dougherty is the former Chief Executive Officer at Convergys, a global leader in customer care, where he led over 75,000 employees across 70 countries.
As a member of the founding management team, Dougherty helped grow Convergys from $3 million in revenue to nearly $3 billion. He ultimately served on the Board of Directors first as COO, then as CEO, for five years.
“The biggest emerging trend in the customer service space is the trend toward self-service automation – fast, effortless self-service. I don’t want to wait on hold to talk to a person, and neither do customers. They want to self-serve on their channel of choice, they want to do it immediately, and they want the experience to be better than speaking with a live agent,” said Dougherty.
Dougherty continued, “SmartAction’s cloud-based conversational AI solution is leading this fast-growing virtual assistant category with their ‘LIFE LESS HARD™’ obsession that puts the effortless customer experience (CX) above all else, while assisting contact centres with a near frictionless transition to automation. I’m excited to bring my experience from the world’s largest customer care company to SmartAction, which is automating customer service through the power of AI.
“When you’re striving to create Earth’s best human-to-machine interface for customer service, it’s much bigger than the AI, or language acoustic models, or layers of pattern recognition algorithms. It’s about the underpinnings of a human-centric design that delivers a human experience with a machine that’s so good, it becomes transparent to the user. That takes an obsession with CX, which is why we couldn’t be happier to have one of the industry’s preeminent customer care experts and business leaders join our team and Board of Directors,” said Tom Lewis, CEO, SmartAction.
About SmartAction
SmartAction was founded as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) research company in 2002 and is now the leading provider of AI-powered virtual agents for customer service. SmartAction uses proprietary conversational AI to automate conversations that used to be handled by call centre agents over phone, chat, and text. SmartAction has nearly two decades of development in AI, machine learning, and natural language processing/understanding (NLP/NLU) to mimic live agent behavior across hundreds of call types and chats in every industry. SmartAction was recognized by Deloitte as a Tech Fast 500 recipient in 2016, Gartner “Cool Vendor” in 2017, and “The Leader in AI-enhanced Self-service” by Frost & Sullivan in 2018.