Interactions, a pioneering force in Conversational AI for customer service, launched its AI-powered agent assist solution, Task Orchestration, to transform the customer experience.
Interactions combines the best of AI innovation and real-time human intelligence to deliver CX solutions to the world’s most recognizable brands. In 2023, its AI-powered Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) delivered more than $300 million in savings to top clients by automating time-consuming and repetitive transactions.
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Task Orchestration extends the Interactions IVA framework by bringing AI-powered automation to any task that traditionally involved human agents. For customers, the automation creates a faster and more effortless self-service experience, in turn increasing customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. For businesses using the product, Task Orchestration significantly increases operational efficiency by lowering agent costs, increasing labor capacity, reducing error rates and freeing up human agents to focus on more critical aspects of their customers’ needs.
How It Works
When customers engage with self-service customer support through any channel, the Interactions IVA system quickly authenticates their identity and routes their requests. Typically, the IVA hands off more complex requests to a human agent to process. But with Task Orchestration, any request can be completed in the IVA as it sends subtasks or worklets to chat agents when human input is needed. This removes the need for transferring calls or chats to agents, thereby eliminating long hold times as well as the frequent need for customers to repeat themselves.
It also reduces the challenge of introducing AI-powered automation into complex contact center environments by eliminating the need for creating new APIs to communicate between systems and by interfacing with existing robotic process automation (RPA) solutions. Additionally, it is designed for businesses to incorporate real-time human intelligence when needed, thereby ensuring businesses can adopt transparent, responsible AI protocols.
Phil Gray, Interactions Chief Product Officer: “Task Orchestration is a great example of how AI is transforming the customer and agent experience in contact centers. It enables an AI powered Intelligent Assistant to communicate with customers across any channel and any language, while replacing call center agents with more efficient chat agents. Most importantly, it saves customers time and effort.”
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What is Task Orchestration?
Task Orchestration extends Interactions blend of AI-centric solutions with human understanding for customer support. This agent assist offering recognizes virtual assistants cannot fully automate every customer interaction, either due to complexity, lack of integrations, or an overall degradation of customer experience.
Task Orchestration serves as a bridge empowering most customer transactions to be assisted by chat agents on-demand, while simultaneously minimizing their involvement and overall task time. It enables contact centers to increase agent productivity with more efficient Generative AI- (GenAI-) assisted chat agents and paves the path for a day when there is a complete GenAI-powered autonomous experience. It pays for itself by significantly reducing a contact center’s agent minutes and enabling agents to serve more customers per work hour.
Task Orchestration Benefits for Customers and Businesses
Lower Customer Effort
Task Orchestration reduces customer effort by speeding up task completion. It has led to a 30 percent decrease in customer call time for certain clients and eliminates the need for customers to wait on hold for the next available agent.
Reduce Agent Handle Time by 50-70 Percent
By enabling the IVA to handle customer interactions, agents are brought into the conversation only when their skills are required, decreasing Agent Handle Time (AHT) by 50-70 percent.
Supports Digital Transformation
Task Orchestration enables a single pool of chat agents to support customers across all channels, effectively turning voice into a digital channel. In addition, GenAI adds automation and additional agent efficiency.
Eliminate Escalations to Live Agents
The IVA retains control throughout the interaction, collaborates with agents discreetly, and enables customers to interact with your brand according to their preferences.
Elevate Agent Productivity
Agents efficiently carry out their tasks via their desktop without the need for direct customer interaction, which enhances productivity and minimizes the risk of burnout.
Universally Applicable to Your Entire Agent Workforce
Any agent, regardless if they’re still in training, voice/digital queue, or the language they speak, can assist customers with clear guardrails in place.
GoDaddy and Interactions
One Interactions customer, GoDaddy, recently trialed Task Orchestration for a subset of their customer interactions that historically resulted in higher Average Handle Time given their complexity.
During this test, Task Orchestration automated most of the journey for these transactions by only calling on a chat agent to complete small steps within the process, while the Interactions IVA managed the self-service customer interaction. This optimization reduced agent time for these transactions by 6 minutes. When real-time human intelligence is required, more cost-efficient channels, like chat are utilized instead of phone, creating opportunities for even greater savings.
Ryan Smith, GoDaddy Senior Director, Customer Care Strategy & Operations: “We were searching for an opportunity to automate things from the customer’s perspective and gain insights and cost savings from the company’s perspective. On the transactions where we trialed Task Orchestration, we’re finding happier customers, more efficient agent time, and we’re getting really, really rich valid feedback from our agents.”
