Liveperson Enhances Conversational AI Capabilities to Help Brands Strengthen Customer and Agent Experiences

New AI enhancements improve bot and agent performance, boost customer engagement, and accelerate time to value while cutting costs

LivePerson, a global leader in customer engagement solutions, announced enhancements to its Conversational AI that will help brands hold even better conversations with their customers on a massive scale. Four new AI-powered capabilities include AI Search, On-Demand Recommendations, “Small Talk” NLU, and Repeat Intent Rate measurement.

Powered by nearly one billion conversational interactions per month on the company’s Conversational Cloud, LivePerson’s Curiously Human™ AI helps customer care, sales, and marketing teams deliver and automate more meaningful, natural-feeling conversations.

The AI-powered features and integrations announced today — including new ways to engage with customers and capture, measure, and use conversational data — make it easier for brands to improve bot performance, enhance customer and agent experiences, and accelerate time to value while cutting costs.

“As we head into 2023, brands are looking to do more with less. AI and automation will only become more important as they seek to increase customer loyalty while reducing operational costs,” said Rob LoCascio, founder and CEO of LivePerson. “Our latest research shows that 98% of brands say AI is important to their customer engagement strategy, but only 28% say they’re realizing its full potential. With the capabilities we’re announcing today, they can start leveraging automation and AI faster than ever to provide even better digital experiences.”

AI Search immediately answers questions without escalating to human agents right out of the box
AI Search raises the bar for customer engagement by providing the most accurate answers to customer questions, only requiring knowledge base content to work. First, it uses deep learning to understand the customer’s intent, the context of their query, and their phrasing. Then, it uses those factors to deliver the best answers — either directly to the customer through a self-service bot or to agents in the form of recommended answers that they can instantly drop into a customer conversation.

AI Search is an out-of-the-box solution that vastly increases time to value. Instead of spending an inordinate amount of time on data science and taxonomy efforts, brands can simply add their content, then turn on AI Search to substantially increase how often and how well they’re answering customer questions.

On-Demand Recommendations help human agents quickly find better answers and bots
This new tool for agents reduces effort and enables them to help more customers faster by making it simple to search for bots and content — then instantly use them. Agents can now simply type in a question or phrase, then drop the bot, knowledge base answer, or predefined content that surfaces in the search results directly into customer conversations.

On-Demand Recommendations boost LivePerson’s existing recommendation engine by making it possible to look up bots and content that do not depend on what the customer says, giving agents greater flexibility to quickly access the best resources to do their jobs. Unlike other platforms, LivePerson also allows agents to pull bots in without losing control of how the conversation unfolds.

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“Small Talk” brings a more human feeling to automated conversations
LivePerson’s “Small Talk” feature allows bots to respond to conversational messages with natural, comfortable responses, including greetings, goodbyes, and confirmations. For example, if a customer starts a conversation with “Hi, are you a bot?” or says, “Thank you!” the bot can politely respond before proceeding with addressing the customer’s intent rather than get confused by the casual interjection.

Brands can quickly make automated experiences feel more natural with LivePerson’s out-of-the-box Small Talk NLU models and content, then customize responses as needed to fit their unique brand voice. This simplifies the developer experience by erasing the need to build small talk domains in-house.

Repeat Intent Rate (RIR) measures customer repetitions to identify opportunities for automation and optimization
Repeat Intent Rate is a new, first-of-its-kind metric from LivePerson that measures how and when a customer follows up on a previously stated intent. While repeat intents are typically negative when it comes to customer care, indicating that an issue has not been resolved, they can signal positive steps toward conversion when it comes to making a sale.

For example, if a customer keeps coming back to ask about their password, looking at RIR could help a brand identify a problem in its password system and how to address it. On the other hand, if a certain customer has ordered the same meal from a brand multiple times per month, RIR can help the brand determine whether this is a customer that would like to receive proactive messages about promotions and rewards.

RIR gives brands the right context to gauge whether repeat interactions are positive or negative, then automate and optimize how they are handled. As an easy-to-understand metric, it helps contact center leaders cut costs, drive revenue, and improve the customer experience.

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