Lucidworks Announces Smart Answers, a Question Answering System That Enhances Chatbots and Virtual Assistants to Deliver Personalized Self-Service

Smart Answers on Lucidworks Fusion Uses Deep Learning to Understand Natural Language Questions and Provide Users with Immediate and Contextual Answers

Lucidworks, leader in AI-powered search, announces Smart Answers on Lucidworks Fusion. Smart Answers enhances the intelligence of chatbots and virtual assistants by using deep learning to understand natural language questions and quickly return the right answers. Customers and employees can now locate critical insights to help them move to their next best action, avoiding frustrating digital experiences and long customer support wait times.

Companies rely on digital portals to provide information to users, whether digital commerce customers looking for product information before purchase, employees hunting for an HR document, or someone looking for an airline’s updated cancellation policies. Information is often scattered across disparate silos and is impossible for a user to locate using natural language questions. Smart Answers on Lucidworks Fusion helps employees and customers resolve issues more quickly, empowering them to find the right answer immediately via chatbot or virtual assistant without seeking out additional support channels or digging through irrelevant search results. Smart Answers’ API also enables easy integration with any chatbot or knowledge base, adding value to those existing applications.

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“Users expectations are evolving towards more conversational interactions with an interface that understands natural language questions, and quickly provides the correct answers,” explains Will Hayes, Lucidworks CEO. “In the current environment, it’s important to meet customers where they are, especially if they’re moving from a real life experience to digital. Our work over the years with Fusion has been focused on understanding a user’s intent. Digging for answers wears their patience, wastes their time, and can even motivate them to seek out a competitor. Being able to understand what your users are asking for in their own words and returning the best answer instantly, allows companies to provide a natural conversational experience digitally. With Smart Answers, we’re cutting down time-to-resolution, increasing customer retention, and powering conversational experiences for users.”

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Users are motivated to help themselves, which makes conversational applications a high priority for many organizations who rely on digital touchpoints. Manikandan Sivanesan, Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, a Lucidworks customer, tested users’ propensity for self-service. He explains: “We conducted an A/B test where we introduced a self-solve based homepage to some customers. There was an increase in traffic that confirmed that customers are really motivated to self-solve and we saw a 7% decrease in support case creation for customers who were given the self-solve homepage.”

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