Boost aims to reshape customer service industry with conversational AI

Online customer service is a profession with one of the highest employee turnover rates which poses a big challenge for businesses in that segment. Many organisations have switched to chatbots to automate such work though the results aren’t always impressive.

Stavanger-based AI start-up, Boost, is aiming to take the customer experience to a whole new level with its conversational AI in a bid to take the pressure of the technical staff and reserve them for premium customers.

Abhishek Thakur, Chief Data Scientist at Boost, told TechRadar Middle East, that many institutions are reshaping customer service in the digital world to resolve thousands of inquiries and mundane daily tasks instantly. Businesses, in a bid to stay ahead of the competition, are looking to set a high standard to resolve questions, complaints or queries and deliver the best experience possible at the same time.

“We make virtual assistants but don’t call it chatbots. We call it conversational AI which are a step higher than chatbots and are artificially intelligent. Virtual assistants understand customers and reply in a proper manner. Chatbots are more monotonous and replies to what it’s not supposed to [which results in] false positives.” he said.

Thakur says that conversational AI can recognize the way a conversion is going and understands the flow of the conversion better. At the moment, it’s text-based but it can be converted into speech.

“Conversational AI uses a combination of deep learning and natural language understanding. It starts by performing comprehensive text processing on the sentence, correcting spelling and preparing it for interpretation. We use around six deep neural networks behind the conversational AI platform and the algorithm learns from the data created by the people. We are rolling out automatic semantic understanding (ASU) to understand the most complex customer interactions. Our new algorithms cut false positives by 90 per cent,” he said.

“More than 50 per cent of the conversations at the largest bank in Scandinavia DNB use conversational AI. Our aim is to boost customer experience and cut wait times,” Thakur said.

Boost’s solutions are used in Scandinavia, Norway and Finland. Boost’s conversational AI supports 25 languages, including Arabic but they don’t currently have clients in the Middle East.