“Echo AI came onto our radar screen because we were looking for AI-driven consumer insight platforms that can help marketing, sales and customer service teams optimize and become more efficient. What we’ve seen are the traditional mediums through which marketing campaigns are pushed out — emails, websites, social media. What we haven’t seen as much is how you take these personalized interactions that have emerged, particularly with chatbots, and use that data to optimize your marketing campaigns and messaging. That’s what Echo AI is able to do.”
That was a quick introduction to Echo AI supplied by Camille Manson of innovation advisory agency Silicon Foundry again in Might.
“Listening to customers is pretty critical for any business,” Alex Kvamme, CEO of Echo AI, instructed us. “The paradox of success is that if you’re good at listening to customers you get more customers — and it’s harder to listen to them. You have thousands or millions of customers telling you exactly what they want and what’s happening in the market; the problem has been that it’s very hard to get at those insights.”
Options have included handbook overview of buyer conversations after which pre-deep studying pure language processing fashions. “You could do sentiment and keyword tracking, but it was not very good, it was not configurable, it was surface level.” Whereas it was potential to run search queries in opposition to transcripts, clients have many various methods of claiming issues. Additionally: “You can only search for what you know to search for.”
Enhancements in deep studying know-how and the event of generative AI have enabled a deeper dive. Audio recordsdata are simply transcribed, however: “You have this unstructured jumble of billions of words, being added to every day, and there was just no way to comprehensively get in there until the invention of LLMs that are unstructured word processing machines. It was the perfect problem for LLMs.” Echo AI, by the way, is model-agnostic utilizing a variety of obtainable fashions together with OpenAI.
Buyer acquisition firm Centerfield had not a lot a jumble however a mountain of unstructured phrases from calls to their name facilities. Echo AI was in a position to shine a lightweight on these conversations.
Supercharging buyer acquisition
“In a nutshell, we supercharge customer acquisition for our clients,” defined Aniketh Parmar, EVP know-how at Centerfield. “We do that using a wide variety of mechanisms especially around our technology platform called Dugout.” In different phrases, Centerfield acts as an extension of the advertising groups, sometimes at Fortune 500 corporations. Additionally: “We don’t get paid until we acquire a customer,” mentioned Parmar, which signifies some confidence within the platform’s capabilities.
How does Centerfield’s acquisition technique work? First, there’s a portfolio of greater than a dozen digital manufacturers like enterprise.com and safety.org that redirect site visitors to Centerfield’s shoppers. The manufacturers entice one thing like 170 million customers all year long. Centerfield additionally drives important site visitors from search key phrases to touchdown pages via partnerships with Google and Bing.
The vast majority of connections, nevertheless, come via Centerfield’s globally distrbuted name facilities. “Using our technology platform we can track everything end-to-end, so we know what ad you clicked on or what you saw on the landing page; and when you make a phone call we know that you’re coming from so-and-so location. We use that information to find the best available agent to convert you as a customer.” The agent can have all the knowledge accessible to them when taking the decision.
After making the primary sale, Centerfield arms off the shopper to its consumer. This goes a step past lead technology; what the shopper Centerfield arms off is greater than a lead, it’s somebody who has already transformed.
Mining thousands and thousands of cellphone calls
Within the name middle area, Centerfield has confronted plenty of challenges together with bettering the efficiency of brokers. “It’s difficult to identify the best-performing agents if you try to do it manually,” mentioned Parmar, “so we wanted to use some kind of technology. Prior to Echo, we weren’t doing this at scale; we were only doing this on certain clients and certain subsets of calls. We could not mine every single call. Today we’re mining pretty much every single call.”
The connection with Echo AI started with a proof of idea train on a small variety of calls after which scaled up. What sort of scale are we speaking about? “Six or seven million calls [by the end of the year]. That’s the kind of volume we’re talking about here.”
It’s one factor to have thousands and thousands of calls mined, one other factor to ingest the outcomes. “It’s a two-step journey,” Parmar defined. “First, they mine the calls; then you can put questions to the platform, like ‘Find the traits of agents that are really good at converting customers.’ The platform can identify themes and then report the information back to us. We can then ingest the information in our platform, Dugout, that has all the performance data.”
That is Centerfield’s first 12 months utilizing Echo AI. From the POC train they noticed an enchancment in conversions. Parmar didn’t but have precise insights of the enhancements seen as Echo AI has been scaled throughout the corporate.
Dig deeper: 5 easy methods to enhance buyer expertise
The micro and the macro
We requested Kvamme to enter extra element about how insights from thousands and thousands of cellphone calls may be reported in digestible type. Kvamme distinguishes between micro-insights and macro-insights. Particular conversations can reveal micro-insights like buy intent — together with for services or products that aren’t the primary topic of the decision — and intent to churn. Echo AI can detect and flag these insights and push them by way of APIs into the organizations different methods (CRM, for instance) the place they will floor and be acted on.
Macro-insights determine traits, alternatives and dangers throughout the enterprise. “We’re surfacing that in our application where you can view those trends over time; and you can take the high levels trend representing millions of conversations and dig, dig down into the singular conversations — the atoms that make the molecule.”
Does Echo AI’s know-how serve channels aside from this name middle instance? “Our vision is that every word that comes out of your customer should feed back to the business,” mentioned Kvamme. “Conversations are the richest medium but you also have reviews, NPS surveys, social media — there are many ways your customers can communicate to you or about you. We are working on analyzing some of those channels.”
