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Solvvy Injects Artificial Intelligence Into Call Centers, Trouble Tickets

Talking to a computer when you need help is the worst. People can go crazy being stuck in voicemail hell just trying to reach a live person. It's especially frustrating for users who don't quite understand their problem enough to explain it, have a language barrier, or even an accent that is hard for a machine to understand.

But perhaps there's some artificial intelligence help on the way. Solvvy, an intelligent self-service platform for customer experience, claims that most customer frustrations with AI help stems from inferior technology. In contrast, Solvvy’s intelligent self-service platform uses AI and natural language processing to understand and answer questions immediately, even when they are long and complicated, misspelled or phrased in different ways, the company claims. If an issue requires human assistance, Solvvy claims it can immediately routes the customer to a person.

Reducing Customer Trouble Tickets

Due to these technology improvements, Solvvy claims to reduce customer ticket volume by 20 percent, which helps improve operating costs and improves customer satisfaction. The system is also constantly learning from the company’s knowledge base, ticket history, and prior customer interactions, causing it to get smarter with time. The natural language learning algorithm is on track to achieve 90 percent automation of transactional requests in real-time within five years.

Solvvy's early adopters include customer support, service desk and self-service systems at GoFundMe, Alexa, MailChimp and Under Armor. We didn't see IT service providers in the mix among the sample adopters, but we'll be watching to see if MSPs somehow leverage the technology.

Meanwhile, investors sound impressed. The company announced this week that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Scale Venture Partners. The round, which included full participation from existing investors, including Pear Ventures, Signatures Capital and True Ventures, brings the company’s total funding to $16.5 million. As part of the financing, Rory O’Driscoll, founding partner at Scale Venture Partners, will join Solvvy’s board. This new investment will allow Solvvy to accelerate product development, focus on expanding their team and grow their customer portfolio.

Tomorrow's Call Centers: Delighting Customers?

Even though customers are continually frustrated with voicemail hell, it hasn't stopped companies from utilizing it for customer service routing. They sacrifice a little bit of customer satisfaction, for more efficient call centers. If a company could have both customer satisfaction, and efficient call centers, where the majority of customer requests are being answered by bots or AI, then that is definitely the ideal scenario. This way human agents can focus on more complicated or important issues instead of dealing with the same rudimentary issue over and over again each day.

Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.