Although some surveys show that people prefer to talk to someone versus a chatbot, whether they’re shopping online or dealing with a customer service issue, that doesn’t stop companies from accepting them. A Salesforce report in 2019 found that 53% of service organizations are expected to use chatbots within 18 months. According to Statista, the size of the global chatbot market could exceed $ 1.25 billion by 2025, a steep climb from $ 190 million in 2016.
A customer’s satisfaction-or lack thereof-with a chatbot depends on the scenario and on the capabilities of the chatbot in question. Obviously, a chatbot that can’t answer key questions will lead to frustration. Countless vendors say they have thought through the problem carefully, including Loris, but Loris, which has now announced that it has raised $ 12 million in a Series A round, is different than many because of its software is designed to teach customer service reps rather than respond to customer requests.
“Loris was founded… with the idea of multiplying emotional communications in the world. At the heart of our story is the origin of software [an] The AI-based solution that delivers de-escalation techniques and language suggests features that guide customer service agents through the toughest conversations, ”CEO Etle Hertz told TechCrunch via of email. ”Loris offers granular, effective data that can drive business-wide decisions, because it integrates customer emotion in real-time, every day. We see the future of commercial winners and losers tied to customer service experiences and their direct impact on the revenue chain. ”
Loris
Loris was launched in 2018 by Nancy Lublin, the former CEO of nonprofit social advocacy group Do Something and the founder of Crisis Text Line, a suicide prevention organization. Lublin has the idea to take lessons learned from the Crisis Text Line, which trains counselors to calm people down and guide them through their issues, and build them into a system that will help employees and companies to navigate conversations about customers.
The approach has proven controversial. In February, then Politico revealed that Crisis Text Line-a shareholder in Loris-funneled data from conversations with Loris, Crisis Text Line said it would stop sharing the data and ask Loris to delete any data received its. (Crisis Text Line maintains that data is handled “securely, anonymously and scrubbed with personally identifiable information.”)
“We draw our insights from anonymized, aggregated data scrubbed by personally identifiable information,” Hertz stressed when asked about Loris ’privacy and data retention policies. “We only maintain non-personally identifiable data, so we can continue to use it to improve our services … Companies like Deloitte review us annually to ensure compliance.”
At this last point, it is worth noting that the “big four” accounting firms, including Deloitte (including EY, KPMG, and PwC), have been found to have committed a high number of incorrect corporate audits. . But Hertz answers his word, Loris ethically trains its systems to guide human customer service agents using suggested language and techniques, using AI to analyze conversation data in real time and provide insights as the leading reasons behind conversations that end in low satisfaction.
Photo Credits: Loris
Recently, Loris-designed to top existing customer service systems-began to pilot the ability to use sentiment analysis to predict when a customer might churn and recommend an appropriate strategy. “We take feedback from our users and empower agents to help make the system better,” Hertz said.
Looking ahead
Loris positions its platform as useful for agents-not just customers-at a time when the volume of customer service requests is increasing and customers have higher expectations of brands. According to a recent Zendesk report, 70% of customers now expect real-time conversations, with live chat requests up 36% over the past year.
Some research shows that customer service agents are wary of AI and automation tools. But Hertz said that, especially for agents whose native language is not English, Loris’s sentiment analysis tools can help them adjust their responses to tones that are difficult to understand, leading to better outcomes – assuming those tools are not bias.
“We’ve analyzed tens of millions of customer service messages across multiple domains. It gives us a large, diverse dataset to help reduce bias, ”Hertz said.
Brands considering adopting Loris will need to weigh the pros and cons of rival solutions like Google Cloud’s Agent Assist and Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, which also use emotion analysis. Incumbent call center service providers like Dialpad offer sentiment analysis features, as do companies including Cogito, Saygent, and SugarCRM.
Hertz said the plan is to put capital from the latest round into research and technology as part of a “solid pipeline of expanded features” for “thousands” of agents in a client base that includes Freshly, Fiverr, and Slice.
“This [features] more to enable non-technical leaders who oversee customer service and support teams to efficiently and effectively measure the ‘human touch’ of their departments … More specifically, we will continue to innovate our insights tools- [which] serves as an out-of-the-box data science partner for customer experience leaders for identifying areas for improvement-and further augment their current empathic language guidance with those configured setting, “Hertz adds.” Although there are other AI companies working on automated responses, they tend to go self-service … [we] focus on integrating customer intent and sentiment analytics during and after the conversation. ”
Loris, who has 15 employees, aims to triple its workforce this year. Bow Capital and ServiceNow both led Series A along with current investors Floodgate and Vertex Ventures.