LivePerson Brings Conversational AI to Life: The 2020 CRM Rising Star Awards

From its headquarters in New York, LivePerson has carved out quite a niche for itself in the areas of conversational commerce and artificial intelligence. In 2018, it introduced its AI offering, allowing customers to create AI-powered chatbots to answer consumer messages alongside human customer service staff. This year, the company, which was founded in 1995, really jumped ahead of its peers with the release of Conversational Cloud, a software platform that allows companies to build and run AI-powered automations over popular messaging channels such as SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, Google RCS, LINE, WeChat, and native messaging on websites and mobile apps.

With Conversational Cloud, companies can instantly respond to messages, answer questions, resolve customer issues, and route to human experts as needed. Conversational AI, which communicates like a human by recognizing speech, text, and intent, is at the heart of the Conversational Cloud.

In all, the Conversational Cloud contains more than 40 application programming interfaces and software development kits that allow users to integrate third-party applications, build new AI-powered applications and automations, create workflows, and read/write data to any system.

Some of the other features include Intent Manager, a real-time intent recognition and classification engine; Conversation Builder, to help companies create automated conversation flows; LivePerson Functions, for creating custom workflows that can be triggered by a variety of conversational events; LivePerson Voice to Messaging and Apple’s Chat Suggest, to shift consumers who call on the phone directly into messaging conversations; and Conversation Analytics, a performance dashboard that captures a range of conversational metrics, from sales-focused metrics like overall volume and average order value to customer care, operational efficiency, and consumer experience metrics.

Early users of the Conversational Cloud have already seen the following results:

• • higher qualified leads that are 2.5 times more likely to convert to sales;
• • average order value and online sales conversions increase by up to 20 percent;
• • labor costs decrease by 50 percent;
• • customer satisfaction scores rise by up to 20 percent; and
• • agent attrition decrease by 50 percent.

“We honestly don’t know how we would have survived the last couple of months without the option to message. It truly saved our business,” said Holly Carroll, vice president of customer service and contact center operations at David’s Bridal, in a statement. “With the Conversational Cloud, we sped up our vision for Zoey, our conversational bridal concierge, and put our customers into the best hands.”

To further help companies get through the COVID-19 pandemic, LivePerson launched a retail and food service curbside delivery notification system using its conversational AI.

Also new this year is LivePerson SocialConnect and EmailConnect, through which companies can manage the massive volume of email, social mentions, and direct messages they receive in the same conversational platform they use to manage messaging channels like Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and more.

And the company didn’t stop there. Earlier this year, it brought Google Business Messages into the stable of channels it supports, and through a partnership with TTEC, LivePerson redefined the customer experience with digital engagement, messaging, and and AI-driven automation. The TTEC-LivePerson partnership will help companies not only offer customer interactions across messaging channels but also turn their contact centers into digitally enabled customer experience hubs and deliver high-impact, personalized customer experiences at scale with messaging and AI.