LivePerson Blazes New Trails with Conversational AI: The 2022 CRM Conversation Starters
LivePerson has a decades-long history in the contact center space, as it has been developing conversational technologies since its founding in 1995. Recent moves have brought the New York-based company deeper into the marketing, sales, and commerce domains.
A central piece in its technology portfolio for the past few years has been the Conversational Cloud, which this year got a major upgrade that brings additional artificial intelligence to bear. The new capabilities include advanced routing and self-learning technology, integrations with thousands of apps, sales attribution, and better ways to track and deliver conversational commerce.
LivePerson's new commerce capabilities help companies capture the massive opportunity of conversational commerce, attribute it correctly, and even automate commerce conversations.
With the debut of LivePerson's sales attribution technology, marketing and sales leaders can now track and give credit for cross-channel sales to agents or bots that participated in conversations and shared links to products or services.
Furthering its move into commerce, LivePerson also launched Conversational Marketplaces to help online retailers integrate messaging and conversational AI into their digital storefronts.
Beyond the new market segments, though, LivePerson also moved into new technology streams within its existing areas of specialty, like the launch earlier this summer of Contact Center Conversation Mining, which helps companies track and optimize customer experiences.
Developed with Celonis, Contact Center Conversation Mining allows companies to map customer journeys across systems and interactions; identify patterns in customer behavior; break conversations down into segment-level data; unlock insights from conversational data, including sentiment and intent; and convert those insights into intelligent action through automation and workflows.
Working with blockchain technology company ConsenSys, LivePerson also a few months ago launched VillageDAO, a decentralized customer care platform. The VillageDAO platform will help companies triage customer service issues at scale by mobilizing community members into customer care squads.
LivePerson's Conversation Assist, part of the larger Conversational Cloud, also received an upgrade this year. Among its new capabilities, it enables contact center agents to receive AI-driven, real-time recommendations for inserting content and bots directly into customer conversations with a single click. The recommendation engine can draw from many sources at once, including company knowledge bases, automations built through LivePerson’s Conversation Builder, and bots from third-party platforms like Google DialogFlow and IBM Watson. A dashboard of rich analytics can help companies monitor and improve recommendation performance and agent engagement.
LivePerson's entire portfolio got a big lift last October with the purchase of VoiceBase, a provider of real-time speech recognition and conversational analytics; and Tenfold, provider of a customer engagement platform for integrating communication systems with leading CRM and support services.
Through these acquisitions, three technologies combine to create a unified, AI-enabled system for customer experience: VoiceBase’s speech recognition and analytics capabilities; Tenfold's advanced voice, messaging, and CRM integrations; and LivePerson's conversational AI and asynchronous messaging. Companies can now offer natural, conversational consumer experiences that carry context and continuity across channels, powered through a single automated voice and messaging desktop experience.
Walter Bachtiger, cofounder and chief revenue officer of VoiceBase, at the time called LivePerson "a trail-blazing industry leader that shares our vision for improving conversations through actionable, AI-powered insights."