Last week Avaya Senior Product Marketing Manager Laura Faughtenberry shared how she was able to get a refund for a single rotten cucumber with the click of a button after finding it in the online order she had just picked up, saving her the time and hassle of returning to the store. If more companies use Avaya Virtual Agents, she says, successful online interactions like this will be the rule instead of the coin toss they are today.
According to the “State of AI Report” from Avaya and IPSOS, a market research firm, only one in two people who used chatbots feel their problem was solved, and only one in three would recommend a business after dealing with their artificial intelligence options. Ivan Rothkegel, one of our editors at Verb, feels that dealing with chatbots is one of the most annoying, hypertension-inducing nuisances of modern life and can’t recall a single time a chatbot solved any problem for him. After all, simple stuff chatbots might be good at, such as checking a bank balance, can be easily done online.
Chatbots need to get better. That is why last week Avaya introduced Avaya Virtual Agent, a set of premade self-service options in the cloud. Companies can just add these options to their current service menus in minutes instead of creating them from scratch, a process that usually takes weeks.
It’s a timely announcement because customers might not wait. During the pandemic they were forced to shop online, but now if your chatbots don’t work, they will try the human options, and they can find those at any competitor’s. After Amazon posted its first quarterly loss in seven years last April 28th, The Wall Street Journal reported that US online spending was down 3% year over year in March, while spending in physical stores was up 11% year over year.
An invitation to the lab
Verb has started working with Elemental Machines, a startup which can pull lab gear data “from any brand, with any function, from any era” onto a single dashboard. The pandemic showed the critical importance of successful lab operations and we’re happy to join this beat.
A little step to help midsize companies with a big problem
Large companies have taken decades to develop their cybersecurity practices, and midsize companies now need the same tools but have no time to learn them. Startup Enveedo asked Verb for help as they work on helping these companies fill the gap.