Directly
Revolutionizing Customer Experience Automation

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as the key driver of digital transformation. AI can help companies overcome the limitation of human capacity and improve workforce productivity like never before. However, most companies today are stumbling out of the gates with their early AI and automation initiatives. In the customer service industry, nothing infuriates a customer more than a virtual agent, or chatbot, that’s giving cold, inaccurate answers. California-based Directly offers an innovative customer experience (CX) automation platform that helps enterprises launch and train virtual agents that double their automation rate. In this interview with CIO Applications, Mike de la Cruz, chief business officer at Directly, explains how their platform delivers automatic, knowledgeable, and personalized support to modern customers, while creating new economic opportunity for people in the AI era.

Can you provide a brief overview of Directly?

As a support automation company, Directly helps companies launch and train virtual agents that double their automation rate. Market leaders like Airbnb, Microsoft, and Samsung use our expert-in-the-loop AI platform to deliver content, training, and answers to their virtual agent for significantly better performance. Our platform easily integrates with leading CRMs, messaging applications, and virtual agents.

What are the trends that you expect to impact the AI space this year, and how will Directly leverage them to evolve?

The integration of human expertise into AI leads to more accurate outcomes, which paves the way for continued AI-human coexistence. Moreover, AI outcomes improve via training, and the demand for workers to train AI will only grow. This growth remains our primary focus, which, in turn, will allow more people to participate in the AI economy. We believe creating royalties based on the value and information that people are adding to AI (paying them for their data, knowledge, and expertise). This strategy is crucial to account for how people will work alongside AI.

What are the challenges that companies face in the present AI space? How does your CX automation platform address these challenges and “deliver content, training, and answers to virtual agents”?

Modern companies struggle with four primary hurdles when implementing virtual agents—lack of content, lack of signal/feedback, lack of maintenance, and low empathy.

Lack of content is the first challenge virtual agents face, as these systems don’t work well without a considerable amount of content. Businesses can’t scale results as they are often limited to historical enterprise knowledge bases and other internal resources. To address this concern, our platform enables a company to resolve more support issues by providing the right content for the virtual agent to serve. With our expert-in-the-loop AI approach, customers can also rapidly develop rich content to add to their existing enterprise knowledge bases and serve automatically to customers in a messaging experience.

In addition, virtual agents need a lot of signals—that is the feedback to know if it is accurately understanding the question and responding correctly. While other enterprises solely rely on historical data to generate customer ‘intent,’ our platform infuses 100x the data with our proprietary expert-in-the-loop AI technology, continuously generating new intents and training phrases that the virtual agent needs to learn and thrive. This approach delivers much smarter conversational AI that can both understand a more extensive array of customer questions and be better equipped at resolving issues.

Lastly, the content and signal that feeds virtual agents need to be updated regularly; the maintenance requirement is a huge hurdle for most enterprises looking to implement AI. Through our platform, content and signal is not only delivered upfront but continuously to maintain performance and prevent decay.

Could you cite one or two case studies on how you have enabled clients to overcome hurdles and attain desired outcomes with your innovative array of solutions?

Two of our customers, Ancestry and Samsung, have experienced significant business outcomes after implementing our CX automation platform.

Ancestry was looking for ways to automatically resolve more customer issues. After partnering with us, they saw a 30 percent reduction in ticket submissions, which has resulted in projected savings of more than $1 million in 2019.

For Samsung, we’re helping support 75 million Samsung devices while delivering 95 percent customer satisfaction. 80 percent of customer inquiries are resolved without agents. In 2018, Samsung won the Stevie Award for sales and customer service (our platform also won a Stevie Award for AI/machine learning solution in 2019).

What does the future hold for your organization? Do you have any footprint expansion plans or platform enhancement strategies?

Over the next 12 months, our goal is to expand to new verticals while advancing our AI technology to take virtual agents to a whole new level of performance.