The company’s creative and flexible consumption model helps telecom carriers achieve significant production and cost efficiencies
Based on its recent analysis of the North American intelligent virtual agent (IVA) market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Inference Solutions with the 2019 North American Customer Value Leadership Award for its flexible and scalable IVA platform. The solution – Inference Studio – incorporatees cutting-edge technologies, and is designed for easy development, deployment, and management. Inference Solutions markets its products through telecommunications carriers and contact center software providers so they may, in turn, provide businesses with intelligent automation to replace or augment legacy IVR systems or offload live agent resources.
The Inference Studio design toolkit has a drag-and-drop interface that allows customers to develop and deploy custom IVA solutions, eliminating the need for coding or specialized training. The IVAs have the capability to handle complex interactions, and thereby reduce call volumes into the contact center. In addition to the flexibility afforded by Inference Studio, the company’s pricing and distribution model enables service providers to resell multiple classes of service at multiple price points to meet customer needs. Organizations purchase Inference’s virtual agents like human agents, with pricing based on their skillsets, which means that clients pay for the capabilities, not by the number of minutes consumed by the virtual agent. This lets companies mix-and-match the capabilities they require.
“Inference’s customers strongly benefit from the company’s culture of continuous innovation. The latest iteration of Inference Studio integrates advanced natural language processing and conversational AI technologies from Google and IBM,” said Nancy Jamison, Principal Analyst, Frost & Sullivan. Moreover, its design for ease of use without complex professional services engagements and unique pricing model have vaulted Inference Solutions into a leadership position for AI-powered self-service.”
In its latest release, Inference has enhanced capabilities such as the new Open Form node that extends closed grammar functionality to support foreign languages. The Open Form node also improves the Dialogflow integration by incorporating a streaming interface that lowers latency and makes the interactions more natural. Lastly, it helps users leverage Dialogflow agents that they build, or choose a prebuilt agent from the Inference library. Inference’s development of AI-infused capabilities for its IVA platform is timely, as the industry is rapidly embracing the use of AI technologies across customer contact.
Inference also extended its omni-channel capabilities by enabling its virtual agents to provide support over the popular WhatsApp messaging network.
“Inference’s customer base has grown between 96 percent and 103 percent every year for the past four years through its partnerships with service providers. Today, its virtual agents are resold by more than 40 telecommunications carriers around the world to businesses of all sizes,” noted Ms. Jamison. “The capabilities of the platform in areas such as AI has positioned it for rapid adoption and will drive sustained growth for the company.”
Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that demonstrates excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers with a focus on improving the return on the investment that customers make in its services or products. The award recognizes the company’s unique focus on augmenting the value that its customers receive, beyond simply good customer service, leading to improved customer retention and customer base expansion.
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.
About Inference Solutions
Founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco, Inference Solutions is a global provider of Intelligent Virtual Agents for sales and service organizations. Inference’s AI-powered Intelligent Virtual Agents automate the routine and repetitive conversations handled by live agents today over voice, chat and text. Inference is trusted by organizations around the world – from small business to the fortune 5000. Businesses and government organizations trust Inference to streamline inbound and outbound customer communications and service. Inference is resold by T1, T2 & T3 carriers, as well as by UC and Contact Center software providers to extend their automated self-service capabilities. For more information, visit http://www.inferencesolutions.com/.
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