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VirtuOz

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2013 American Business Awards

Company: VirtuOz, Emeryville, CA
Company Description: VirtuOz is the leader in Digital Customer Relationships, enabling large and mid-market enterprises to use Intelligent Virtual Agents to provide world-class online marketing, sales, and support channels, ensuring a high quality user experience while improving operational performance.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Relationship Management Solution

Nomination Title: VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agents

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 500 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date.

In 2011, VirtuOz extended the use of intelligent virtual agents, for large and mid-market enterprises beyond customer support channels, into online marketing, sales, and social media. Intelligent virtual agents are digital personas that engage online users in personalized conversations to address requests and create digital customer relationships. VirtuOz solutions combine best- in-class solutions with best practices across agent development, deployment, and optimization for measurable results at one- tenth the cost of traditional channels.

In 2011, VirtuOz processed over 166 million live enterprise virtual agent conversations for Global 2000 companies including CCB-Paris, a wholly-owned subsidiary of L’Oreal; Kaspersky; Michelin; Symantec; and Voyages-sncf.com.

Whether accessed via a public or password protected help page, a mobile device, or Facebook, VirtuOz’ intelligent virtual agents are the first point of entry for online consumers. Leveraging advanced natural language processing and predictive intent analysis, intelligent virtual agents immediately engage the user, respond consistently to online requests, and interactively guide users to the right outcome through a personalized, conversational channel.

VirtuOz intelligent virtual agents can now address sophisticated online service needs, like assisted purchasing; guided product selection; troubleshooting for technical support; or taking action on behalf of customers, such as cancelling orders or upgrading services.

The success rate for VirtuOz’ intelligent virtual agents is an impressive 100 percent: on average 80 percent of the time they answer directly to the customer, the remaining 20 percent they direct the user to the appropriate human-assisted channel, such as live chat or agent. Gone are the frustrating days of multiple service hand-offs that require a consumer to restate their problem. If an intelligent virtual agent either cannot resolve the issue directly, they pass the virtual conversation context to a human agent for resolution.

Support: As the first point of entry, an intelligent virtual agent deflects an average of 22 percent of call center issues. When front-ending a human assisted channel such as live chat, virtual agents improve resolution time by 16 percent, and accelerate call center and live chat recovery time up to four times faster when major issues arise.

New in 2011

Sales: Virtual agents can reduce shopping cart abandonment and boost online sales. French internet retailer CCB introduced Iris to answer product questions and assist with purchase completion. Iris is integrated with Web call back capability, to immediately connect consumers with a live person if she cannot resolve their question. Iris also sits at the first point of entry on the CCB customer support page.

Iris has achieved:

• An 85 percent resolution rate
• A 25 percent decrease in email traffic
• A 66 percent decrease in web callbacks

Marketing: By allowing companies to engage, converse, respond and listen to customers in unprecedented ways, intelligent virtual agents improve customer loyalty, retention, and brand awareness. Michelin has set up a virtual agent Michelin Man on its corporate Website. Conversant in both English and French, and programmed to discuss around 10,000 conversations each month, he can answer questions about himself and the company, while helping visitors navigate the site. This has increased visitor time on the site by 133 percent.

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Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Steve Adams, CEO and president Steve is a seasoned technology executive with 20+ years of hands-on experience building and leading technology companies. With Steve’s proven expertise in growing early stage “disruptive” software companies into successful industry standards, VirtuOz is well positioned to lead the next innovation in digital customer relationships, intelligent virtual agents. Prior to joining VirtuOz, he served as president and CEO at Sabrix where he transformed the company’s flagship software into a highly differentiated managed services model, which ultimately led to the company’s acquisition by Thomson Reuters. Steve also served as CEO at Uniscape and was responsible for worldwide marketing at Novell and Citrix.