Microsoft partners with Directly to deliver better customer service;
CX Automation boosts CSAT up to 10%, while resolving up to 40% of
support inquiries across all customers
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 04, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Directly announced its CX automation platform to deliver better customer service.
Directly’s CX automation platform transforms how companies deliver self-service by tapping the knowledge of expert users to resolve more customer inquiries. Experts identify gaps in support content and are paid to: 1) create relevant support content that’s delivered to customers automatically, 2) teach AI algorithms to continuously improve, and 3) resolve customer questions quickly and effectively.
As the network of experts provide feedback on automatic answers, they create 100 times more data than traditional AI systems. Directly’s system overcomes the most common pitfall of standalone AI—lack of data—while giving customers the best instant answers. Gig-economy mechanisms such as routing, rewards, and incentives ensure quality by using answers from only highly-rated experts that demonstrate product and/or service expertise.
Instant answers are delivered in the voice of the expert who authored the answer, with the expert available behind the answer, delivering a new level of experience and empathy unmatched by intelligent assistants and standalone AI. A royalty model rewards them each time their answer helps a customer, incentivizing them to create better answers and creating economic opportunity for people in the AI era.
“Most customer service leaders have one initiative to build a more skilled workforce, and a separate initiative to automate more interactions so they can help more customers,” said Antony Brydon, CEO and co-founder of Directly. “We realized we could bring the two together and create a unique model that provides better automation, simply by paying experts for building better and continuously honing AI for better self-service answers.”
Directly’s AI-driven platform delivers automatic answers to Microsoft’s customers—written and curated by Microsoft’s expert product users. These experts are paid each time their automations are used to answer a question.
“Directly has consistently been on the cutting edge of AI and customer service, and we’re thrilled with this new launch,” said Adam Coccari, Sr. Manager at M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures). “Directly is providing Microsoft customers with seamless support based on knowledge from our community of experts, and is a great example of deploying AI in concert with humans to solve critical business problems.”
According to Mila D'Antonio, principal analyst for Ovum, many customer interactions can be handled by AI within 5 years, but many companies are stumbling out of the gates because of the high failure rate of unassisted AI solutions.
“Many companies are discovering they don’t have the data to power more than point solutions,” D'Antonio said. “By helping companies tap the millions of hours of product expertise in the heads of their expert users, Directly is proving that AI will become a viable option to facilitate the personalized, efficient, and frictionless experiences customers crave.”
Directly’s CX Automation platform was recently awarded a Technology Innovation Award for Customer Service Automation from Frost & Sullivan. Dhiraj Badgujar, technology analyst and author of the report, wrote: “Through combining the gig economy model and machine learning algorithms, Frost & Sullivan feels that Directly is transforming and scaling up the customer service approach to exciting new levels by merging human expert insights with AI-based automated answers.”
About Directly
Directly is an emerging leader in CX Automation, helping companies deliver better customer service at scale while creating economic opportunity for people in the AI era.
Companies like Airbnb, Microsoft and Samsung use the platform to put their expert users at the heart of their AI, resolving more customer questions at 60-80% less cost. Expert users identify gaps in in self-service content, and are paid to: create support content that’s delivered to customers automatically, teach AI algorithms to continuously improve, and resolve customer questions.
Directly’s open APIs integrate with leading CRM applications including Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce Service Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud and Zendesk, along with existing help centers, enterprise knowledge bases, messaging and business intelligence systems. The platform can be used independently or can be used to train and enhance existing AI systems.
Directly is based in San Francisco and backed by top firms including Microsoft Ventures, Northgate Capital, Costanoa Ventures, and True Ventures.
Media Contact
Ian Martorana
The Bulleit Group for Directly
directly@bulleitgroup.com