New in Conversations and Answers: Channels, Agent Productivity, and AI Improvements

We’ve added new features, channels, and advanced capabilities to Conversations – our cloud contact center solution and advanced channel improvements and AI capabilities to Answers – our chatbot building platform. Read on to learn how these new additions can improve your business operations and results.

We added new communication channels to our cloud contact center this quarter.

Businesses are now able to use Conversations to respond to customers via Instagram Messaging.

Today, many customers primarily choose to interact with brands through social media – from requesting rides and ordering food to making purchases. Responding to these queries through a cloud contact center makes the experience faster and simpler for both customers and agents. Now your agents can use Conversations to simultaneously respond to multiple Instagram direct messages and comments, alongside your other communication channels, in one place.

>> Learn more on why you should provide customer service on Instagram

Conversations also supports reviews on Google Play. Now you can engage with your app users, understand their feedback, and improve your product – while also engaging with potential users who are considering downloading your app. Don’t leave a negative review unanswered – fully equip your agents with an all-in-one workspace that enables them to address concerns and boost brand reputation.

Email is now available to all Conversations users, and it has a full set of features that enable agents to conduct two-way conversations with customers. Leverage the most common customer care channel, alongside your customers’ other preferred channels, to provide superior customer support.

Aside from digital channels, we’ve enabled API integration for audio and video Calls. All customers and partners can integrate Infobip Conversations Calls into their own solutions and enhance applications with modern call center capabilities.

Conversations is a single solution for managing all the channels mentioned above, plus many more. Managing all your customer communication from one interface gives agents access to context and full conversation history with a 360° customer view – without the need to switch tabs or systems.

We’ve also added new features to the previously introduced mobile app and knowledge base available in Conversations.

For the Conversations mobile app, we’ve enabled new push notifications that alert agents when a conversation is assigned to them or when a new message arrives. To further improve agent experience and resolution time, we also added voice message capabilities so your agents can record and send audio messages and solve queries in a more detailed, personal, and faster way.

We’ve also added new features that aim to improve conversation management directly from the mobile app, such as the ability to change:

and more.

This means agents don’t have to use their desktop to manage or hand over conversations – they can do it from anywhere and at any time using their mobile device.

Our Knowledge Base has also been upgraded to give agents more flexibility and improve first contact resolution. We’ve added suggested articles for agents that are updated automatically based on the last five messages they received from a customer. In addition, the new categories structure in the knowledge base will enable managers to create an unlimited depth of folders and sub-folders with content relevant to agents. And users will be able to add comments on articles with ˝resolved˝ or ˝not resolved˝ status management, and more.

All updates aim to lead to better customer and agent experiences by making all information, manuals, and guides needed to offer fast and personalized support accessible through a unified agent panel.

>> Track all new Conversations features and improvements in the official Release Notes

It’s a well-known fact that WhatsApp, with over 2 billion active users in more than 180 countries, is one of the most popular chat apps worldwide. The users are highly engaged, with an average user checking WhatsApp 23 times per day. But as consumer habits change, businesses need to keep pace and change with them. Many WhatsApp users have started communicating through voice messages, and now over 200 million voice messages are sent each day over WhatsApp.

In June 2021, we enriched our intelligent chatbot building platform, Answers, with voice messaging capabilities. Customers can now send voice messages to your chatbot which it processes from speech to text instantly, determines intent with its AI engine, and replies with either text or voice. This new functionality enables you to follow trends and to communicate with customers in the way they already communicate with their friends and family.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an advanced function of AI that enables chatbots to understand customers’ intents and specific entities such as date, time, or place. For example, a standard AI chatbot would only be able to understand “I want to schedule an appointment,” and then it would have to ask additional questions. However, a NER chatbot can understand “I want to schedule an appointment on the 25th of July with Doctor Smith”. The chatbot understands the intent of “schedule appointment” but also understands specific entities such as date or doctor’s name.

This improvement enables you to have a true AI chatbot that can cover complex and advanced use cases without agent assistance. NER chatbots are available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Live Chat is a great way to communicate with customers directly from your website or mobile app. But in this release, we wanted to further improve the customer experience, which is why we enabled automatic authentication. Now, when a customer contacts your chatbot, it will know their name, email, and all other relevant information.

This improvement further personalizes a customer’s experience and enables them to seamlessly access important updates including delivery information and account status – as well as make changes such as canceling a delivery, changing an address, or upgrading a plan, without the need for manual authentication.

>> Track all new Answers features and improvements in the official Release Notes