Our world is turning more and more digital every day. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning were in the spotlight in 2017 and continue to grow strong in 2018. This revolution has already led to exciting news for SAP, as we announces its new product, SAP Conversational AI through the acquisition of the French startup Recast.AI.
SAP Conversational AI is part of the SAP Leonardo Machine Learning portfolio. The service includes a powerful language technology and an end-to-end bot platform allowing the training, building, and monitoring of chatbots, as well as packaged bots specialized per industry. With an existing bot-building community of more than 30,000 developers worldwide SAP Conversational AI offers all necessary tools to integrate smart conversational agents into corporations, thus getting one step closer to enabling the intelligent enterprise.
Customers using SAP Conversational AI can automate their customer support with smart, multilingual and always-on chatbots, enhancing the quality of their customer support, client satisfaction, and therefore revenue.
What is Conversational AI? Is It Essential in 2018?
In 2015, messaging applications such as Messenger, Whatsapp, Kik, and Telegram outperformed social media platforms in recurring users. This created a new shift in the way people get and share information online: Conversation became the new interface.
Facing a surge in the volume of online interactions, companies such as telcos, banks, or insurance firms have to find a way to efficiently manage and provide outstanding customer service. Today, 17 percent of people are kept on hold, 42 percent speak to different agents, and 78 percent of clients end contracts because of bad support. This amounts to $1.6 trillion annual losses due to poor customer service in the U.S. alone.
Through chatbots, SAP Conversational AI is a great way to change the landscape of customer support. By understanding human language, bots are capable of managing recurring client requests autonomously. This allows brands to lighten the load of support agents’ work by 50 percent or more and refocus considerable resources on higher added value tasks in order to generate revenue.
SAP Conversational AI joins SAP CoPilot in the world of conversational technologies at SAP. The two products complement each other by providing all necessary tools to build chatbots with SAP Conversational AI and a unified interface and metabot with SAP CoPilot, allowing a smooth and efficient interface for all bot users.
Announcing Three Brand New Capabilities
SAP Conversational AI for Telcos: Revolutionize Customer Support in a Click
With pre-trained and pre-built interactions, SAP Conversational AI for telcos is a packaged customer support chatbot that can be integrated into all communication channels or business apps in a few days. Managing invoice questions, PIN number resets, or order tracking by default, SAP Conversational AI for telcos works alongside human agents to lighten their workload, allowing them to refocus on higher added value tasks to generate revenue.
Hallo Deutschland: Provide Outstanding Conversational Experiences in German
While SAP Conversational AI allows the building of bots in any language, we focus on providing even faster bot time-to market for advanced languages. SAP is proud to announce that German is joining English, Spanish, and French as an advanced language. These four languages are now specifically tailored for bot building.
SAP C/4HANA Integration
It’s important that bots and human agents work hand-in-hand to provide a smooth and seamless experience for customers around the world. Fallback channels in SAP Conversational AI enable seamless handover of conversations from bots to human agents. SAP is glad to announce the integration of SAP C/4HANA as a fallback channel. Bot builders can now connect any bot built with SAP Conversational AI to SAP C/4HANA, enabling the fallback of bot conversations on human agents in case of misunderstandings or sensitive topics.
Understanding Customer Chatbot Stories at SAPPHIRE NOW
To illustrate the power of SAP Conversational AI, two of our clients are joining us at SAPPHIRE NOW.
“Conversation is the new interface. Having a great mobile app or website is not enough anymore to deliver our customers the information they need as quickly and easily as possible. Adding a chatbot to the mix is now a must.”
– Olivia Fischer, Digital Media Director, SNCF
SFR, a major French telecommunications firm, is on-site to present the bot of its brand RED. When we met SFR, the company wanted to automate parts of customer account management with a chatbot to provide 24/7 availability while reducing the support workload. Today, the bot allows SFR to reduce conversation duration because clients now have direct access to all relevant information. The bot now fully manages specific customer support use cases.
SNCF is also on-site for their brand Transilien. The state company running the French train networks needed to modernize its communication to provide personalized experiences to its customers. Its digital marketing unit decided to invest in innovation through AI to achieve its goal. Today, the company is at SAPPHIRE NOW to present how integrating a messenger chatbot speaking three different languages allowed them to renew their customer services.
Learn more about SAP Leonardo Machine Learning and SAP Conversational AI at sap.com/ML. For more information on how to automate your customer support with a chatbot, contact us via email here. SAPPHIRE NOW attendees can explore all of our sessions in the Agenda Builder.
Omer Biran is head of Conversational AI, SAP.
Justine Baron is marketing and communications manager for Conversational AI at SAP.
