Augment, a leader in customer experience-driven artificial intelligence (AI), emerged from stealth today with the launch of its industry-first customer experience AI platform. Unlike first generation chatbot providers that attempt to remove humans from customer interactions, Augment's "human-in-the-loop" approach allows brand representatives to deliver superior customer experience through live chat applications -- backed by powerful machine learning and a training set of over 100 million interactions. With a founding team of data science and enterprise veterans coming out of parent company Silicon Valley Software Group, the company has raised the first round of Series A funding of $5 million from Silicon Valley Data Capital and JAZZ Venture Partners.
Augment's customer experience AI technology is designed to streamline the customer journey and maximize support teams' performance using modern short messaging tools such as live chat. With unique applications of AI algorithms, Augment utilizes existing product and customer data across the enterprise to surface the most relevant suggestions in real time. Augment's data sets are optimized based on responses made by people, and continuously learns based on every customer interaction. Armed with the best-suggested responses based on a specific customer situation, call center agents are able to engage in better conversations, address customer issues and, ultimately, convert more interactions into revenue.
"Enterprises spend over $500B globally on customer support, but their processes are so inefficient with call center agents often 'flying blind' without access to rich customer and product data," said Jim McLean, Founder of Silicon Valley Data Capital. "The call center industry is ripe and overdue for disruption. Augment's automated approach to the customer experience process and their world-class team of AI experts and enterprise veterans is the perfect combination to lead this industry transformation."
"Early AI applications for CRM have been challenged by industry expectations. Augment presents a new vision for deep learning that we share and which we feel will benefit our brand," said Jamie Young, Senior Director of Customer Experience for Dyson. "Augment's human-in-the-loop AI platform fits our needs to boost the productivity of our agents while improving the overall customer experience."
Best of Both Worlds: AI and Humans
To enhance the overall customer journey, Augment's innovative technical team of data scientists from Carnegie Mellon University and MIT ingested more than 100 million interactions to parse, categorize and train the Augment customer experience AI platform. The platform's patent pending, data-driven approach improves agent performance, while increasing overall customer and employee satisfaction. In addition to Dyson, current clients include Fortune 500 brands in the telecommunications, consumer electronics, retail and airline industries.
Augment AI Benefits:
Better customer conversations: Augment AI presents a natural conversational flow that is not based on "canned" responses; augments the presence of the human agent and allows them to choose or modify the best answers
Cost savings through agent efficiencies: Lowers engagement time with better accuracy and consistency of responses
Converts more customer interactions into revenue events: Suggested responses resolve issues and present new opportunities for customer engagement
Ability to scale: Automated and efficiently scales on increased volume
Reduces customer support agent ramp-up and training time and turnover and improves team satisfaction -- agents learn from the best answers within the organization
Augment AI technology increases service throughput by more than 30 percent and increases agent efficiency through offloading repetitive inquiries to AI-powered tools and suggests the best responses and product recommendations.
"We designed Augment with a focus on enhancing rather than replacing the agent workforce," said Matt Swanson, CEO of Augment. "Contrary to most chatbot technologies that result in garbled or confusing responses, our platform offers enterprise executives the ultimate Turing Test -- their customers are unaware that their conversation is powered by AI."
Pricing and Availability
The Augment customer experience AI platform, Chat Helper and Product Helper are available for deployment.
About Augment Solutions Inc.
Augment is a leader in customer experience-driven artificial intelligence (AI). Augment AI uniquely empowers your employees to deliver a superior customer experience by surfacing the best information and answers across the enterprise in real time. Augmented agents deliver improved brand experience through messaging and live chat applications preferred by consumers and then convert more of these interactions into customer delight and revenue. Augment AI powers Fortune 500 brands around the world. For more information please see www.augmenthq.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
About JAZZ Venture Partners
JAZZ Venture Partners invests in companies developing experiential technology that improves human performance. At the intersection of digital consumer platforms, such as virtual and augmented reality, AI and neuroscience, these companies are impacting health, mind-body wellness, peak mental and physical acuity, accelerated learning and training, sports, and entertainment. For more information, please visit www.jazzvp.com.
About Silicon Valley Data Capital
Silicon Valley Data Capital, SVDC, is an early stage investor in next-generation enterprise software companies. As big data, predictive analytics, AI and ML applications become more critical to the success of businesses everywhere, SVDC is helping entrepreneurs develop the most advanced applications and services to match their needs. For more information please visit www.svdcapital.com