5 Essential Attributes Of A Trusted Conversational AI SaaS Provider

A software as a service provider (SaaS) should simplify the Conversational AI learning curve for your team, accelerate development, yield a faster time to production, and lower your costs to deploy. Reading this, you are most likely in search of a SaaS provider to  power a Conversational AI deployment in your enterprise or government agency. These are the 5 essential attributes your strategic SaaS provider should have:

EXPERTISE    |    EXPERIENCE    |    INTUITIVE PLATFORM    |    SUPPORT    |    MAINTENANCE

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Industry Expertise

Your team needs the advice, counsel, and expertise of a dedicated team of Conversational AI pros that align well with your industry, size of your organization, and IT skillset of your team. Your SaaS provider should be well-versed in their ability to guide you to tailor content specifically for voice or screen-based interactions. They should have experience with harvesting and analyzing data from users; including assisting with custom optimizations to enhance the user experience. Their ability to implement various languages to reach your audience and auto-translate content is also essential to the future growth of your organization.

Proven Track Record

The SaaS provider you are considering should have several documented examples of providing innovative ways they have helped other customers. They should be able to illustrate how their solution helped their customers conduct transactions, support their audience, and grow their market share to include people with disabilities. Ask to see their results. They should also be able to show how users analyze their audience data, and how well they coach their customers on the software optimizations they should perform to improve customer interactions across channels.

During the vetting process, have them show you:

• Implementation Speed - solutions should be live in just hours; avoiding lengthy project sprints

• P&L Responsibility - accomplishing organizational communications goals, maintaining project budgets, and reducing overall overhead cost

• Efficiency – expanding staff capacity, and improving the delivery speed of communications

• Unified Analytics Dashboard – a clear way to see deployed content, how it’s being received across channels, and identify data-driven enhancements that should be made

• Improved Customer Experience - measurable results of how their software has enabled users to engage their audience the way they want, when they want

• Expanded Accessibility & Inclusion - case studies of their software being used to bridge challenges for people with disabilities

• Support & Insights – tools that are available to your team including interactive educational and training content, chat and phone support

• Expanded Reach – examples of audience expansion to reach their audience using voice assistants, contact centers, and chatbots

• Voice Domain Name Capture (aka invocation name) - the ability to search and secure a voice invocation name within their platform

• Proof of Concept - see your existing content in a live demonstration of their platform

Powerful, User-friendly Platform

An intuitive platform to create Conversational AI should virtually eliminate the need for in-depth IT involvement. The platform should allow just about any user to navigate and collaborate on the content creation process; regardless of their technical background or which department they are in. The created content should have the ability to be simultaneously deployed to all active channels with a single click of the mouse. Safe and secure software platforms are typically powered by operating software like Microsoft Azure, and should be able to be integrated with your existing subscription.

Look for these essential Conversational AI SaaS platform features:

User-Friendly Interface - The platform should be intuitive, and easy to create Q&A content, multi-turn conversations, and connect to backend systems and/or other Azure services like cognitive search, document translation, speaker verification, etc. Subscription Options - Every organization has different requirements ranging from procurement to security.  Find a provider who offers you subscription options to meet your needs.  Zammo.ai is available as a cloud-based SaaS solution, but is also available as an Azure Managed Application which resides on your Azure tenant.

Prebuilt Conversational Libraries - Templated conversation libraries should be provided across industries. Libraries should be able to be re-used or easily modified to accelerate content creation and scale quickly. These conversations can be imported to your business, customized, and then published.

Personalization - Conversational AI content should be a reflection of your brand. Your staff should have the power to personalize it accordingly. The software should provide choices of neural voices you can select to fit with your organization and audience persona(s).

Augment Existing IVR System - There should be no need to recreate your existing telephone IVR. Simply add a conversational AI layer to handle initial calls including routine questions and related workflows. More nuanced or complicated needs are passed back to your existing call queue for your experienced staff to handle.

Omni-Channel Publishing - Using the platform, content should be created one time, and then simultaneously published to all the active channels with a single click.

Unified Data Analytics - Audience data from all communications channels should be made available on one analytics dashboard. The platform should allow an analytics API to export your data to a self-hosted service like Microsoft Power BI to merge with other data across your organization.

Scalability - Conversation templates, white labeling, separate billing, separate content management, multilingual capabilities etc. are examples of features that will help your organization be more efficient and grow over time.

Multilingual Capabilities - Look for the ability to translate separate knowledge bases into multiple languages. Bonus if they offer an auto-translation feature to speed up the content creation process.

Testing Prior To Deployment - Your team should be able to to test your content on Alexa & Google Assistant, interact with test bots, and even call a test phone number to hear and interact with your content prior to publishing. The platform should enable business users from several departments to collaborate while drafting and editing new or existing content, ensuring accuracy and approval by multiple departments before going live.

Predictable Pricing - Take the guesswork out of estimating related expenses. SaaS providers like Zammo.ai have developed a comprehensive, one-of-a-kind pricing estimator that takes your projected usage and delivers a cost-per-month consumption projection.

Ease of Procurement -Your SaaS provider should offer purchase options that ease the procurement burden and make speed to production even faster.  Zammo.ai allows customers to purchase via credit card, ACH, or purchase order.  Additionally, as Zammo.ai is also available on the Azure Marketplace, Azure customers can use Azure commit funds for both the subscription and ongoing Azure consumption.

Multi-Channel Support

Inevitably, your team will need help along the journey beginning with formulating a solid strategy to leverage Conversational AI. They will also need some assistance building, deploying, implementing, and optimizing the software solution. Your SaaS provider should offer multiple ways for your team to get the help they need. Ideally, your team would have access to advice and counsel via telephone or chat, as well as a 24/7 knowledge base with videos, tutorials, and more.

Over time, leveraging Conversational AI is going to enable your team to learn from your customer interactions; allowing your team to refine your content to be more natural and intuitive. With the right support partner, your staff will continue to expand your audience reach, and raise satisfaction levels - all while improving operational efficiency and lowering overhead costs.

Maintenance & Continued Improvement

Of course, maintaining and optimizing your conversational AI content will be a continuous improvement area in your organization. Conversational AI will continue to enable the ability to have human-like conversations with your audience. Optimizing your content can virtually eliminate the monotony of recorded IVR phone responses, ‘canned’ chatbot replies, or incorrect information being shared with your audience on voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant.

SaaS providers like Zammo.ai should be handling the necessary internal maintenance to the codebase, software integrations, etc. that minimize ongoing maintenance costs and keep your team focused on optimizing your communications to best fit the needs of your audience.

Zammo.ai - Your Conversational AI SaaS Partner

Ready to explore a Conversational AI deployment in your enterprise or government agency? Consider Zammo.ai as your SaaS partner of choice. Partnering with our team can remove traditional obstacles like the technical complexities, long drawn out project development and production timeframes, and staggering costs associated with building and deploying AI-based solutions. Many times, conversational content can be created and deployed in just hours from starting your initial subscription. Schedule a visit with an experienced SaaS provider: www.Zammo.ai

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