Gen AI
Sep 19, 2024
The best businesses in the world can merit their success to one thing—listening to their customers.
Yet as a company grows, it becomes increasingly more difficult to stay close to this crucial source of wisdom.
The traditional customer listening approach has been marred by ineffectiveness for decades. Manually listening to calls, sending surveys no one responds to, and relying on customer service leaders to spend even more hours of their already busy weeks making sense of why customers are frustrated with getting what they need–it just doesn’t make sense.
We believe every customer’s voice should be seen and heard, with their opinion acknowledged as if they were in the same room as your executive team. But it’s also physically impossible to review every single customer interaction in depth–and that’s the problem Echo AI has been built to solve.
Our initial entry into the market as the first conversation intelligence platform to be built on generative AI was just the beginning. In the past year, we’ve reached new levels of scale, closed new partnerships with fast-growing brands like Ancestry and Centerfield, and our approach to genAI technology has been cited in industry reports as one of the fastest ways to achieve ROI.
That’s why we are thrilled to share that we’ve been recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor for Customer Service and Support. It’s a reflection of the groundwork we’ve laid in helping brands take a better approach to how they listen to and act on customer feedback.
It’s our deepest belief at Echo AI, and it’s what we’ve sought out to build from day one.
Table of Contents
Why Echo AI Made the Cut As A Cool Vendor
Vendors mentioned in this Cool Vendors report have unique approaches to some of the most common and frustrating customer care scenarios. Most importantly, they are tackling the same issues that have been plaguing the industry for decades—long hold times and low CSAT scores, for one—by building on the latest in new technologies.
Echo AI disrupts this landscape by offering deeper, autonomously generated insights at a fraction of the cost. Since it was built on genAI, Echo AI’s infrastructure can simultaneously process millions of customer data points at a time and offers detailed, context-rich insights without the need for manual intervention. This is a game-changer in the industry because leaders can quickly understand customer intent, sentiment, and the root causes of issues, all within minutes. In fact, users can ask direct questions like “why are customers canceling during peak season?” and receive descriptive, qualitative answers.
An Army of LLMs Working Together
Echo AI analyzes every customer touchpoint-–from calls to texts to social buzz-–using 20+ LLMs and runs each data point across multiple dimensions, which is how it is able to provide more accurate insights into key business risks and opportunities. This means a single conversation can be analyzed fifty different ways, surfacing nuanced information that is then used to generate themes and trends.
Analyzing customer data from several angles leads to a deeper, contextual understanding of how all customer feedback fits together, enabling easier root cause analysis that doesn’t take an analyst several hours to complete. It’s all there, with the first layer of analysis done, ready to be used to automatically QA agent performance, reduce churn, and improve customer satisfaction.
Self-Generating Insights from Customer Feedback
Echo AI can autonomously generate insights on its own, without the need to configure tags in order to capture learnings. Echo AI categorizes and summarizes information to give clear overviews of intent, sentiment, and resolution scores, detecting high-level themes and trends by itself. This enables business leaders to quickly identify root causes of issues like spikes in customer support tickets or increases in returns and cancellations—all without the user specifying what to look for.
The platform’s genAI capabilities can pinpoint the top reasons behind an issue in minutes, complete with nuanced details that help businesses respond rapidly and effectively. For example, Wine Enthusiast used Echo AI to discover that there was a trend in customer complaints on their wine fridges. After digging into the issue, it turns out there was a manufacturing defect that was causing rusting on electrical components. They swiftly intervened to pull the wine fridges off their shelves, preventing further erosion of customer trust in their brand.
Insights That (Actually) Become Campaigns
Insights are only good if they’re being put to good use. With Echo AI, businesses can use customer feedback insights to immediately update customer engagement campaigns.
If several customers demonstrate intent signals of potential churn through their interactions with support, these customers can be tagged, and added to high churn segments that receive a sequence of nurture emails. Alternatively, these same insights can be used to improve targeting for customer acquisition.
For example, Centerfield, a prominent contact center that serves some of the largest telecom companies globally, uses Echo AI to find trends in customer conversation data to improve its sales and marketing campaigns in real-time by narrowing the focus of demographics criteria. Centerfield handles 18 million calls a year, and having Echo AI surface conversation insights that can improve targeting has directly impacted their ability to meet customer acquisition goals for clients.
By connecting with engagement tools and customer data platforms, customer insights can be turned into automatic actions that engage, retain, and convert customers, both new and existing.
As Camille Manso, partner at Silicon Foundry, commented,
“Echo AI came onto a radar screen because we were looking for AI-driven consumer insight platforms that can help marketing, sales and customer service teams optimize and become more efficient. What we’ve seen are the traditional mediums through which marketing campaigns are pushed out — emails, websites, social media. What we haven’t seen as much is how you take these personalized interactions that have emerged, particularly with chatbots, and use that data to optimize your marketing campaigns and messaging. That’s what Echo AI is able to do.”
Looking Ahead to Future Innovation
We’re just starting to scratch the surface on what it means to use genAI to surface deep, contextual insights. There’s a whole world that is only beginning to make itself known as we venture into the world of genAI and conversation intelligence to improve how executives stay connected to every customer in depth. Our mission is to enable every executive, analyst, and agent alike to have a direct line into customer wants and needs, without the manual effort that has historically been required to get there.
Stay tuned for more updates on Echo AI as we gear up to unveil our latest innovation this October.
Gartner clients can see the full report here.
