LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud and Afiniti’s pairing technology enable an AI-powered personalized experience throughout the customer journey
Customer expectations have greatly shifted in recent years, especially as we’ve moved into “the age of the customer” – a time when brands are expected to anticipate and meet customer needs. And artificial intelligence is a critical tool in achieving those goals.
According to a recent LivePerson survey, 83% of customers prefer brands that let them use messaging conversations to digitally browse, interact, and make purchases. Conversational channels such as text messaging, WhatsApp, iMessage, and others are growing in popularity, with 63% of consumers saying that messaging with a brand makes them feel a deeper personal connection.
Brands have expanded their online shopping and digital channel options, but continue to face challenges with creating more personalized customer service with customer-agent interactions.
That’s why LivePerson and Afiniti have today announced a new strategic partnership to bring AI-powered personalization efforts, featuring customer-agent pairing, to consumers’ digital channels, all through LivePerson’s industry-leading Conversational Cloud™ platform.
This partnership will build better customer-brand engagement by using AI to pair customers and contact center agents based on best fit. Afiniti’s AI pairing technology will be natively integrated with LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud, streamlining deployment, driving revenue for clients, and bringing a more personalized customer experience to millions of people to improve customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Ben Evans, Afiniti’s Executive Vice President of Partnerships, and Dan Sincavage, LivePerson’s Senior Vice President of Voice & Global Partnerships, discuss the partnership below.
In your own words, why did Afiniti and LivePerson decide to partner?
Ben: This partnership combines Afiniti and LivePerson’s powerful AI capabilities through a native integration, helping companies improve the agent and customer experience, while driving more revenue.
Not only do we share the goal of helping businesses have better conversations with their customers, but LivePerson’s powerful messaging platform, innovative culture, and drive to deliver a sustainable competitive advantage for its clients have made them an excellent partner for Afiniti.
By partnering with LivePerson, a leader in customer engagement solutions, Afiniti is also able to extend our proven AI pairing technology beyond voice and into messaging on multiple channels.
Dan: At LivePerson, we’re all about creating customer engagement that feels Curiously Human™. That is to say, a customized experience where AI understands customer behavior and intent, connects them to brands across conversational channels, and delivers meaningful outcomes. Afiniti’s goal of pairing people based on individual behavior and interpersonal connection aligns seamlessly with this mission.
By natively integrating Afiniti’s behavioral pairing technology, our platform will help brands deliver even more personalized customer service, delight their customers, drive revenue, and cut costs. The partnership will allow us to create better customer engagement for more brands and their customers across the globe.
You both used the term native integration; tell us more about it.
Ben: At the point in the customer journey a live agent is required, LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud communicates with Afiniti’s pairing solution to determine agent selection. Afiniti’s AI analyzes historical data to identify subtle customer and agent behavioral patterns. By combining this information with real-time agent availability and utilization, the customer is paired with the best agent in milliseconds, resulting in higher customer satisfaction, happier agents, and better commercial outcomes for the brand.
Dan: The integration will be seamless in both synchronous and asynchronous messaging channels, plus offer self-serve audit capabilities to monitor operations for reliability and stability. In short, by integrating directly into our platform, Afiniti brings 16 years of expertise in pairing customers and agents to all of the conversational channels supported by our solution.
Our Conversational Cloud powers nearly a billion conversational interactions per month. Afiniti’s pairing technology is helping us set our sights on even better outcomes for the customers and agents that participate in these conversations on a massive scale.
Dan, what are the specific benefits for joint clients and consumers?
Dan: This strategic partnership will help customers have better conversations with brands on the channels they love using everyday with friends and family. Simply put: they will be more satisfied, and will feel more individually catered to by the brands they are engaging with.
Our joint clients will also unlock even more value from their LivePerson solution, with more tools for their personalization strategy, an array of self-service portals and monitoring options, and seamless deployment, enabled by our close partnership and strong integration. They will be able to optimize any metric prioritized by their business strategy across sales, service, and retention.
Furthermore, Afiniti’s continuous ON/OFF benchmarking will ensure precise measurement of the value delivered through pairings, while the native integration will provide a seamless and fast setup. Plus, a pay-for-performance model means clients will be charged only a share of the value that LivePerson and Afiniti deliver together.
Lastly, what does the timeline look like for the deployment of this partnership for a customized experience?
Ben: This announcement is the first step in a multi-year relationship. We are currently targeting GA in early 2023, with a strong pipeline of early access clients in development.
Both LivePerson and Afiniti will work closely with clients from discovery to implementation. Clients can expect the deployment process to take about 16 weeks, and once deployed, we’ll provide ongoing, global post-launch support.
If you are an existing Afiniti or LivePerson client and interested in becoming an early access customer for this integration, please reach out to your current relationship manager.
SAN FRANCISCO, California, November 16, 2021 / Newswire – Afiniti, the world-leading provider of artificial intelligence technology for pairing agents and customers, and Genesys®, a global leader in customer experience orchestration, today announced a strategic partnership. This partnership will provide for a native integration of Afiniti’s Enterprise Behavioral Pairing (EBP) technology with Genesys Multicloud CX™. EBP will be the exclusive AI pairing solution offered on the Multicloud CX platform in partnership with Genesys.
With 70% percent of consumers saying a business is only as good as its customer service, companies are increasingly focused on providing highly personalized, effortless and empathetic experiences that drive customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Afiniti’s EBP artificial intelligence discovers historical patterns of behavior that allow for optimal pairings of customers and agents. With Genesys and Afiniti, companies will be able to better facilitate conversations that reduce the need for transfers or follow-up calls — simplifying each consumer’s experience of interacting with a business and building brand loyalty.
The partnership improves on existing enterprise integrations between Genesys and Afiniti, allowing EBP to be deployed instantly and seamlessly. Genesys Multicloud CX customers will not need to change any incumbent routing, reporting, or other technologies in their customer experience ecosystem. Organizations will have the ability to leverage their data sources, select metrics and business lines to optimize, and precisely measure the revenue, cost, and customer satisfaction benefits of EBP, all within Genesys Multicloud CX.
“We are delighted to have Genesys join our strategic partner program and enthusiastic about the advantages this partnership will bring our joint clients,” said Michel Portenier, EVP and Chief Partnerships Officer at Afiniti. “With the native integration of Multicloud CX with EBP, organizations will be able to rapidly and easily capture Afiniti’s precisely measurable revenue and cost benefits.”
“Many organizations have shifted their understanding from ‘call centers are a cost center’ to ‘this is an opportunity to build a better relationship’ — and in some cases, even a revenue center,” said John Hernandez, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Genesys Multicloud CX Solutions. “Companies are eager to orchestrate end-to-end, meaningful experiences to earn trust and loyalty. Genesys partners with leading innovators and Afiniti is an important addition to our ecosystem for Multicloud CX customers.”
Forrester Research recently stated: “Customer service is a top driver category for overall CX. Contact center teams help customers during all stages of the customer lifecycle. Their assistance ranges from presales outreach to postsale issue resolution, where every interaction with a contact center agent can be crucial to the relationship,” (Forrester, “The CX Professional’s Guide to Working with Contact Center Technologies and Leaders,” 30 April 2021, Faith Adams, Art Schoeller).
For more information, visit: www.afiniti.com
Media Inquiries
Media / Afiniti media@website23-prsrhearfpxnbzqh.afiniti.io
Sarah Koniniec / Genesys Sarah.Koniniec@genesys.com
About Afiniti
Afiniti is improving the quality of human interactions around the world. It uses patented, award-winning artificial intelligence to identify subtle and valuable patterns of human interaction to pair individuals on the basis of behavior, leading to happier, more loyal customers and measurable increases in enterprise profitability. Afiniti’s unique benchmarking and precise measurability allow clients across industries including healthcare, telecommunications, travel, hospitality, insurance, and banking to confidently raise revenues and reduce costs. With over 150 deployments in major enterprises, Afiniti has optimized interactions between more than 600,000 agents and 700 million customers. Afiniti’s AI continually learns and improves, analyzing over one million interactions every day to refine its pairings, delivering billions in revenue annually to its global customer base. To learn more, visit www.afiniti.com.
About Genesys
Every year, Genesys orchestrates more than 70 billion remarkable customer experiences for organizations in more than 100 countries. Through the power of our cloud, digital and AI technologies, organizations can realize Experience as a Service℠ our vision for empathetic customer experiences at scale. With Genesys, organizations have the power to deliver proactive, predictive, and hyper personalized experiences to deepen their customer connection across every marketing, sales, and service moment on any channel, while also improving employee productivity and engagement. By transforming back-office technology to a modern revenue velocity engine Genesys enables true intimacy at scale to foster customer trust and loyalty. Visit www.genesys.com.
©2021 Genesys. All rights reserved. Genesys, the Genesys logo, Genesys Cloud CX, Genesys Multicloud CX, Genesys DX and Experience as a Service are trademarks, service marks and/or registered trademarks of Genesys. All other company names and logos may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies.
LONDON, Sept. 21, 2021 – Afiniti, a global provider of AI-based behavioral pairing technology, today announced a multi-year extension to its contract with Sky, Europe’s leading media and entertainment company.
Sky uses Afiniti’s technology to help customers resolve issues over the phone more quickly and easily. Rather than routing customers to the first available agent, Afiniti’s patented AI analyses behavioral patterns to pair customers with agents based on who they will best interact with — and who is best able to solve the customer’s problem.
Afiniti’s pairings lead to better conversations that reduce the need for transfers or follow-up calls — making each customer’s experience of interacting with a brand as enjoyable and easy as possible.
“As one of our longest-standing partners, Sky has proven to be a great ally in our effort to transform customer interactions,” said Sabine Azancot, General Manager, United Kingdom, at Afiniti. “Every interaction is an opportunity for brands to give customers a better experience. That’s where Afiniti comes in — by ensuring Sky’s customers get to speak to the person they’re most likely to click with that day. We are incredibly proud of the trust the Sky team places in our technology and its ability to bring customers closer.”
The new deal significantly expands the two companies’ partnership, including a new focus on innovation that provides Sky with early access to Afiniti’s new product capabilities.
It will also allow Sky to extend Afiniti’s technology to customers of Sky Europe, as well as its Digital and Retail channels.
Media Inquiries
media@website23-prsrhearfpxnbzqh.afiniti.io
About Afiniti
Afiniti uses the power of AI to help brands create happier, more loyal customers. Afiniti’s unique ability to precisely measure the value of its technology through ON/OFF cycles means clients only pay for a percentage of the value delivered. It has over 150 deployments in major enterprises and has optimised more than 600,000 agents and 700 million customers. Afiniti’s technology continually learns and improves, analyzing 1.3 million interactions every day to refine its pairings. Afiniti’s technology is proven to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in incremental revenue to its clients each year, in sectors as diverse as telecoms, banking, insurance, retail and healthcare. To learn more, visit www.afiniti.com.
About Sky
Sky is Europe’s leading media and entertainment company and is proud to be part of the Comcast group. Across six countries, we connect our 23 million customers to the best entertainment, sports, news, arts and to our own award-winning original content.
Last week at the O2 Partner Awards, Afiniti was named ‘Best Partner for Innovation’ in 2018. We truly appreciate the O2 team and their recognition of our long-standing, successful partnership.
Afiniti and telecommunications provider O2 first partnered in 2015 and have forged a strong relationship in which Afiniti EBP™ intelligently routes approximately 3 million calls per month placed to O2 on the basis of behavior. As a result, O2 is seeing $20 million in annualised incremental revenue, 8% churn reduction, and 15,000 annual incremental saves.
We look forward to continuing to provide our partner with measurable gains in profitability and customer satisfaction.
Attendees included Ian Hayhoe, Gareth Turpin, Malcolmn Cubitt, and our own Caroline Langan, Davide Caramelli, and Jay Duffy.