Today, we are thrilled to announce new funding, new enhancements to our platform, along with a partner program that can help make customer support systems more flexible and resilient. Together, the advancements and partner program will make it easier than ever for companies to seamlessly integrate our platform and immediately reap the benefits.
Simple. Scalable. Resilient.
It’s been a challenging few months. I’m very proud of the incredible work we’ve seen among our customers and from our team in response to a global crisis unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. Our focus, more than ever, is on helping our customers through these turbulent times.
COVID-19 created an unprecedented operational challenge for customer service teams across the globe, as contact centers shuttered, while in many industries customer support inquiries spiked. It’s made many companies rethink how they go about customer service. It’s also added clarity to our purpose at Directly: to deliver a flexible platform that not only offers more efficiency and scale to customer service, but one that can be resilient even under the most adverse conditions.
To achieve this resilience, we’ve been focused on advancements in three areas: making it easier to integrate our platform into our customers’ ecosystem, growing our multi-channel capabilities, and building our partner ecosystem.
5 APIs that instantly make your support operations dynamic
We’ve made tremendous progress in simplifying how we integrate our platform with a company’s customer support systems. Using five simple APIs, we make it easy to quickly inject intelligence and activate automation within your systems — making your support operations more scalable and resilient.
INGEST: We provide a simple way to aggregate your entire ecosystem of customer interactions and customer data — from chat transcripts and call logs to customer history and profile data.
UNDERSTAND: This API connects your system with our platform’s combination of machine learning and an expert (human) network, which together analyze and determine the intents of your customers. It can help visualize common issues into a cluster map, and provide real-time intelligence to help determine which issues to automate and which to route to experts and company agents. (We’ve also launched a complementary AI analysis using our Understand API here).
AUTOMATE: We deliver automated conversations to solve common issues through our virtual agent partners. The API provides curated answers and expert-written content for automated workflows so customers don’t have to.
ENGAGE: We use AI-powered routing to connect your support systems to community experts, who provide live assistance. The built-in reputation system and reward-based incentive program empowers community experts to solve customer problems and augment internal support teams.
REPORT: Our analytics engine is constantly churning information from your customer ecosystem — offering a live view of what’s happening, along with deep insights and actionable intelligence. Tools include a real-time cluster analysis, histograms, opportunity analysis, trend recognition, and more.
Together, our 5 simple APIs take static support systems and bring them to life. They establish the critical infrastructure you need to deliver dynamic customer support that can respond to what’s happening in real-time — even in the face of a crisis. You can find more detailed information about just how simple it is to integrate our APIs on our developer portal.
Expanding our multi-channel support capabilities
A big part of our focus in recent months has been extending our platform capabilities to serve across many different support channels and ecosystems. By extending our intelligent automation across channels, we ultimately provide greater flexibility and versatility in this increasingly complex world. We’re now able to support the following channels:
Phone (IVR) – Shift up to 40% of phone volume to digital by offering customers automation and live assistance via an SMS alternative to the IVR.
Email and Webforms – Respond to email and web contacts with personalized & knowledgeable automated responses. Offer an improved messaging experience if they need further help.
Live Chat – Use automation to resolve up to 60% of customer issues within your live chat channel before ever connecting to an agent.
Messaging – Provide a superior messaging experience by offering automated conversations and live assistance to customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Available in 10+ common languages.
Directly partner program joined by three leading VA companies
Last, we’re happy to share that we’re introducing a new Directly partner program and our first partners. We’ve joined forces with three leading virtual agent companies Meya, Percept.ai, and SmartAction. As part of this program, Directly is granting these companies access to the power and versatility of our community expert networks — which help train AI, provide answers at scale for a diverse customer base, and augment a company’s live agent workforce.
Meya.ai — Meya.ai is a cloud-based customer experience (CX) automation platform that enables businesses to reduce operational costs, expand capabilities, and deliver more personalized customer experiences via sophisticated conversational interfaces that can be deployed across websites, mobile apps, and more.
Percept.ai — Percept.ai provides end-to-end AI-powered solutions for businesses, leveraging state-of-the-art deep learning and natural language processing technology to help businesses better connect with and support their customers.
Smartaction — SmartAction offers cloud-based virtual agents that leverage natural language processing (NLP) to automate calls, chats, and texts that live agents handle today.
Moving forward: Creating the foundation for a more resilient approach to customer service
COVID-19 has been jarring to business, but perhaps no aspect of business has been so overwhelmed as customer support. Customer service is the frontline for any business — and right now, there are a lot of anxious consumers that need help.
The crisis has shown us that having centralized customer service operations isn’t always enough. Companies need systems that are flexible enough to respond to unexpected situations, and dynamic enough to quickly adapt to shifting customer needs.
Companies such as Microsoft, Samsung, Airbnb, and Autodesk are using Directly’s platform to deliver more automated and elastic customer support operations that are resilient, even in the face of a crisis. Our platform integrates with support channels to understand customer issues in real-time, automate common solutions, and engage community experts. This enables customer support leaders to resolve customer issues with the right mix of automation and human support, boosting customer satisfaction, while saving millions per year. Contact us to set up a demo of our platform today.
