PHM: Hi, I’m P.H. Mullen, Chief Marketing Officer of Interactions. And I’m here today with Interactions President, Cathal McCarthy. We recently announced an exciting collaboration with NVIDIA, one of the driving forces in artificial intelligence, GPU hardware, and full stack computing.
So Cathal, let’s dive in. We’re working with NVIDIA. What does that mean for both companies?
CM: Well, first and foremost, PH, I think it’s very exciting for both companies. This is something we’ve both been working on for some time together, and it’s great to be in a position now where we can actually bring that news to market.
In terms of significance, the importance is going to show up with customers. Customers are going to see the benefit of our two companies coming together. NVIDIA have created this amazing hardware and software solution that we are delighted to integrate directly inside of the Interactions platform that we have been building for over a decade. We have gathered these billions and billions of data pieces that only a company like NVIDIA and the power they bring can help us leverage that in a way we’ve never had before. And ultimately, what that means is a better customer experience for the brands that we support and the brands we’re talking about.
PHM: So if I’m a business customer, how does this collaboration support me?
CM: Well, If we’re talking about a big business, with millions of customers, they’ve got a global footprint. They’re committed to creating an experience that reflects the best of their brand and supporting that at scale. We can do all of that.
If you look at the problems that businesses are facing today–scaling, labor shortages, the ability to have a consistent experience across the globe, supporting multiple languages– bringing together both of our companies allows us to deliver that in a way that nobody else can to solve it all.
So if you’ve got a customer in France and they want the very best Conversational AI experiences, they can do it in France. If you want that in the US, you can do it in the US or anywhere else in the globe. So it extends our language coverage in a way that wasn’t possible in the past. The power of Riva speech AI and the GPU from NVIDIA means we can light these experiences up in a period of time that we weren’t able to in the past.
PHM: As I understand it, we’ve done several projects already combining NVIDIA technology with Interactions. Let’s talk about the results.
CM: The results have been amazing. We actually chose one of our partners based out of New York, 1- 800-FLOWERS. We chose 1-800-FLOWERS because they deal with some of the spikiest spikes in customer demand anybody experiences around the world. Think about Valentine’s day. Think about Mother’s Day. Think about those days. And we needed to bring to 1-800-FLOWERS a combination of our two companies that could absorb that demand in a unique way.
We’ve seen about a 30% lift in their call containment. And that is the number of people you can support with an experience that you can create that may not need the assistance of a human being.
PHM: Let’s drill down into the Customer Experience (CX). If I’m a customer of 1-800-FLOWERS with a customer-care need, what type of experience will I get?
CM: Well, first and foremost, it’s truly conversational. You can talk to the technology as a human being. And when you talk, you want a reaction, and that reaction you want to have in real time. You want that question answered in a time period that meets your needs.
The brilliance of NVIDIA Riva working with the Interactions is that we can handle the experience in a truly natural way. The conversation drives the experience–the technology doesn’t drive the experience. And that’s what’s unique. And especially at a critical moment of time when you’re buying a gift for somebody who may be very special in your life.
PHM: So there’s a lot of conversation these days about customer experience. Is it broken in the post-COVID world? At Interactions, we don’t think so. But we do see a tremendous opportunity to reshape the industry. Talk to me about your views on this and where Interactions fits.
CM: You’re absolutely right, PH. We don’t think in terms of fractured or broken. Fractured or broken only improves what may not have already been great. We think about reshaping the world to meet the needs of the customer, and meeting them where they are. So if the customer wants to interact with your company, through voice, through chat, through SMS, through social, whatever their preference, we are there with this single piece of technology that allows a customer to work directly across your company, through whatever channel in a unique way.
So if you call, you want to have a conversational experience, we’ll do that through voice. If you chat and you want a conversational experience, we’ll do that through chat.
