LivePerson - Best New Contact Center Solution

Company: LivePerson
Company Description: LivePerson makes life easier for people and brands everywhere through trusted Conversational AI. Its products empower consumers to stop wasting time on hold or on websites and, instead, message their favorite brands just as they do with friends and family. LivePerson has 1,200 employees globally and serves over 18,000 customers, including leading brands like HSBC, Orange, and The Home Depot.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Contact Center Solution – New

Nomination Title: LivePerson’s AI-powered Conversational Cloud transforms brand-consumer engagement with real-time intent detection, responses, and analytics

In 2020, LivePerson launched the Conversational Cloud, the world’s most advanced AI-powered command center for brand-consumer interactions. Unlike phone-based customer service and engagement, it is easily operated from anywhere, which became essential as lockdowns and social distancing emerged.

While many of the world’s largest brands already used LivePerson’s industry-leading LiveEngage platform, the Conversational Cloud, launched in 2020, includes powerful new tools, including Intent Manager and Performance Optimizer.

Intent Manager — a real-time intent recognition and classification engine that analyzes every turn in the conversation — lets brands instantly understand consumers, then take appropriate action to respond. It is powered by LivePerson’s proprietary NLU capabilities and machine learning algorithms, grounded in 20+ years of conversational data and over one billion transcripts across industries. Intent Manager is used by top brands to gain real-time insights and take immediate action to improve customer service, marketing, and sales automations.

Key benefits of Intent Manager include:

-Automatically understands 50% of consumer intents with preconfigured, out-of-the-box intent models customized for telco, financial services, retail, airlines, and other industries.
-Enables data scientists, content creators, and even nontechnical employees like contact center agents, to fine-tune or configure intents from an intuitive interface.
-Empowers brands to make important policy, process, and product-related decisions.
-Routes conversations to the agent or bot best equipped to resolve them at high satisfaction levels.

Performance Optimizer’s launch provided brands with a new, AI-powered tool to measure and manage the health of conversational operations. It is the only measurement tool on the market empowering brands to do all of the following in one self-service dashboard:

-Measure critical KPIs for conversational experiences
-Use AI to automatically assess performance and provide actionable insights
-Easily track, for the first time ever, conversational performance against internal targets and industry benchmarks
-Deliver robust reporting data with clear recommendations for improvement

As COVID meant brands were replacing old ways of measuring the effectiveness of phone-based customer service and needed new ways to measure conversational experiences, Performance Optimizer’s launch meant they could accurately assess how they were helping customers, then make real-time changes to ensure their connections were as meaningful as possible.

Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):

Please see financials press release and slides for more information on those topics. Highlights since launching the Conversational Cloud include:

26% revenue growth
Record new contract values and 8 seven-figure deals
Guidance raised to 25% for 2020, one year ahead of plan
Pivoted to positive YTD free cash flow generation, growing cash position $26M

Additional achievements since launching: details on new support for Instagram messaging and Google’s Business Messages; new AI-powered messaging experiences for brands including David’s; and curbside/contactless experiences for retail can be found at pr.liveperson.com

If you are nominating a brand-new product or service, state the date on which it was released. If you are nominating a new version of an existing product or service, state the date on which the update was released: August 4, 2020

Outline the market performance, critical reception, and customer satisfaction with the product or service to date. State monetary or unit sales figures to date, if possible, and how they compare to expectations or past performance. Provide links to laudatory product or service reviews. Include some customer testimonials, if applicable (up to 350 words):

After the launch of the Conversational Cloud LivePerson delivered one of the best financial quarters in its history as it helped leading brands navigate one of the most challenging global events of our time.

The Conversational Cloud is used by Chipotle Mexican Grill to gain real-time insights and take action to improve customer service, marketing, and sales automations.

“Everything we have done on this end-to-end transformation journey has been about delivering exceptional digital experiences to our customers and our crews,” said Nicole West, VP Digital Strategy & Product at Chipotle. “We’re using the Conversational Cloud to curate convenient, frictionless, engaging experiences that are aligned with our purpose to Cultivate a Better World.”

Based in the cloud and requiring less bandwidth than voice calls, the Conversational Cloud is ideal for the distributed workforce. Brands across the world, including David’s Bridal, have used the Conversational Cloud to stand up remote workforces.

When David’s Bridal was forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to temporarily shut down retail stores and needed to act quickly to maintain business continuity, they transformed from a 90% in-store business to a 100% digital business in two weeks, leading to a 7.5x increase in messaging volume and 700% increase in sales via messaging.

“We honestly don't know how we would have survived the last couple of months without the option to message — it truly saved our business,” said Holly Carroll, Vice President of Customer Service & Contact Center Operations at David’s Bridal. “With the Conversational Cloud, we sped up our vision for Zoey, our conversational bridal concierge, and put our customers into the best hands.” https: //www.davidsbridal.com/contactUsView

Destination CRM named LivePerson a Top Innovating CRM Company for 2020, noting that the company "really jumped ahead of its peers with the release of the Conversational Cloud" in the areas of conversational commerce and AI.