Ultimate, Europe’s leading platform for customer service automation, teamed up with G2 to help users identify, evaluate and rate intelligent virtual assistants. This comes as a result of a growing need from brands to find orientation in the extremely fast-evolving world of chatbots and conversational AI.
As disruptors in their field, Ultimate and G2 recognized this pain point in the buyer’s journey and worked together on to defining the area more clearly.
G2 visitors can now navigate to “Conversational Intelligence Software” and find a new category called “Intelligent Virtual Assistants” that clearly differentiates chatbots from IVAs.
Intelligent virtual assistants diverge from the classic chatbot by more natural, human conversations. IVAs recognize user intent faster and out of context, even if this has not been explicitly programmed in advance.
Through the use of machine learning and deep learning, IVAs learn constantly and become more and more confident in their decisions over time. This enables a higher automation rate on the one hand and a better customer experience on the other.
Matthew Miller, Research Analyst at G2, adds: “The new Intelligent Virtual Assistants category was built to help software buyers discover and assess solutions that meet their requirements in this fast-developing area of software.”
“With conversational artificial intelligence (AI), IVAs can engage with customers in an intelligent, human-like manner and provide personalized answers to users’ questions. IVAs can help empower businesses to both be available 24/7, and provide a consistent experience.”
- Matthew Miller
In addition to enabling more natural, conversational experiences, IVAs make the work of customer service staff easier. New information is identified from the conversation and the data in the customer database is automatically updated.
Reetu Kainulainen, CEO of Ultimate, explained:
G2 identifies five features of IVAs that providers must prove in order to qualify for the new category:
1. Understand a conversational request by using NLP or speech recognition.
2. Give users the ability to edit conversational flows.
3. Provide tools to analyze conversations via dashboards or reports.
4. Have the ability to route conversations to a human.
5. Allow for human-in-loop capabilities to ensure the accuracy and viability of IVA.
Tim Handorf, Co-Founder of G2, states:
“We saw the need to create this category to differentiate new intelligent solutions that go beyond what’s commonly known as chatbots.”
Ultimate is the leading solution for enterprise customer service automation. Our multilingual, intelligent layer automates repetitive customer service cases and guides agents with answer recommendations through complex tasks. Ultimate is partnered with leading CRM providers Salesforce, Zendesk and Freshworks. The company is based across Helsinki and Berlin and supports leading businesses including Finnair, Telia, and ADAC. To learn more about Ultimate’s solutions for customer service automation, please contact sales@ultimate.ai
G2 is revolutionizing the way businesses discover, buy, and manage software and services. More than three million users per month rely on G2 to help them find and buy the best software for their businesses. The platform has more than a million verified reviews and $100M in total funding invested by IVP, Accel Partners, LinkedIn, Emergence Capital, Pritzker Group, Chicago Ventures, Hyde Park Ventures, industry leaders and founders. G2’s customers include Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM and Zoom and its most recent funding, a $55M Series C, was announced in October, closely followed by the company’s acquisitions of Siftery and Advocately.