Chatbot Development, Chatbots, Thought Leadership

Discover.bot Partner Spotlight: NLX

AI-powered technologies offer multiple advantages across different sectors and are constantly evolving to deliver smooth communications and increase user engagement. Nowadays, businesses have adopted a range of built-in products and services that can help them assist with their heir marketing and customer service experiences.

August 19, 2022

Get to Know NLX

Conversational AI and other AI solutions have become part of our daily lives, from chatting with advanced customer service teams to e-booking a hotel or flight. The introduction of automated workflows, natural language processing, and machine learning are some of the factors that have transformed our world and influenced efficient data collection, analysis, and seamless interactions.

Chatbots and other Conversational AI tools currently represent the top use of AI in enterprises, and their adoption rates are expected to almost double over the next two to five years. In fact, by this year, 70% of white-collar workers will regularly interact with conversational platforms, according to Gartner. To help brands transform their customer contact into personalized customer experiences, many innovative service providers have found a way to introduce Conversational AI to help with tasks like check-in for a cruise or flight, sending service reminders, and arranging roads.

To learn more about how organizations can help leverage all these tools, we sat down with the team of NLX, a group of Conversational AI experts with the mission of helping brands redefine the way they interact with people and vice versa with the help of Conversational AI. By bringing automated and frictionless multimodal self-service tools, they’ve empowered customers to resolve their own inquiries at their own pace.

Stay tuned to read the Q&A below to dive deep into the world of NLX and how they help organizations tackle customer frustrations in order to empower them through Conversational AI.

How can conversational AI SaaS products help transform customer experience?

Hold times and staffing challenges continuously plague the customer support industry, resulting in diminished customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and ultimately, a hit to the bottom line.

The pandemic compounded these existing challenges, creating a clear need: Businesses needed a better way to efficiently and effectively address customer inquiries - whenever and however - without hiring more staff.

Conversation AI SaaS products can help transform customer contact into automated workflows where customers resolve inquiries on their own, without the help of an agent. These tools can reduce hold times and strain on staff, improve customer satisfaction, and ultimately increase the bottom line.

What role does NLX play in empowering the brand’s customer services?

NLX helps businesses transform their customer contact into personalized, automated self-service experiences. With NLX, end-users will experience the next class of Conversational AI. Unlike Visual IVR, where the voice assistant drops after a link are sent to the customer, NLX’s technology is a step above. The customer experiences continuous engagement just as they would with a live agent. When implemented, NLX empowers a brand’s customers to resolve their inquiries at their own pace – with no wait time or frustration.

Brands that use NLX experience our code-free design, easy multichannel deployments, and built-in analytics all with enterprise-grade security and scalability. NLX eliminates large go-live projects for ongoing improvement in customer self-service with a digital assistant that stays on call even after the problem has been resolved and then follows what the customer is seeing to make sure they are taking the right steps.

What was the vision behind NLX?

Andrei and his brother Vlad Papancea, in addition to their childhood friend Peter Szerzo, started NLX in 2018 with the ambition of helping brands transform customer interactions into personalized, automated self-service experiences.

The idea for NLX spurred from Andrei’s time at American Express and as a consultant.

He single-handedly built the [natural language understanding] platform that processes millions of conversations across AmEx’s main servicing channels. While he was there, he started seeing a few trends while evaluating top vendors contending to perform the natural language processing. Nothing the vendors offered seemed to wow us, but several of the vendors said, independently of one another, that they had never seen any implementation like he was doing before, which he thought was interesting.

After his time at AmEx, Andrei was consulting in the Conversational AI space and noticed that he needed to re-implement the same tech repeatedly. He could see just how much money was being thrown around and, frustratingly, seeing companies with underwhelming technology making headway without fully solving the problem.

The trends that he was seeing, in conjunction with his past experience, added confidence to his conviction that something better could be built.

So he discussed my idea with his brother — an engineering superstar — in addition to his friend and co-founder Peter, an accomplished engineer, a gold-medaled physicist who he met at the National Physics Olympiad in grade school. They began building the platform and engine under the hood of all Conversations by NLX. They didn’t limit themselves by working within the constraints of the AI and technology that was available then but focused on the ideal end-user experience and built from there. That engine and platform today powers enterprise-grade conversations at scale in a low-code, cost-effective manner.

Are there top markets/industries that NLX is looking to disrupt in the future?

NLX is industry agnostic and our products can be implemented anywhere, however, the Conversational AI startup has expertise in Travel and Hospitality, Health & Wellness, Automotive, Higher Education, and Retail.

What is the biggest challenge encountered today in implementing technology to alleviate customer pain points?

There are still a tremendous number of companies that haven't yet embraced Conversational AI technology. And most companies who would benefit from this technology already have at least some form of [interactive voice response], maybe a chatbot. But that’s still the traditional implementation of it: We're going to put the system in place and it's going to automate these voice calls and we're going to put this chatbot in place and it's going to deflect. It's almost like there's a lot of emphasis on deflection.

And there are a lot of opportunities — and we're seeing this more with customers — for companies to just embrace quality customer service, which doesn't always have to do with deflection. Sometimes the right thing to do is to just send people to a live agent, to a human. Other times there are better ways of providing that service.

So instead of focusing on the cost savings, focus on the customer and create a good experience. Sometimes a good experience is giving someone an answer quickly — which might not always mean getting them to a human, or it might! It's about just figuring out that nice balance to service customers. In essence, there's a lot more opportunity to embrace the practice of a good customer experience.

What are the top unique product offerings that NLX provides to its clients?

NLX’s unique product is the Conversations by NLX platform - a no-code environment where technical and nontechnical teams can universally access, create, manage, and refine voice, chat, and multimodal customer experiences based on real-time analytics. The Natural Language Understanding (NLU) platform easily integrates with AWS services like Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex, in addition to other systems, channels, and unique business technologies. When updates are made to the NLX platform, there’s no need to reconnect anything - changes are seamlessly applied across the board. Designing conversations within Conversations by NLX is as easy as drag-n-drop, and adding text.

We also share the expertise of our team on how to go about solving your unique business challenge for the customer service operation you’re looking to automate. We focus on the ideal solution and innovate using technology to realize the best outcome for the end user.

How do you ensure that customers receive a personalized experience through your products?

Brands can use their existing systems of record to personalize automated conversational experiences by easily integrating with the NLX platform, especially when using AWS services. It’s as easy as a few clicks and copy-pasting!

How can AI automation streamline operational challenges with the clients you work with?

The Conversations by NLX platform is no-code, removing barriers and silos between nontechnical and technical teams to easily create, manage, and finesse customer conversations in reaction to real-time analytics provided by the platform. Conversational AI can also help automate repetitive tasks your IT team might be handling like password reset, or, like in the case of Copa Airlines, inform crew members of flight changes to they can accept new plans and agree to new flight plans. (See here) Conversational AI can also help maintenance teams install technology when deployed to the field by offering rich visual and auditory step-by-step instructions. These are just some B2E examples of how Conversational AI can support your business specifically… but it can also help with B2B and B2C. Use cases like “order status”, “return policy”, “Covid-19 guidelines”, and more can save agents time from answering calls AND put their time to better use answering more difficult questions.

The Future of AI

The future of Conversational AI is even more customer-centric. The customer will be able to reach out to a brand in the channel of their choice and resolve their inquiry in the method that’s easiest. Whether the original inquiry came in over voice or chat, customers will be able to seamlessly transition between modalities to respond in the most convenient way.

Specifically, at NLX, we’re very excited about doing more with multimodal. The use of multiple modalities drives a more cohesive experience - there’s a synergy of touching, reading, saying, and doing things that binds the experience together! We’ve seen the benefits for both customers and businesses, and are excited to continue innovating in this space. We’re also excited to continue developing and implementing ways in which Conversational AI can help proactively resolve customer inquiries before the customer reaches out. There’s so much room to creatively innovate for a better customer self-service experience - it’s exhilarating!

NLX® strives to be the leading customer self-service automation solution. Its Conversational AI SaaS products help brands transform their customer interactions into automated, personalized self-service experiences. When implemented, NLX empowers a brand's customers to resolve their own inquiries at their own pace -- with no wait time or frustration. As an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, NLX is also backed by Aquila Capital Partners, Sage Venture Partners, Flying Fish Partners, and JetBlue Technology Ventures. Learn more here.