Messaging services are being highly touted as the next medium for customer service as they offer brands a way to not only deploy human agents, but also implement artificial intelligence to address requests. But what if companies want to use AI in areas besides chatbots or on Twitter? Kylie is a startup that’s making its public debut claiming that it can “clone” a brand’s social media presence and automate responses across Twitter, Zendesk, Salesforce Chatter, and other services.
Founded by Jamasen Rodriguez and Sinan Ozdemir, this Y Combinator Fellowship startup says it is using “cutting-edge research” that enables the Kylie AI to understand the context and sentiment of a customer complaint, determine ways to respond, and make the proper decisions based on company-centric data points.
AI has garnered quite a bit of attention for its potential to improve the customer service experience, particularly from the brand’s perspective. Facebook offers Wit.ai to developers for use in bots, and platforms built specifically around the space include DigitalGenius, True AI, and Salesforce’s Einstein.
When implemented, Kylie monitors all incoming communications to a company’s help desk and then generates an automated response for an agent to review, approve, and send out. After enough recurring questions and answers have been analyzed, the AI will reach a certain level of confidence that enables it to bypass the human review process and respond automatically.
Rodriguez told VentureBeat in an email: “A brand would want a cloned personality to respond to customers faster via text channels, increase brand voice consistency across all channel, and reduce the average holding time an agent takes to respond to a complaint. The cloned personality allows a brand to scale personalized customer support without cutting quality or empathy.”
Brands interested in using Kylie will have to integrate the AI into an existing third-party service provider, such as Zendesk, Google, Twitter, SAP, or Salesforce. The potential for Kylie is to at least reduce the workload for customer support agents, who would no longer have to look up answers to customer queries and could instead rely on AI to predict what’s needed and surface it. Or the AI could eventually handle menial tasks and free up humans to take on more complex support requests.
The company said that Kylie is also useful if you’re looking for something to handle around-the-click support requests without bringing on more personnel.
Kylie’s AI will work across a variety of channels, including email, SMS, Twitter, and chat. The company has signed Microsoft, Verizon, Nike, Best Buy, HP, and DiGiorno Pizza as customers.
