The competition in the customer service automation space kicked up another notch today after DigitalGenius Inc. announced that it’s secured $4.1 million in funding from a group of nine institutional investors. According to the startup, the cash will be spent on trying to broaden the adoption of its Human+AI Platform, which uses machine learning algorithms to answer help desk questions.

The inclusion of the technology removes the need to pre-program the service with canned text as most other chat bots require and instead allows organizations to have responses tailored for every user. DigitalGenius’ algorithms perform the customization using historical conversation logs from a brand’s contact center, which are correlated with email records and social media data to identify the most common requests. After an initial training period that involves a specialist from the startup or one of its partners spending several weeks fine-tuning its accuracy, the Human+AI Platform is ready to start taking requests.

The catch is that the service can only reliably answer the limited set of questions identified during the analysis process, which requires an organization’s human customer care representatives to handle outliers. DigitalGenius solves the issue by giving every user who access the service the option to define the “confidence” level with which they expect an issue to be handled. If the Human+AI Platform can generate an response that passes the threshold, then it’s assigned to handle the case, while everything else is automatically redirected to a help desk agent. The technology dramatically lowers the workload on a company’s contact center, thereby reducing personnel expenses while allowing for user inquires to be handled faster.

The startup claims that several major brands have adopted the service since its launch last year, most notably Panasonic Corp. and BMW AG. The lineup of investors that contributed to its new funding round is equally impressive, with the likes of Bloomberg Beta and Salesforce.com Ventures being listed in the group. DigitalGenius’ total raised now stands at appropriately $7.3 million. 

Image via DigitalGenius