Just six weeks after raising $34 million in funding, Conversica Inc. is enhancing its artificial intelligence-powered business conversation engine to enhance its natural language processing capabilities and add time-recognition intelligence and automated FAQ response capabilities. The company said it has also completely redesigned the user interface.

The company’s automated agent attends to much of the routine works of following up with sales prospects, such as sending confirmations, offers, updates and requests for additional meetings. It’s intended to mimic a human agent so that the prospective customer is unaware that he or she is dealing with a robot.

The platform combines natural language processing to understand incoming messages, an inference engine for basic decision-making and natural language generation to create human-like messages. It integrates with a variety of customer relationship management and marketing automation systems, leveraging a knowledge base of more than 200 million human sales interactions collected over seven years from Conversica customers.

Among the enhancements to the platform are the following:

• Scalability to improvements support higher message volume, as well as increased flexibility and processing power to handle a wider variety of conversational scenarios;
• Tighter integration with more than 45 CRM, marketing automation and lead management systems, including those from Salesforce.com Inc., Marketo Inc., Oracle, HubSpot Inc. and Velocify Inc.;
• An automated FAQ capability that can interpret customer intent to a finer degree that previously and that can respond to a larger variety of common questions without requiring human involvement;
• New time-sensitive capabilities that enable Conversica to read and act appropriately upon timing-related customer responses, such as out-of-office messages or requests to contact the sales prospect in two weeks; and
• Enhanced, customizable alerting that delivers the information and context that a human sales representative needs for seamless follow-up.

Conversica also introduced a new version of its engine tailored to automotive dealerships. The assistant follows up on inbound requests and proactively reaches out when service appointments are due based upon factors like service intervals, recall notices and previously postponed service appointments.

Pricing begins at $2,999 per month.  Conversica claims more than 1,000 customers and 16,000 active users in a variety of industries. The nine-year-old company has raised $56 million and says its 2016 revenues were $18 million.

Creative Commons image via Pixabay