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LivePerson and Afiniti: Integrating artificial intelligence technologies to create better conversations and a more customized experience
LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud® and Afiniti’s pairing technology enable an AI-powered personalized experience throughout the customer journey
September 13, 2022 • 5 minutes
Customer expectations have greatly shifted in recent years, especially as we’ve moved into “the age of the customer” — a time when brands are expected to anticipate and meet customer needs. And artificial intelligence is a critical tool in achieving those goals.
According to a recent LivePerson survey, 83% of customers prefer brands that let them use messaging conversations to digitally browse, interact, and make purchases. Conversational channels such as text messaging, WhatsApp, iMessage, and others are growing in popularity, with 63% of consumers saying that messaging with a brand makes them feel a deeper personal connection.
Brands have expanded their online shopping and digital channel options, but continue to face challenges with creating more personalized customer service with customer-agent interactions.
That’s why LivePerson and Afiniti have today announced a new strategic partnership to bring AI-powered personalization efforts, featuring customer-agent pairing, to consumers’ digital channels — all through LivePerson’s industry-leading Conversational Cloud platform.
This partnership will build better customer-brand engagement by using AI to pair customers and contact center agents based on best fit. Afiniti’s AI pairing technology will be natively integrated with LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud, streamlining deployment, driving revenue for clients, and bringing a more personalized customer experience to millions of people to improve customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Ben Evans, Afiniti’s Executive Vice President of Partnerships, and Dan Sincavage, LivePerson’s Senior Vice President of Voice & Global Partnerships, discuss the partnership below.
In your own words, why did Afiniti and LivePerson decide to partner?
Ben: This partnership combines Afiniti and LivePerson’s powerful AI capabilities through a native integration, helping companies improve the agent and customer experience, while driving more revenue.
Not only do we share the goal of helping businesses have better conversations with their customers, but LivePerson’s powerful messaging platform, innovative culture, and drive to deliver a sustainable competitive advantage for its clients have made them an excellent partner for Afiniti.
By partnering with LivePerson, a leader in customer engagement solutions, Afiniti is also able to extend our proven AI pairing technology beyond voice and into messaging on multiple channels.
Dan: At LivePerson, we’re all about creating customer engagement that feels Curiously Human™. That is to say, a customized experience where AI understands customer behavior and intent, connects them to brands across conversational channels, and delivers meaningful outcomes. Afiniti’s goal of pairing people based on individual behavior and interpersonal connection aligns seamlessly with this mission.
By natively integrating Afiniti’s behavioral pairing technology, our platform will help brands deliver even more personalized customer service, delight their customers, drive revenue, and cut costs. The partnership will allow us to create better customer engagement for more brands and their customers across the globe.
You both used the term “native integration”; tell us more about it
Ben: At the point in the customer journey a live agent is required, LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud communicates with Afiniti’s pairing solution to determine agent selection. Afiniti’s AI analyzes historical data to identify subtle customer and agent behavioral patterns. By combining this information with real-time agent availability and utilization, the customer is paired with the best agent in milliseconds, resulting in higher customer satisfaction, happier agents, and better commercial outcomes for the brand.
Dan: The integration will be seamless in both synchronous and asynchronous messaging channels, plus offer self-serve audit capabilities to monitor operations for reliability and stability. In short, by integrating directly into our platform, Afiniti brings 16 years of expertise in pairing customers and agents to all of the conversational channels supported by our solution.
Our Conversational Cloud powers nearly a billion conversational interactions per month. Afiniti’s pairing technology is helping us set our sights on even better outcomes for the customers and agents that participate in these conversations on a massive scale.
Dan, what are the specific benefits for joint clients and customers?
Dan: This strategic partnership will help customers have better conversations with brands on the channels they love using everyday with friends and family. Simply put: They will be more satisfied, and will feel more individually catered to by the brands they are engaging with.
Our joint clients will also unlock even more value from their LivePerson solution, with more tools for their personalization strategy, an array of self-service portals and monitoring options, and seamless deployment, enabled by our close partnership and strong integration. They will be able to optimize any metric prioritized by their business strategy across sales, service, and retention.
Furthermore, Afiniti’s continuous ON/OFF benchmarking will ensure precise measurement of the value delivered through pairings, while the native integration will provide a seamless and fast setup. Plus, a pay-for-performance model means clients will be charged only a share of the value that LivePerson and Afiniti deliver together.
Lastly, what does the timeline look like for the deployment of this partnership for a customized experience?
Ben: This announcement is the first step in a multi-year relationship. We are currently targeting GA in early 2023, with a strong pipeline of early access clients in development.
Both LivePerson and Afiniti will work closely with clients from discovery to implementation. Clients can expect the deployment process to take about 16 weeks, and once deployed, we’ll provide ongoing, global post-launch support.