Virtual agents / Chatbots
in United Kingdom

Inocu is a Windows Live Messenger buddy. Using Inocu you can get information from the web, search websites and play games. to make Inocu talk to you just use the !talker command.

Mothercare is improving the customer experience on its website with the launch of Ask Carrie, an interactive virtual assistant. Ask Carrie delivers fast, accurate answers to queries across the Mothercare website. Customers are able to ask questions directly using the system without the need to call or email the Mothercare contact centre. Ask Carrie also ensures faster access to the wide range of parenting information and resources on the Mothercare website. By allowing customers to search using everyday language it ensures that the Mothercare website remains a primary destination for parents.
The Ask Carrie persona was created to provide an approachable and engaging figure for customers and was launched as part of the major redesign of the Mothercare website. This also includes improved online product search, a wider range of content, and bigger, brighter product images all designed to deliver an improved customer journey.

How smartAgent is helping; Answering customer queries without having to phone or e-mail, reducing CRM costs, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, providing a feedback mechanism for customer wants and needs and providing a mechanism to optimise online and offline content. Virgin Holidays is also using the Synthetix.info service to analyse visitors' wants and needs by looking at the questions they ask. The use of the conversational logs and analysis will allow Virgin Holidays to better serve both their online and offline customers. In addition, the conversation logs ensure that Valerie always has up to date information.

What smartAgent is hoping to achieve for Best Western; Answer customer queries without having to phone or e-mail, reduce CRM costs, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty and provide a feedback mechanism for customer wants and needs.

Best Western is using the Synthetix.info analytics service to analyse visitors wants and needs by looking at the questions they ask. The conversation logs also allow them to make sure that Tom and Lucy always have up to date information. Jo Ogden, Head of Ecommerce and Distribution at Best Western is aiming to answer more queries online with lower CRM costs and to improve customer loyalty. "It's designed to make sure our customers have an enjoyable experience and improve conversions", she said.

O2’s Lucy, created in 3D for great reality, is an example of an avatar which displays a number of ‘emotions’ depending on the conversation taking place at the time. This V-Person™ can field questions for all parts of the O2 website including Pay Monthly, Pay & Go, Home Broadband and Mobile Broadband. In January 2010 Lucy answered her one millionth question on the web!

Lucy has been integrated with Live Chat from LivePerson to allow for a seamless user experience. The video below shows a brief demonstration of the handover from the Virtual Assistant to Live Chat.

This is a first attempt at a general cognition system. The input is first converted into Basic English of 1,000 semantically-tagged words and mapped on to a multivariate space in order to achieve spatial proximity as a function of semantic similarity. It is currently capable of 6 logic operations: equivalence, similarity, induction, deduction, abduction and metaphor. It is able to learn from free unstructured text and improve upon itself.

Virtual Hollie is providing answers to questions from people interested in visiting a number of holiday parks across the United Kingdom. The virtual assistant is currently dealing with thousands of visitors each month. The technology is answering customer queries on a variety of subjects whilst also navigating the user to additional content that appears on the website. The virtual assistant contains a wide range of content, this includes information on key attractions, when famous people are performing and routine information about each venue such as "what time do you need to check in". One of the more interesting aspects of the deployment is that "Hollie" promotes some of the events that are taking place at the resorts over the course of the year.

Staff at Butlins have full access to a wealth of management and customer contact data via the Synthetix analytics service. They can see all the questions that users to the assistant have posed. This allows them to make sure that Hollie is always updated to answer any new queries that may arise. The system also provides detailed management reports to monitor the success of the smartAgent. Hollie is the first live edition of smartAgent Version 4 and has many new features and functions that enhance the system for both the user and the website owner.