Virtual agents / Chatbots
in United Kingdom

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.

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.

A virtual newsreader is the newest recruit to the web-site of the Grimsby Telegraph. Developed by Virtual Character consultants, Daden Limited, the talking avatar reports current news stories for newspaper's online edition.

Called "Kate", the assistant is based on "chatbot" technology created by Daden Limited. Kate takes advantage of latest web-delivered text-to speech and animated avatar technology to report on the most recent headlines and breaking news at Grimsby Telegraph's web site.

Sarah is the virtual online assistant of Royal Mail. She gives immidiate answers to questions posed by the Royal Mail´s customers. The majority of the enquiries are on the delivery status of parcels.