LivePerson Inc. adds new capabilities to Maven AI

LivePerson Inc. added new artificial intelligence capabilities to Maven AI, a conversational AI product that aims to replace traditional websites and 800 numbers. The new offerings are intended to increase businesses' efficiencies, improve messaging channels and enable new conversational commerce use cases for companies.

Maven AI, built on LivePerson's machine learning technology, manages conversations between enterprises and customers over text, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Rich Communication Services, Apple Business Chat, Amazon Alexa, and other messaging platforms and voice assistants.

Maven's new offerings include the following:

• Maven Assist recommends next actions for agents to take, surfaces content or suggests bots capable of responding to the customer's inquiry.
• Maven AI-Powered Routing routes conversations to the right agents, bots or content to solve customer requests based on contextual information, including the customer's profile information, interaction history and contact center operations.
• Maven Developer APIs improve existing bots or other systems by consulting Maven on next actions and provide the ability to integrate multiple sources of data into Maven's decision-making.

According to LivePerson, the new additions enable businesses to maintain personalized conversations with customers without having to design and scale their own conversational AI infrastructure. Maven AI-Powered Routing also offers new conversational commerce use cases for companies in different fields. Examples provided by LivePerson include the following:

• routing customers back to the initial agent they previously contacted for a follow-up;
• identifying and directing VIP customers to a certain advisor for more personalized experiences; and
• routing inquiries about a service outage to a bot to provide status updates until the issue is resolved, enabling agents to be available for more urgent or complex inquiries.      

Existing bots can be integrated into Maven AI-Powered Routing through the Ask Maven and Context Warehouse APIs. Agents assisted by Maven can also rank the software's recommendations to improve future suggestions.

Conversational commerce enables customers to inquire and make purchases over messaging platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Alexa. Conversational commerce bots initially had mixed success, however, as improvements are coming thanks to maturing AI technologies, the conversational commerce market is looking more promising. Gartner identified conversational commerce as one of the 10 top trends that will affect the future of digital commerce, predicting that, by 2022, at least 5% of digital commerce orders will be predicted and initiated by AI.

LivePerson competes against other live chat software vendors, such as Olark and Velaro. Olark offers a free trial and multiple ways to customize chat box appearances, among other features. Velaro offers a social network integration feature, providing agents with customers' information pulled from social media networks, like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.