Directly’s CX Automation Platform Puts Experts At the Heart of AI

Microsoft partners with Directly to deliver better customer service; CX Automation boosts CSAT up to 10%, while resolving up to 40% of support inquiries across all customers

Directly announced its CX automation platform to deliver better customer service.

Directly’s CX automation platform transforms how companies deliver self-service by tapping the knowledge of expert users to resolve more customer inquiries. Experts identify gaps in support content and are paid to: 1) create relevant support content that’s delivered to customers automatically, 2) teach AI algorithms to continuously improve, and 3) resolve customer questions quickly and effectively.

As the network of experts provide feedback on automatic answers, they create 100 times more data than traditional AI systems. Directly’s system overcomes the most common pitfall of standalone AI—lack of data—while giving customers the best instant answers. Gig-economy mechanisms such as routing, rewards, and incentives ensure quality by using answers from only highly-rated experts that demonstrate product and/or service expertise.

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Instant answers are delivered in the voice of the expert who authored the answer, with the expert available behind the answer, delivering a new level of experience and empathy unmatched by intelligent assistants and standalone AI. A royalty model rewards them each time their answer helps a customer, incentivizing them to create better answers and creating economic opportunity for people in the AI era.

“Most customer service leaders have one initiative to build a more skilled workforce, and a separate initiative to automate more interactions so they can help more customers,” said Antony Brydon, CEO and co-founder of Directly. “We realized we could bring the two together and create a unique model that provides better automation, simply by paying experts for building better and continuously honing AI for better self-service answers.”

Directly’s AI-driven platform delivers automatic answers to Microsoft’s customers—written and curated by Microsoft’s expert product users. These experts are paid each time their automations are used to answer a question.

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“Directly has consistently been on the cutting edge of AI and customer service, and we’re thrilled with this new launch,” said Adam Coccari, Sr. Manager at M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures). “Directly is providing Microsoft customers with seamless support based on knowledge from our community of experts, and is a great example of deploying AI in concert with humans to solve critical business problems.”

According to Mila D’Antonio, principal analyst for Ovum, many customer interactions can be handled by AI within 5 years, but many companies are stumbling out of the gates because of the high failure rate of unassisted AI solutions.

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“Many companies are discovering they don’t have the data to power more than point solutions,” D’Antonio said. “By helping companies tap the millions of hours of product expertise in the heads of their expert users, Directly is proving that AI will become a viable option to facilitate the personalized, efficient, and frictionless experiences customers crave.”