Zenon Sliwka is the Co-founder and Chief Sales Officer of Born Digital, a leading All‑In‑One AI platform for anyone to design, build, and deploy AI Virtual Assistants that can handle anything — from customer queries to outbound calling — without the need for developers. Born Digital enables organizations of any size and industry to create powerful assistants that can automate their customer service, sales, and marketing efforts.
Zenon has 20+ years of experience in senior management and business/digital transformation. Led line teams in international logistics, telecommunication & banking industries (DHL, Deutsche Post, Deutsche Telekom, GECapital).
What motivated you to establish Born Digital, and how has your extensive experience in IT and management influenced the development and success of this platform?
I spent over 20 years in the IT industry where I saw inefficiencies in traditional customer service processes. I realized that these traditional methods had reached their limits and it became clear to me that we needed another layer to have the transformations needed.
AI had the potential to act as that new layer. By automating workflows and queries, AI-powered voice and chatbots can save time, resources, and cost.
We therefore founded Born Digital in 2019, leveraging both my experience and our CEO Tomas’ experience in process management to guide the development of these AI solutions that can integrate into existing systems seamlessly. Having insights into industry pain points, we created an all-in-one platform that addresses current challenges and also sets the new standard for customer experience automation.
Born Digital’s core product is a conversational AI no-code platform that enables any business to create AI agents. Can you explain how it works and how it differentiates itself from other solutions in the market?
Born Digital is a Conversational and Generative AI-powered no-code platform that allows non-technical people to automate customer interactions, uncover actionable insights, and streamline workflows.
Our key differentiators are:
- The no-code UI platform provides an easy, cost-efficient, and fast way for non-technical uses to create bots and analytics reports using a drag-and-drop builder.
- The all-in-one platform offers a comprehensive solution that smoothly integrates the ability to analyze interactions at scale. This allows you to evaluate bot and human agent performance easily, understand your customers better, and identify areas of improvement.
- Advanced Use of LLMs and GenAI: Our platform leverages advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI (GenAI) to improve the capabilities of bots, allowing for more natural and accurate interactions which feel human-like.
What are some of the misconceptions you have come across regarding integrating AI into customer service?
It’s important to manage expectations regarding what AI can achieve independently. Some people can have unrealistic expectations of results from deploying AI but successful implementation requires setting clear guardrails, ensuring a smooth transition between AI and human agents, and testing various scenarios.
This takes me to the topic of AI working in unison with humans. There’s a common belief that AI in the context of customer experience is here to replace humans. Companies that come to us seeking AI solutions tell us that they’re doing so to support their team members and enable them to focus on solving complex problems instead of repetitive or lesser complicated one. Their goal is not to let go of their customer service team.
Could you highlight how companies like AXA, Samsung, and Deutsche Telekom have improved their customer experience using Born Digital?
The solution we created for Deutsche Telekom addresses all non-technical issues such as contracts and payments, as well as technical topics such as internet and phone malfunctions. A 30% cost reduction was observed, saving 56 FTEs, and maintaining the same sales KPIs with fewer operators.
With AXA, we automated their travel insurance, claims handling, FNOL, health assistance, and damage reporting. With our AI Email Processing solution, they automated 20% of calls in the Claims Handling Department and 87% of chat conversations, reducing wait times and increasing NPS by 7 points.
With Samsung, we deployed a smart routing voice assistant that can greet callers by name and understand their query to prioritize routing. It collects information from the caller when the line is busy, then passes it to human agents for faster resolution. A post-call survey Voice Bot was also deployed to provide instant call ratings. This led to a service level above 90% and saved 10% of operators’ time.
Can you share your views and experience on why human agents working with AI offer a better experience than agents working alone?
Well, many have been saying that Generative AI will phase humans out of the customer experience process. I do not think that is possible as many complex and sensitive customer issues need critical thinking and empathy, which AI still cannot fully provide yet. Customers value connection, and it can get frustrating if you’re stuck in a loop of AI answers. Allowing people to easily reach a human agent is crucial. So, what is the benefit of having AI in your customer exerience? Faster resolution times, 24/7 availability, and workflow automation. This all assists your agents in doing a better job.
Digital Humans are gaining traction. What is this technology and what do you see as the main benefits for companies to incorporate Digital Humans into their teams?
Digital humans are avatars that have autonomous animation, and can connect into conversational AI to really drive dynamic and interactive experiences.
We like to say that Digital Humans have three competencies: human appearance, worflow automation, and analytics.
We particularly focus on the enterprise market, because we saw that there are a number of challenging problems in enterprise. That is all about taking things that are complex and using digital humans to simplify it and make it more human. Things such as helping people through payments, passport renewals, picking the right plan, through to many other areas in e-commerce and other sectors.
What are the current biggest challenges of developing Digital Humans?
From a technical perspective, what we’re mainly focusing on now is creating realistic lip-syncing and facial expressions and ensuring natural full-body movements. Integrating these multimodal inputs in real-time to achieve high-quality animation that avoids the “uncanny valley” effect within current software constraints are important.
What key considerations do you recommend for companies thinking of deploying Digital Humans?
The most important one I would say is evaluating the suitability of their use cases. In other words, do you even need a digital human for that situation? For straightforward, quick tasks such as checking bank balances or transferring funds, existing voice and chatbots are most likely often enough. Digital humans may not add significant value in these scenarios. However, for more complicated interactions and customer journeys, digital humans can really enhance the experience by building trust and confidence, helping customers with complex decisions such as understanding product features and choosing the right internet plan. Technically challenging tasks can also be given a comforting and supportive touch with digital humans.
The second key consideration is ensuring that the underlying conversational AI and NLP technology is advanced enough to support meaningful, interactive conversations. This lets digital humans engage in more interactive and personalized dialogues.
Born Digital uses a technology called Conversation Analytics that helps companies uncover insights from conversations (chats, calls, and emails) – what is this specifically?
Conversation Analytics is the ability to automatically generate actionable insights from customer conversations to improve operations, agent performance, and more. The goal is to enable leaders to make data-driven decisions and understand what is happening in their business.
For Customer Experience, it analyzes parameters such as what topics were discussed, sentiment, and tone of voice. This gives you insights into customer journeys and pain points. For Agent Performance, it helps leaders by evaluating agent performance and providing recommendations. It identifies patterns and trends in sentiments, and it can be done on the agent level or team level by aggregating insights across multiple calls.
For companies looking to integrate AI, whether it be into their customer service, marketing, sales, or financial functions – what are the steps and considerations you would recommend for success?
Integrating AI into your business requires a strategic approach, so I always advise to start by defining your objectives and assessing your current infrastructure and technical capabilities. Choose AI solutions that align with your needs and begin with a pilot project to understand potential challenges. You also need to ensure your data is high-quality and involve a cross-functional team in developing the AI strategy. A very important step is to establish guardrails to monitor performance and provide training for employees.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Born Digital.
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