NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- LivePerson, Inc. (Nasdaq: LPSN), a global leader in Conversational AI, today announced its enterprise-grade Conversational Cloud, where hundreds of the world's largest brands build and run AI-powered automations over popular messaging channels such as SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, Google RCS, LINE, WeChat, and native messaging on brand websites and mobile apps.

As the world's most advanced AI-powered command center for brand-consumer interactions, the Conversational Cloud empowers brands to instantly respond to messages, answer questions, resolve customer intents, and route to human experts as needed. Conversational AI, which communicates like a human by recognizing speech, text, and intent, is at the heart of the Conversational Cloud and provides the personalized, high-touch experiences that consumers demand — all on the same messaging channels they love using every day with family and friends.

The Conversational Cloud's Intent Manager lets brands instantly understand what consumers want, then take action to respond.
Every meaningful conversation starts with understanding. What do your customers want? What are their intentions? The Conversational Cloud's Intent Manager, a real-time intent recognition and classification engine, analyzes consumer intentions at every turn of the conversation. Intent Manager is powered by LivePerson's proprietary natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities and machine learning algorithms, which are grounded in 20+ years of conversational data and more than one billion messaging transcripts across a variety of industries.

Intent Manager is currently being used by top brands, including Chipotle Mexican Grill, to gain real-time insights and take action to improve customer service, marketing, and sales automations.

"Everything we have done on this end-to-end transformation journey has been about delivering exceptional digital experiences to our customers and our crews," said Nicole West, VP Digital Strategy & Product at Chipotle. "We're using the Conversational Cloud to curate convenient, frictionless, engaging experiences that are aligned with our purpose to Cultivate a Better World."

Key benefits of Intent Manager include:

• Automatically understands about 50% of consumer intents with preconfigured, out-of-the-box intent models customized for telco, financial services, retail, airlines, and other industries.
• Enables data scientists, content creators, and even nontechnical employees like contact center agents to fine-tune or configure custom intents from an intuitive interface.
• Empowers brands to make important policy, process, and product-related decisions.
• Routes conversations to the agent or bot resource best equipped to resolve them at high satisfaction levels.

The Conversational Cloud's Conversation Builder empowers even nontechnical users to automate conversations at scale.
Brands that use the Conversational Cloud can automate a high percentage of consumer interactions through LivePerson's Conversation Builder, which empowers technical and nontechnical staff to build automated conversation flows with a simple point-and-click interface. For example, Chipotle's new concierge bot Pepper seamlessly handles customer intents to take orders for delivery and pickup, share order status updates, and provide customer service as needed.

With Conversation Builder, a single automated conversation flow can be configured to run on any messaging channel. If the automation needs an assist, human agents are automatically tapped to seamlessly join the conversation.

"Unmanageable volumes of consumer interactions have been burying brands since the start of the pandemic. While many initially thought of these changes as temporary, they're very much here to stay; in the U.S. alone, we're on track to close over 25,000 brick and mortar stores," said Robert LoCascio, founder and CEO of LivePerson. "Consumers still want personalized experiences, and the only way brands can scale these is through Conversational AI. It's clear that having an AI and automation strategy went from 'business improvement' to 'vital for operations' overnight."

Data from the Conversational Cloud demonstrates the rapid growth of automation on the platform:

• The volume of automation-powered messaging conversations is up 100% from the end of 2019.
• Over the same time period, the volume of messaging conversations fully contained by automation (completed with no human agent needed) has tripled.
• Automation now plays a role in approximately 70% of all messaging conversations on the platform.

The Conversational Cloud is built for the builders.
With over 40 APIs & SDKs, the Conversational Cloud gives developers full control to customize conversational experiences. Brands can easily integrate third-party applications, build new AI-powered applications and automations, create workflows, and read/write data to any system.

"We kept developers top of mind as we built the Conversational Cloud because we knew they'd be the key to unlocking its true power," said Jennifer Kline Shernoff, Vice President, Product Management at LivePerson. "Integrating with CRM, billing, and other backend systems means developers can now easily automate how brands handle common intents like 'What's my order status?,' 'Pay my bill,' or 'Schedule an appointment.' "

LivePerson Functions makes the Conversational Cloud even more powerful, with the ability to create custom workflows that can be triggered by a variety of conversational events. For example, by integrating with external systems, customers with VIP status can be routed to dedicated experts before the conversation even starts. As Functions runs entirely in the Conversational Cloud, it also eliminates the costs for hardware and infrastructure overhead typically required by brands to integrate with platforms.

The Conversational Cloud is available anywhere, at any time.
Based in the cloud and requiring less bandwidth than voice calls, the Conversational Cloud is ideal for the distributed workforce. Brands across the world, including David's Bridal, have used the Conversational Cloud to stand up remote workforces.

When David's Bridal was forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to temporarily shut down retail stores and needed to act quickly to maintain business continuity, they transformed from a 90% in-store business to a 100% digital business in two weeks, leading to a 7.5x increase in messaging volume and 700% increase in sales via messaging.

"We honestly don't know how we would have survived the last couple of months without the option to message — it truly saved our business," said Holly Carroll, Vice President of Customer Service & Contact Center Operations at David's Bridal. "With the Conversational Cloud, we sped up our vision for Zoey, our conversational bridal concierge, and put our customers into the best hands."

New iOS and Android mobile apps for the Conversational Cloud are now available enabling work-from-anywhere agents and in-store associates to provide safe and convenient services via messaging, like contactless curbside pickup — with little-to-no training required.

The Conversational Cloud works across all channels, making it the single place to connect all of a brand's conversations, from messaging channels to mobile apps, websites, social media, and email. Brands can also use features like LivePerson Voice to Messaging and Apple's Chat Suggest to shift consumers who call on the phone directly into more convenient messaging conversations.

The Conversational Cloud's Conversation Analytics helps measure and optimize conversations to deliver outstanding marketing, sales, and customer care business results.
The Conversational Cloud includes Conversation Analytics, a performance dashboard that captures the most impactful conversational KPIs, from sales-focused metrics like overall volume and average order value to customer care, operational efficiency, and consumer experience metrics. Brands can easily compare their performance to industry benchmarks and take actions recommended by LivePerson's AI to improve over time.

Brands using LivePerson's Conversational Cloud have seen results including:

• Higher qualified leads that are 2.5x more likely to convert to sales.
• Up to 20% increases in average order value and online sales conversions.
• Labor costs reduced by 50%.
• CSAT scores increased by up to 20%.
• 50% decreases in agent attrition.

"AI-powered messaging is a win-win-win for customers, employees, and brands," said Alex Spinelli, chief technology officer at LivePerson. "Consumers and agents benefit from the incredible convenience and efficiency of messaging, while brands benefit from developing direct, high-value relationships with their customers, which they own forever right in the same conversation thread where they first connected."

LivePerson's conversational solutions garnered several recognitions in the first half of 2020, including:

• Fast Company named LivePerson to its prestigious Most Innovative Companies list, listing the company as number three in the world's most innovative AI companies category.
• Forrester, a leading global research and advisory firm, named LivePerson a leader in The Forrester New Wave™: Digital-First Customer Service Solutions, Q2 2020.
• The CODiE Awards, the tech industry's only peer-reviewed awards program, named LivePerson's bot-building platform the Best Customer Service Solution of 2020.
• The Stevie Awards, the world's top customer service awards program, awarded LivePerson's bot-building platform the 2020 Gold Stevie^® Award for best New Contact Center Solution.

To learn more about the Conversational Cloud, watch this short video and visit liveperson.com.

About LivePerson, Inc.
LivePerson makes life easier for people and brands everywhere through trusted conversational AI. Our 18,000 customers, including leading brands like HSBC, Orange, GM Financial, and The Home Depot, use our conversational solutions to orchestrate humans and AI, at scale, and create a convenient, deeply personal relationship — a conversational relationship — with their millions of consumers. For more information about LivePerson (NASDAQ: LPSN), please visit www.liveperson.com.

CONTACT: Mike Tague, mtague@liveperson.com

SOURCE LivePerson, Inc.