Alight Solutions’ Use of Verint’s Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) Technology Wins 2018 Opus Research Award
Verint® Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: VRNT), The Customer Engagement CompanyTM, today announced that Alight Solutions has received the 2018 Opus Research Conversational Commerce Award by leveraging Verint’s Intelligent Virtual AssistantTM (IVA) to transform its web self-service experience with automation.* Alight’s virtual assistant, named “Lisa,” is an innovative example of how Verint customers lead the way with automated, intelligent self-service solutions.
The Opus awards showcase excellence and achievement for real-world implementations of conversational user interfaces for customer engagement, digital commerce, self-service, employee assistance and intelligent devices. A team of five judges awarded Alight among over 20 submissions from multiple industries around the world on key criteria including business value, customer experience, innovation and productivity.
A leader in technology-enabled health, wealth and human capital management solutions, Alight leverages Verint’s IVA solution as the anchor technology for its new web self-service system. The IVA has a unique health, benefits and HR natural language model that understands the questions and needs of millions of different users, in their own words.
During the 2017 open enrollment period between October and December, the busiest time of year for Alight and its clients, the new self-service system handled over 760,000 interactions. Since its launch in April 2017, Lisa has chatted with 1.1 million different people and answered over 2 million questions, with 30% being outside normal business hours, and provided answers for the top five chat topics: annual enrollment, health savings accounts, password issues, medical benefits, and retirement benefits.
“Alight’s goal is to make it easier for people to find the information, tools and support needed to make important decisions, and we are delighted that Opus Research has recognized our work,” said Ibrahim Khoury, Director, Product Development and Innovations at Alight. “Alight’s challenge was to determine how to create a seamless, automated, people-centric experience for people and their families. We decided that intelligent virtual agents were the most promising solution, and chose Verint’s IVA to handle our complexities, create great experiences and provide a positive business impact.”
Lisa Provides Guidance and Support to Customers and Employees
Lisa is designed to give people and their families HR and benefits guidance and support. For example, a customer recently chatted with Lisa inquiring about her 24-year-old son’s eligibility to remain on her insurance plan after graduating college and gaining employment. The customer asked Lisa if they were obligated to remove the dependent from their plan, or if he could stay on until end of year.
Because Lisa is powered by Verint’s IVA with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) and human-assisted machine learning architecture, she is constantly improving her knowledge and language skills. Lisa understood that the intent in the chat was to inquire about dependent provisions. She factored in employee-specific attributes and eligibility,
then provided the correct guidance—conversationally and consistently. She was also able to comprehend the informal chat language that included improper grammar, acronyms and no punctuation.
“We are proud that Opus Research has recognized Alight’s achievement with Lisa, and that Alight chose our IVA solution as the foundation,” says Verint’s Michael Southworth, general manager, intelligent self-service. “Companies have been trying to conquer the self-service automation challenge for over a decade now, and Verint’s IVA is proving to be an important solution to address that challenge, and a vital part of a company’s overall customer experience strategy. Alight’s success is a powerful case study for how IVA’s are driving automation and transforming web self-service systems.”