Cape Town-based conversational automation specialist, CLEVVA, has recently enhanced its virtual agents with Generative AI (Gen AI) technology.
This upgrade enables virtual agents to engage in targeted sales, support, and service conversations that feel human while effectively accomplishing tasks.
CLEVVA’s co-CEO, Ryan Falkenberg, emphasizes the distinction between virtual agents and chatbots, “There is a lot of local interest in how Gen AI can be used to improve contact centers and business. We have embraced Gen AI to enable powerful conversational automation that you can control. It’s a major shift,”
 
Ryan Falkenberg, co-CEO CLEVVA
CLEVVA addresses challenges by incorporating “prompt engineers” to analyze customer requests before prompting Gen AI, ensuring accurate and personalized responses. Falkenberg notes that the combination of Gen AI’s language understanding and virtual agents’ rule-bound control allows businesses to deploy AI, managing customer engagements within accepted boundaries confidently.
For example, a question like ‘What tourist attractions should I see when visiting Rome?’ would traditionally deliver a generic list of top attractions in the city. If the virtual agent first asks the customer when they plan to visit Rome, what their interests are, how mobile they are, and more, it becomes possible to better prompt the Gen AI. Properly prompted, it can offer up a personalized itinerary that is tailored to that customer.
Gen AI’s tendency to go ‘rogue’ poses a challenge, making it untrustworthy for unsupervised customer interactions. The contact center supports agents but requires human oversight.
“CLEVVA can create constraints around what questions a Gen AI-enabled virtual agent can and can’t answer, pointing to specific data sets it may use and those that are out of scope,” Falkenberg says.
Gen AI’s language capabilities also enable virtual agents to converse in multiple languages and soon via voice channels, providing a human-like experience in customer service.