Besides “Why Is Envoy the Best Systems Integrator?”, the question I’m asked most often these days is what generative AI products I most recommend to Customer Experience and Customer Service & Support teams. In this month’s blog, I thought I’d answer that question in a place with a URL, so I can easily share the link in the future. 🙂

Of all the products out there that use generative artificial intelligence to help CX and CS teams operate at their best, there are three that we love the most at Envoy: Forethought, Knots.io, and  Lang. This article covers:

1. Who each company is & why they’re awesome
2. Customer examples of the incredible business value from each AI product for CX
3. One commonly held view that most CX professionals have about generative AI that these vendors strongly disagree with

What does Forethought do — and why is Forethought different?

Forethought is a Generative AI customer experience agent that resolves customer issues, discovers insights, and assists human agents. Unlike clunky chatbots or GPT-bolt-on’s, Forethought is deeply integrated and trained on your proprietary data and brand policies, so you get an AI experience as unique as your customers.

What does Knots.io do — and why is Knots.io different?

Knots.io builds automated Zendesk applications, which use Knots.io technology to automatically enrich tickets before they’re ever opened. The enrichment allows agents to focus on quickly answering questions and resolving issues with their full human intelligence in a way that delights customers. 

Agents using Knots.io don’t have to open individual tickets, view attachments, or find customer numbers. Instead, thanks to Knots.io, all the contextual information lives in the Zendesk platform for them. The Knots.io team also offers free set up and implementation, completed in 5-20 minutes. No one at customer organizations needs to be trained to use Knots.io applications either!

What does Lang do — and why is Lang different?

Lang utilizes custom AI models for each client to optimize tagging taxonomies, automate large parts of the support workflow, and provide real-time insights to CX and Product teams in contexts relevant to them, wherever they want it: data warehouses, Zendesk, Lang dashboards, and more. 

Unlike other tools, because Lang deploys a unique AI model for each individual client (based on simply explaining tags via prompts), the tagging accuracy and relevancy is solely based on that client’s data, allowing taxonomies to be truly custom and relevant in nature. 

What business value do Forethought, Knots.io, and Lang customers enjoy?

• Forethought customers cut their ticket volumes in half, while improving CSAT by 21% and reducing time-to-resolution by 70%. Notable Forethought customers include SaaS businesses like Asana, fitness companies like Noom, and marketplaces like Upwork.
  
• One Lang customer, a leading US Telehealth company, extracted insights to enhance the customer experience across its different 20+ business lines and verticals. Leveraging Lang.ai’s robust data processing capabilities which analyzes all free text and seamlessly integrates with Zendesk, the CX Insights team efficiently handles cross-functional insight requests from 20+ business unit GMs. This results in the delivery of real-time and reliable CX data in Looker dashboards that drive company-wide product enhancements.
• Knots.io customers represent many industries. With Knots, one eCommerce fitness products company validates customer identification and routes customers to customized flows – across almost 75K tickets each month. As a result, the company saves $600,000 every year in unnecessary labor costs. Agents are also happier, and customer satisfaction is higher.

What’s one thing most CX professionals believe about gen AI that you strongly disagree with?

• Says Deon Nicholas, CEO & Co-founder of Forethought: “Most CX professionals underestimate the true cost of building a reliable AI system. With modern AI technology, it’s easy to create ‘demo-quality’ code for chatbots. However, in a full system you have to maintain and retrain the models consistently, and handle failovers when LLMs fail, among other measures, which can actually lead to increased costs. We advise CX leaders to partner with best-in-class AI companies like Forethought and implementation experts like Envoy to ensure a successful and cost-effective solution.”
• Says Basil Polsonetti, Co-founder of Lang: “Many people believe that AI is the be-all and end-all that can analyze data and unilaterally make decisions with no guidance from humans. Our team at Lang believes AI is best utilized as an AI copilot, helping guide you and your teams to meaningful areas of decision making and delivering trustworthy data to make those decisions yourself.”
• Says Hassan Ghiassi, Head of BD at Knots.io: “We believe in investing time in conversations with experts, since that’s the best way to learn about what’s next in CX. Right now, we see a lot of people thinking about AI as only generative AI, which means companies need to be digitized to use it. At Knots.io, we view AI as a powerful technology even for very successful companies that rely heavily on physical documents. This belief is based on how often we see our customers in manufacturing, shipping, and logistics reduce agent rotation once they start using our applications, since they no longer need to spend time looking for information.”

Thank you to Lang, Knots.io, and Forethought for their contributions to the CX technology ecosystem, as well as this blog!