Introduction:
Businesses aim to provide the most incredible experience to their clients. However, you must engage with Siena customer support to fix issues when a delivery is delayed or an order is incorrect.
Merchants can now employ chatbots and other software to handle more straightforward queries by integrating artificial intelligence into the customer service layer. Because chatbots frequently follow a script, users may have to endure a lot of annoying back and forth before choosing to speak with a natural person.
The co-founders of Siena AI, Andrei Negrau and Lisa Popovici, think creating an AI customer support agent with human empathy is possible. They have eight years of experience in the e-commerce industry, and they most recently developed software for Shopify merchants.
When we honestly looked into the experience, everyone despised chatbots, so you had that on one hand. Business process outsourcing came next, Negrau told TechCrunch. “The idea behind Siena from the beginning was that no system could automate everything as smoothly as an agent could.”
The two created a customer care system driven by AI that may be a machine but can comprehend the context and react empathically, much as a human would.
It’s been introduced previously for AI to be included in customer support, frequently as conversational AI. Businesses like Ada, 8Flow.ai, and Neuron7, to mention a few, have created strategies for improving customer service for companies and their clients.
Negrau and Popovici assert that Siena differs in three respects, though: First, merchants may build a single persona on social media that embodies their brand’s distinct voice and style while using a more formal character for email correspondence, thanks to the AI Personas function.
Additionally, they trained Siena to multitask during an interaction. For instance, retrieving order information, requesting product images, modifying the shipping address, and distributing a replacement item. The third option is the company’s CORE, a cognitive reasoning-based engine determining the optimal action for resolving complicated customer support issues.
Siena AI Raises $4.7M to develop an Empathic AI:
Siena AI Raises $4.7M to develop an Empathic AI [Source of Image: Techcrunch.com]
Six months after starting the business, Siena already has 65 clients, including companies like Kitsch, Simple Modern, and Everyday Dose. Popovici stated that the industry had hit revenue benchmarks throughout this period but would not provide more information. Additionally, the business handles up to 80% of all consumer interactions via email, text, social media direct messages, and comments in more than 100 languages.
Siena is also famous with investors. The startup recently received $4.7 million in seed funding from a group that included Sierra Ventures, Pari Passu Ventures, Spacestation Investments, Village Global, The Council, and OpenSky Ventures.
Over the next 12 months, the co-founders intend to use the funding for technological development, hiring, and go-to-market strategies to enable their solution to function as a completely autonomous agent for clients. For easier integration of AI into customer service processes, Siena is also developing Siena AI Academy, a learning hub for customers.
“By the second quarter of next year, our flagship product—the autonomous agent—will be in a great position,” Negrau stated. “We will keep assisting our customers in locating what we know is effective because we know what isn’t working.”
