VirtuOz, a company that develops virtual support agents, has closed a $11.4 million Series B funding round led by Mohr Davidow Ventures, with Galileo Partners and Eric Hahn with Inventures Group also participating. The company’s “Virtual Agents” are basically intelligent chat bots that can walk users though sales, help, and support questions automatically. Virtual Agents generally appear as chat avatars (you can see one below), and are apparently so realistic that the company says that 69% of customers end their conversation with a “Goodbye”.
Avatars are continuously tweaked for each company, offering regular status reports that let administrators know how effective they are. Agents run through a complex series of algorithms meant to help with their designated objective, and can ask customers for further information to build up a gradually growing knowledge of each customer’s problem as it tries to reach a solution (it’s not just a series of if/then statements). Agents are also capable of simultaneously handling thousands of customer support issues at the same time. The company’s software has already been deployed by a number of major sites, including PayPal, Chegg, and eBay (which claims that 88% of support questions were resolved instantly by their VirtuOz agents).
I’m not a big fan of automated help systems, as I generally can find whatever they have to say elsewhere on the web. But VirtuOz seems to have positioned itself well – there’s clearly a huge market for them, and the floundering economy will likely see even more companies swap human tech support in favor of cheaper automated systems.
Jason,
Actually the round was led by MDV, with Galileo and Inventures also participating in the round.
Thanks for them
Jason Interesting article.
You should checkout the Video Avatars I mentioned here http://socialap.../video-avatars/
They seem a little more real. I wonder if they got funded too.
So how do we sign up for the service? I would be interested in using the product.
I hate these automated systems
They rarely work better than what’s already in the FAQ.
Well, human support agents does speak and act like robots that can`t give you an answer if its not in their script. It seems this chat bot is smarter and can actually learn things, so companys should really be adopting them
I believe that’s more the fault of the company (what you said about “human robots”) for both not giving them enough information or letting them handle advanced issues.
A french and smart company !
Well done guys.
(linkback) Thrive or Fail? VirtuOz – fully automatic customer service chat bots [VOTE] – http://www.thri...rfail.com/47d4e
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Not nearly as interesting as CodeBaby…
Congrats to Virtuoz Team for the success! I represent an established company based in Turkey, also working on technologies such as Virtual Agents, Call Center Knowledgebase Tools, and Semantic Autoresponders. We believe that these technologies are the future of the customer service presence on the web, given that competition is higher, so the need for cost reduction is more significant than ever. The market is huge, and companies such as Virtuoz and ourselves, will be helping corporations deal with large amount of customer inquiries, one at a time
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I think that this type of technology will come in real handy for people like myself who are running a solo deal, or an organization with not much initial funding.