Millions of people around the world have chatted with AI agents powered by Sierra – setting up Sonos speakers, ordering Casper mattresses, and refreshing SiriusXM satellite radios.
Consumers love interacting with them, especially compared to the brittle chatbots of a few years ago. Many of our customers’ AI agents have customer satisfaction ratings of 4.5 / 5 or higher, on par with and in cases exceeding the ratings in their contact centres.
Chatting with AI has become mainstream and delightful, thanks in large part to ChatGPT. But for most consumer brands, chat is rarely the most important channel. People still prefer to ring companies, and for good reason. Calling an expert remains the most effective way to solve many problems.
Despite billions of pounds of investment in conversational AI, no one has been able to bring the delight of AI agents to phone calls. We’re still left with long waiting times, broken transfers, and confusing phone trees (‘Press 7 for billing enquiries’).
That's why today we're excited to announce a new way to interact with Sierra agents: voice.
Sierra AI agents can now answer the phone.
AI phone calls with lifelike quality
People are highly sensitive to the subtleties of a voice and the flow of a conversation. In bringing the benefits of conversational AI to phone calls, we started with the feel of the conversation itself. What’s the right tone and cadence? How should an agent handle being interrupted? Should it laugh? How fast and responsive can we make it? We obsessed over all of these details, ensuring that your AI agent responds quickly and naturally.
In addition to smoothly managing the back and forth of a live conversation, your Sierra agent has all of the service-specific context it needs to speak the language of your company. It understands your brand, product names and technical jargon, and it can efficiently take down emails, order numbers, addresses and other information required for your service enquiries. It can also be personalised, able to remember a customer’s birthday or recognise five years of membership.
Behind the scenes, Sierra agents have multitasking superpowers. While your agent communicates updates and makes small talk, it can quickly retrieve relevant information, securely access internal systems, and take appropriate action. In the context of a return, for example, a Sierra agent can pull up a customer’s order while it checks their address. Then, in a fraction of a second, it can locate the three nearest return centres, calculate walking directions for each, and tell the customer which has the shortest walk.
Finally, Sierra AI agents go beyond just the mechanics of each enquiry. They are aware of sentiment and tone shifts, and they can adjust their approaches accordingly in real time – including escalating to your customer service team if needed. This adaptability ensures that interactions feel responsive and personal.
Connected with your call centre ecosystem
Modern contact centres are complex, often spanning multiple contact centres, BPOs, IVR systems and 800 numbers. Recognising this, we built Sierra’s agents to integrate seamlessly into your existing contact centre ecosystem and scale up to meet demand as needed.
Sierra agents can integrate with any call centre platform, and they can sit in front of or behind traditional IVR systems. Sierra agents also play well with compliance tools, survey systems and other voice-related infrastructure you’ve deployed. There’s no rip up and replace. You can get started gradually, and scale as it makes sense for your operations.
If a situation requires a person to intervene, Sierra agents can seamlessly escalate to call centre teams. AI-powered intent classification and skills-based routing ensure that calls make their way to the right team. And every handover includes a detailed AI-generated summary, ensuring that your team members have the context they need to quickly resolve a case, and that your customers never have to repeat themselves.
We also ensure that CX leaders have the tools and insights available to manage, monitor and optimise their AI agents. With Sierra’s Experience Manager, managers can track performance, spot trends, and identify any new or emerging issues. Interactions with voice-enabled agents are recorded, and automatic transcription and AI-based analysis and tagging make it easy to review specific conversations by topic or sentiment, and to generate aggregated reports.
Deliver consistent experience on every channel
Sierra’s Agent OS makes it possible to build your company’s AI agent once and deploy it on any channel. The result is an experience for your customers that consistently represents your company and brand at their best, whether a customer is reaching out via chat or phone.
Of course, typing and talking are different, so your AI agent needs to adapt to each channel. On chat, your agent might share an image to help you identify the order you’re enquiring about, while on the phone it might describe an item in a few words. ('Are you referring to the set of wingback dining chairs delivered last Monday?') This flexibility ensures that your customers always receive the information they need, when and how they need it.
The ability to ‘build once, deploy anywhere’ has meaningful operational benefits as well. Your CX teams need only maintain a single agent, and any updates to it – whether a new policy or product line, or an updated approach to an important process – are instantly reflected across every channel.
Just as with Sierra’s chat-based AI agents, your voice agent will continuously improve. Feedback and coaching from CX teams help tune the agent’s behaviour and performance, and as Agent OS and the AI models underlying it improve, so too will your voice agent.
Answer immediately, every time
What if you could answer the phone when your customers rang, right away, every time? What if as a result there were more interactions, more moments of delight, and more opportunities to get to know your customers, deepen relationships, and build loyalty? Making that possible is our goal.
At Sierra, we help companies elevate their customer experience with the power of conversational AI. We’re proud to partner with leading brands who trust our platform to engage their customers, whether on chat or on the phone.
If you’d like to have more conversations with your customers, we’d love to talk.
