The ZEW Contact Center 5.0, CC5.0 for short, is a cloud solution developed by SUSI&James and relieves companies that make constantly recurring outbound calls. For example, appointment reminders, appointments, surveys and the like can be fully automated. With CC5.0, the voice assistant SUSI, which already acts as a digital employee in various industries, makes phone calls to customers, patients and partners of the companies and thus automates this process, which today is carried out by humans. This means that, depending on demand, any number of calls can also be routed out in parallel to corresponding contacts. The advantage of this is that a lot of time is saved on the one hand and employee capacity on the other. SUSI can learn individual dialogs and thus be used flexibly in different applications. In order for this application of SUSI to function in a particularly elegant, robust and powerful way, CC5.0 is based on the AI platform "EVA" from SUSI&James.
EVA is the first platform globally responsible for the development, training and operation of Digital Employees. These Digital Workers are designed to interact and speak logically with humans. Through EVA, CC5.0 has access to several leading- and cutting-edge technologies, for example, a dialog system, a machine-learning framework, speech-to-text and text-to-speech components, as well as integration with a cloud communications provider to incorporate the SUSI voice assistant into telephony. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based digital assistants speak to respondents in natural language. The CC5.0 makes it possible to import phone numbers of contacts and systematically call them through the voice assistant SUSI with a prefabricated dialogue. This technology has the potential to relieve a large number of people and companies by having constantly recurring outgoing calls automatically handled by SUSI. In concrete terms, this is very useful in the example of a telephone survey with a large number of people.
The research cooperation
In this proof-of-concept project, we wanted to find out together with the Center for European Economic Research (ZEW) whether voice assistants are suitable for use in opinion research with regard to automated telephone surveys. The aim was to find out how the acceptance of the interviewed persons behaved towards the voice assistant in comparison to humans. Furthermore, the goal of the project was to use our SUSI to automatically call a large number of young companies in Germany and conduct a short survey on the topic of Corona. It was important to find out how the Corona pandemic affected the operations of German companies. The execution and evaluation of the scenario happened in the last weeks. This first scenario was considered an acceptance test for the topic of artificial intelligence and was a breakthrough for the use of AI as an interface to humans. The CC5.0 product allowed ZEW to make multiple calls simultaneously and complete the entire survey within a short period of time, rather than having to do an extensive project with a call center. To do this, CC5.0 required ZEW to provide appropriate telephone numbers to be contacted. In addition, information should already be given in a prefabricated dialogue, which SUSI should ask for. In this regard, ZEW had 500 registered companies with complete data including telephone number, managing director and location.
With one click, the CC5.0 automatically called all defined contacts and the digital employee SUSI independently conducted the survey using a sophisticated dialog. First, she introduced herself and explained to the interlocutor what the survey was about and what role the interlocutor played in the survey. Then, she continued the pre-written dialogue, asking three simple questions to which a "yes" or "no" answer could be given. Specifically, the following questions were asked:
"To date, has the Corona pandemic had a mostly positive economic impact on your company?"
"Have you used or applied for federal, state, or local assistance or support for your business?"
"Are you thinking about or already working on changes to your strategic direction for the post-Corona pandemic?"
SUSI collected all the required data in the interview and stored it anonymously in a secure database. After all surveys were completed, the results could be viewed, analyzed and further used. It became clear that such a process, if carried out by humans, would take a very long time. For this reason, the ZEW Outbound project asked for enormous added value and may change the relationship between artificial intelligence and humans in the future.
