

Automating Online Customer Experiences
Flamingo specializes in “conversational commerce” technology for enterprises. The company’s artificial intelligence-based virtual assistant platforms help financial services and insurance companies automate online customer experiences for higher satisfaction scores, better sales conversion rates, and lower costs.
Training a System to Hit the Ground Running
Flamingo needed a way to train new deployments of its virtual assistants so they’d be ready to work independently their first day at a new job. Or as Elliott says, a way “to solve the cold-start problem.” In a typical scenario, Flamingo initially sets up one of its virtual assistants as a “co-pilot” alongside a human operator. As that operator interacts with customers and answers questions, the platform tracks each exchange and starts to learn by recognizing patterns. After a few weeks of this training phase, the virtual assistant will be ready to strike out on her own and operate independently. However, some clients want to improve their customer experiences and conversion rates faster. They can’t afford to wait. “A lot of our clients are really excited about automation,” says Elliott. “They want to quickly get to the point where the machine is completely autonomous—skipping the training phase altogether and being fully automated from day one. That’s why we started working with Appen.”The Perfect Combo: Natural Language Data Plus AWS
How well the virtual assistants perform right out of the gate in these “cold start” situations depends on their training. They need to learn the ropes by fielding the same kind of natural language questions that customers would ask. To get those questions, Flamingo turned to Appen based on its reputation for delivering high-quality training data to leading technology firms around the world. Appen’s first project for Flamingo was a project just like this for an Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) 100 financial services firm. Appen sourced a group of native

Freedom to Focus on the Core Business
