Avanza Solutions debuts cognitive CRM platform ‘Impulse’

Avanza Solutions has announced the launch of its all-new cognitive CRM platform, Impulse, at Seamless Middle East, taking place at Dubai World Trade Centre this week.

Impulse is a built-for-business cognitive platform that uses artificial intelligence to engage, respond and analyse customer interactions and behaviours. It works across all customer touch points and channels to help companies intuit what each customer needs enhance the user experience and drive loyalty and satisfaction.

“Right now, the problems that we are seeing in the cognitive space are that there are multiple AI engines coming from various companies, and on top of these AI engines, you need to build a layer of assets or functions to train the bots,” said Waqas Mirza, managing director and CMO, Avanza Solutions. “This training can then show the analytics produced by the engine, ensuring that the bot is not abandoned and making sure it is easy to see when human intervention needs to come in.”

The bot is currently running on IBM’s cognitive platform, Watson.

“Impulse gives our customers a lot of structure around natural language understanding and processing, and gives them certain frameworks enabling them to train a bot, including what domains it should cover and what questions it should answer,” added Mirza.

Avanza has recently utilised Impulse for ADIB, in the form of an Islamic mortgage chatbot.

“This service caters to the first 20-30 questions that a customer would ask when applying for a mortgage, such as eligibility and documents required,” said Mirza. “Impulse can answer these queries quickly and efficiently. This bot is also a resident inside our own mobile banking app.”

Impulse is also set to be used as a damage control mechanism across social media outlets, following feedback from Avanza’s banking and finance customers.

“Our customers have requested a social media crawler to be integrated into our bot. For example, if someone is bad-mouthing a bank in the night across social media platforms, the damage control needs to be done immediately,” explained Mirza. “Banks might not have staff trawling through social media outlets to do that kind of monitoring throughout the night, but we can integrate a crawler into Impulse that can identify if anything has been said about this particular bank. The bot can then produce an automated response explaining that someone will be in touch with the user during work hours if an issue needs to be addressed.”