Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Sprint's AI-Driven Messaging Solution with Innovation Accolade

As with most business functions, the call center spends most of its operations budget on labor. And while it’s critical to have the right staffing levels of trained agents with the right skills to serve customers, many of the calls and other communications handled by the contact center are repetitive, routine and simple requests. One way to address this is by using artificial intelligence, or AI, to handle the simpler routines, and recognize when to pass customer queries to a human agent.

Analyst group Frost & Sullivan recently recognized Sprint Business with its 2019 North American New Product Innovation Award for Sprint Smart Messaging, an AI-powered text messaging system that was designed to handle simple communications with customers. Sprint Smart Messaging responds to customers who text a business’s landline to provide answers to simple questions like business hours and product availability; it can also handle more complex tasks like take food orders or set appointments.

The goal is to streamline customer conversations and free up human staff to handle more urgent customer needs and perform other business-related functions. The service is available to all of Sprint’s five million business customers, from small business to large.

Additionally, the solution has transcription capabilities. When callers leave a voicemail, the Smart Messaging system transcribes it and transmits it to the designated employee or business owner to read, callback, or send a follow-up text. The solution has an application interface (both iOS and Android) so designated users can direct their responses via their smart phones, tablets, or computers.

In bestowing its award, Frost & Sullivan recognized that the Sprint Smart Messaging solution is unique in the marketplace.

"Broadly applicable across a range of main street businesses, Sprint Smart Messaging expands capabilities and functions with an AI engine to respond to customer calls and questions via text messaging. When the business cannot answer the phone, the call automatically gets converted to text capability. No other carrier currently supporting the small to medium size business (SMB) segment offers this level of enterprise-grade customer engagement," said Brent Iadarola, Frost & Sullivan VP of Information & Communications Technologies.