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Nuance's Nina Moves to the Web for More Complete Customer Service

By Amanda Ciccatelli, TMCnet Web Editor

These days, customers expect the availability of self-service options 24/7. Airline passengers can print boarding passes at home, the cruise ships offer kiosk concierges to help vacationers find their way back to their rooms, the smartphone provides access to information from a clinic while a patient is waiting for a doctor to arrive, and the Web offers unlimited help to customers. In fact, 75 percent of consumers prefer self-service due to its speed, accuracy and convenience, according to Forrester (News - Alert) Research, while 67 percent of people look for customer service via a company’s website in 2012.

Nuance Communications, Inc., a provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers, has decided to expand Nina, its virtual assistant for customer service, to the Web, adding text-based virtual assistant capabilities to enterprise Web marketing, ecommerce and support applications.

As of late, Nina has become smarter, with the ability to engage in customer conversations and connect to enterprise back-office applications. Additionally, Nuance (News - Alert) has made Nina multi-lingual, with the ability to recognize and speak 38 languages.

Back in 2012, Nina was introduced as the first solution to bring speech-based virtual assistant capabilities to mobile customer service apps. Now with expanded capabilities, Nina is a multi-channel solution, delivering intelligent, natural interactions across customer self-service apps, including text messaging, voice, mobile apps and the Web. Today, Nina represents an opportunity for enterprises to leverage intelligent systems to deliver easy and effective self-service solutions to customers.  

“Adding conversation capabilities to web-based customer service results in a powerful and unique multi-channel customer service platform,” said Nancy Jamison, principal analyst, customer contact, Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert), in a statement. “Add to this Nuance’s rapid expansion of language support, and you get a solution that will benefit multi-national enterprises as well as significant regional leaders in industries such as banking, travel and retail.”

With Nina Web, Nuance is creating a new face of customer service online, as Nina Web presents a human-like virtual agent that can resolve customer requests, while conveying the brand essence of an enterprise. It routes conversations to live agents, providing human-like customer service conversations via text or speech interactions using Nuance natural language understanding (NLU) and connectivity to CRM, ERP and database systems.

“Nina is driving a new generation of customer self-service, where customers finally get the experience they’ve been demanding at a scale that the world’s largest brands require,” said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager of the Nuance Enterprise Division.

To date, Nina is the first solution to combine speech-based virtual assistant capabilities with natural, intelligent virtual agent conversations. Based on Nuance’s innovative technology leadership and expertise in voice, natural language understanding, conversational dialogue and resolution techniques, Nina delivers a multi-channel, automated customer service experience for the consumer and the enterprise.  

Neff Hudson, assistant vice president for emerging channels at USAA, commented, “We have built our legacy of service by ensuring that our members get the right answer with minimal effort and with ease. We were early adopters of Nina in our mobile app, and we are pleased to see that Nuance is extending that same compelling customer experience to the Web.”

Beyond the expansion to 38 speech recognition and text-to-speech languages, Nina supports 13 text-input languages as well. As with mobile apps, Nuance provides a pre-made persona for the Web, which can be customized for specific branding strategies.