[August 31, 2017] |
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Conversica Delivers Record Growth and Innovation as the Leader in Conversational AI for Business
Conversica,
the leader in conversational AI for business, today announced a
record-breaking first half of the company's fiscal year, with
accelerated growth in bookings and revenue, major new capabilities in
its AI platform, significant additions to the company's management team,
and continued acknowledgement of its leadership through industry awards
and analyst recognition.
Conversica automates business conversations through virtual assistants
powered by artificial intelligence. The company's flagship AI Sales
Assistant engages every lead in a human conversation to qualify more of
them for sales, freeing sales reps to spend more time closing business.
In the first half of 2017, more Conversica customers than ever employed
their AI Sales Assistants to engage and qualify leads and create sales
opportunities more quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively.
This year, Conversica continued its tremendous growth and celebrated
many notable milestones:
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Increased annual recurring revenue by over 50 percent, with sales to
new customers and significant expansions in existing accounts.
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Grew the customer base to over 1,200 companies, adding customers in a
variety of industries, such as technology, financial services,
education, hospitality and automotive. New customers include Box (News - Alert), New
Relic, Microsoft, Northwestern Mutual, Salsa Labs and Avalara.
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Released significant new AI capabilities-including support for
conversations via text/SMS messaging, new assistant languages (Spanish
and French) and automated meeting scheduling-and processed more than
250 million messages.
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Expanded its executive management team with the addition of Dr. Sid J.
Reddy as Chief Scientist, Brian Kaminski as Chief Customer Officer,
and Victor Belfor as Senior Vice President of Business Development.
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Added key new employees in engineering, data science, operations,
customer success and sales to grow the company to over 160 employees.
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Earned the Red
Herring Top 100 award, distinguishing the company as one of the
Top 100 private technology companies in North America.
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Named for a second time to the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing
private companies.
Conversica's Sophisticated AI Sales Assistants Attract Customers
Across Industries
Conversica increased its customer base this year across a diverse set of
B2B and B2C industries, including technology, financial services,
education and automotive, bringing the total roster of clients to more
than 1,200, many of which added more salespeople to handle the increased
flow of opportunities identified by their AI Sales Assistants.
"A record number of global enterprises across a dozen industry verticals
chose Conversica's category-leading AI solution, and they did so because
of the incredible ROI they are able to achieve," said Conversica CEO
Alex Terry. "Conversica's AI Sales Assistants continue to help
salespeople across industries follow up on their leads far more
effectively, and our AI Assistants are now deployed in other departments
and communicating in multiple languages. Moreover, the recent additions
we've made to our executive team will boost our pace of innovation,
extend our reach and ensure that we continue to serve each of our
customers well, even as we continue our accelerated growth."
Notable new customers and those which significantly expanded their usage
include:
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Epson, which generated millions in sales pipeline from their
Conversica AI Assistant
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ScaleArc, which saw a 30x increase in influenced pipeline
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SecureAuth, which added $2M in new pipeline in less than eight
months
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Top Hat, which achieved 200% ROI on Conversica-handled
opportunities
"Our research reflects accelerated adoption and deployment of AI-based
resources for marketing, sales and customer support activities,"
explained Dan Miller, Lead Analyst and Founder, Opus Research.
"Intelligent assistants, like those offered by Conversica, support
measurably positive business outcomes by boosting productivity and
lowering costs while supporting high levels of customer satisfaction."
Conversica Unveils Enhancements to Industry-First AI Assistants
Conversica has expanded its Conversational AI platform with new
capabilities and customer-requested features each month. Key
enhancements include theability to deploy AI Assistants with multiple
names, titles, email addresses and phone numbers to conduct multiple
conversations across multiple business functions, in multiple languages,
across multiple communications channels.
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New Multiple Assistant Capabilities: Leveraging the experience
and technology underpinning the company's successful AI Sales
Assistant, Conversica added AI assistants capable of automating
important business conversations in service, finance, customer success
and recruiting. Increasingly, organizations deploy a single Conversica
platform that delivers multiple assistants with conversations
optimized for separate business functions. Each assistant benefits
from the training, experience, insight and results gained from the
thousands of other assistants in the field across all customers,
resulting in more engaging and helpful conversations than are possible
in a stand-alone manner.
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New Conversations in Multiple Languages: Conversica's AI
Assistants now engage individuals in human-like conversations in
English, Spanish and French and are intelligent enough to
automatically switch languages mid-conversation when appropriate.
Since business conversations occur in many different languages, even
within a single country or region, Conversica AI Assistants now engage
each individual in their preferred language. Conversica assistants are
already trained on millions of human conversations to achieve an
unprecedented level of accuracy and reliability, and the company has
expanded its team of conversation designers and trainers with native
speakers to develop new capabilities and ensure high levels of AI
accuracy.
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New Communication Channels: Conversica added SMS/text messaging
as the next communication channel for its AI Assistants. This feature
allows assistants to communicate with leads via email and SMS, even
switching channels mid-conversation to best satisfy the needs of the
lead while maintaining compliance with regulations such as the
Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). Each lead's contact
information and communication preference is always passed to the
salesperson for appropriate follow-up and to the dozens of CRM and
marketing automation solutions with which the company's products are
integrated.
Three New Executives Join Conversica's Leadership Team
Conversica has made three key appointments to bolster its executive
team, tapping industry veterans with public and private company
experience to help lead the company through this period of accelerated
growth. New appointments include:
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Dr. Sid J. Reddy, Chief Scientist. Reddy is a noted expert,
author and speaker in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP)
and computational linguistics. He joins Conversica from Microsoft (News - Alert),
where he was a Principal Applied Scientist. Prior to Microsoft, he
founded an NLP lab at Northwestern University. He has designed,
developed and contributed to dozens of NLP systems used in production
in a wide array of use cases and industry verticals, including
business intelligence, legal, healthcare, life sciences, and
e-commerce.
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Brian Kaminski, Chief Customer Officer. Kaminski is an
accomplished customer success expert with 20 years of experience
rapidly scaling winning teams. Kaminski comes to Conversica from IBM (News - Alert),
where he served as a worldwide client success executive and developed
the strategy for customer success across IBM's multi-billion-dollar
SaaS (News - Alert) portfolio. Prior to that he was Chief Customer Officer at Marin
Software.
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Victor Belfor, Senior Vice President of Business Development. Belfor
has more than 15 years of go-to-market strategy and execution
experience and joins Conversica from OpenSesame, where he managed
partnerships ranging from Oracle (News - Alert) and SAP to Workday, Cornerstone and
OnDemand. Prior to that he established the partnership programs for
Ring Central, helping to accelerate growth prior to the successful IPO.
Additional Information
About Conversica
Conversica is the leader in AI-powered business conversations and the
only provider of AI-driven lead engagement software for marketing and
sales organizations. The flagship Conversica® AI Sales Assistant helps
companies find and secure customers more quickly and efficiently by
automatically contacting, engaging, qualifying and following up with
leads via natural, two-way conversations. Used by more than 1,000
companies worldwide, Conversica's sales assistants are built on a proven
AI platform integrating natural language processing (NLP), natural
language generation (NLG), and machine learning (ML) capabilities and
engage prospects over multiple communication channels and in multiple
languages. Recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor, Conversica is a
portfolio company of Providence Equity, Kennet Partners and Toba Capital
and is headquartered in Foster City, California.
To learn more, visit conversica.com
and follow the company on Twitter,
LinkedIn
and Facebook.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170831005465/en/
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