Boom.ai quickly advances its AI offering with SADA

Boom.ai, formerly known as Boomsourcing, was founded in 2007 as a customer acquisition company, helping clients generate sales and grow by providing contact center services, virtual assistants and receptionists, and outsourced business processes.

The core of Boom’s technology is its proprietary Perfect Pitch software that manages dialing and customer relationships while simultaneously providing agents with a smarter and more accurate way of interacting with prospects. The company has generated over 200 million minutes of conversations for its customers.

For the past two years, Boom.ai has been hyper-focused on using artificial intelligence to improve the quality of its products and services. New tools ensure greater performance and compliance for its business-to-consumer clients and allow the onboarding of a fully-trained virtual agent within days, instead of weeks or months to train a human agent.

“When people call in, they don’t realize they’re talking to an AI agent. That’s the whole game for us,” said Greg Doermann, Chief Technology Officer. “With AI and machine learning, our platform can actually listen and respond in a manner that replicates and sounds like a human representative. Of course, the option to speak with a live agent is available, but our technology has advanced to the point where that rarely occurs.”

Business challenge

Boom.ai was working to combine its patented AI technologies with live agents in call centers throughout the Philippines, Mexico, and the U.S. when the COVID crisis began in March 2020. Many of its call centers shut down and some agents were transitioned to home offices.

“We were scrambling to get our AI services up and running as fast as possible,” said Doermann. “The IT team wanted to ensure that we would be able to continue to serve our existing customers and also provide them with an innovative alternative to traditional operations due to the pandemic.”

Solution

“We determined Dialogflow, Google Cloud’s natural language understanding platform, would eliminate the need for building out necessary training tools, validations and user interfaces ourselves,” said Doermann. “We also wanted a trusted partner to provide us with support to help us integrate Dialogflow into our existing telephony platform and provide expertise in leveraging Google Cloud’s technology to achieve the highest quality of results.”

SADA’s Emerging Solutions team was all in. With a portfolio of expertise covering solutions like Contact Center AI (CCAI), Document AI, Google Cloud Search, and more, the team has helped numerous companies unleash the full potential of Google Cloud’s AI-powered solutions.

“SADA helped us get that ball rolling. They were really instrumental in transitioning key aspects of the AI work,” said Doermann. “Their involvement actually hockey-sticked development and made it easier to finish the project.”

Results

Through extensive support conducted remotely, Boom.ai was able to make rapid progress and was in production with AI agents within a matter of months. “SADA has been a fantastic partner. They were super helpful and very responsive helping us work through this critical phase of development,” said Doermann. “As a privately held company, we are very cost-aware. The return on investment for Dialogflow and all the tools that we received was well worth it.”

While Doermann emphasizes there will always be a need for human agents, many Boom.ai customers are transitioning aspects of customer service to AI and experiencing its benefits. For instance, AI agents provide accurate and enhanced customer service, never get impatient, don’t sleep while working 24/7, provide a new level of control over sensitive credit card data, and reduce wait times for consumers. When comparing concurrent phone calls handled by the company’s 1,500 live agents, Boom.ai currently has the equivalent of roughly 100 AI agents and growing at a rate of 10X per quarter. “We have a line out the door of customers who want to get this deployed,” said Doermann.

Boom.ai’s marketing team is now working on creative ways to enhance the technology and increase adoption. “We are exploring really exciting scenarios where AIs are not trying to pass as a human,” said Sean Spencer, Vice President of Marketing. “For instance, brand characters may take your order for amusement park tickets or a mascot could answer questions about your insurance claim. I can see this type of entertaining customer engagement in the near future.”