Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing digital sales and customer service

“The aim of our development work is to increase sales volumes for our customers and to provide better quality answers to our line work from our chatbots. We’re taking the chatbot and livebot experience to a new level with the help of artificial intelligence.” says Upseller CEO Jussi Takala.

“Artificial intelligence of large language models is a new thing, with good opportunities to safely connect customer-specific information. Basically, an assistive tool has now been built, to which the Upseller can provide any customer’s data sources, which serve as an aid to the staff in customer service and sales work.” describes Evolver CEO Arttu Kataja.

“Normally, when the customer service department receives a question about a product, a customer service representative goes to look for an item in the catalog. Now that assistant can do the same thing. To guarantee high quality, a person checks the answer”, he adds.

When using language models, it is also important to ensure the reliability and data protection of the service. Upseller’s solution is implemented on top of Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service. “OpenAI as a research company has led the way in language model-based solutions. Microsoft offers OpenAI services from a secure, customer-owned Azure environment, topped with its own security framework to prevent abuse. The service has worked very well”, continues Devisioona’s CEO Jouni Heikniemi.

An opportunity that had to be seized

Evolver and Devisioona implemented an artificial intelligence project in cooperation with Upseller. The result was a new language model artificial intelligence used for supporting both sales and customer service. A solution connected to everyday work makes operations more efficient and moves strategic development forward.

Kataja says that at the beginning of the project, there was a long discussion about how the new language model artificial intelligence could be utilized. After clarifying a suitable application for utilizing AI, they decided to seize the opportunity: “The exploratory conversations lasted for a long time. Upseller presented a good use for AI that was easy to get onboard with. That was the start of a joint project.”

Upseller has utilized artificial intelligence throughout its operations. The artificial intelligence leap offered an opportunity to develop an even better product and service. It soon became clear that there are no ready-made solutions on the market, so something new had to be developed.

“The market survey confirmed our perception that we are pioneers in a technology sense. With the joint development project, we will have an even bigger head start on our competitors. The demo showed that the decision was right.” says Takala happily.

The project is based on Upseller’s growth strategy and the desire to offer customers an even higher quality service. As Takala puts it: “We are going to grow and we want better quality service for our customers. This is an opportunity that cannot be missed.”

“With the help of this artificial intelligence, we are able to provide our customers with more efficient sales service and, above all, better quality customer service faster.” he adds.

Sales and customer service merge together

The artificial intelligence of large language models enables sales and customer service to merge together. When the machine knows how to take into account the customer’s specific needs and respond to the person with a pleasant tone of voice, the differences between the answers given by the machine and the person become blurred.

“Previous chatbots performed specific actions based on what the customer asked. Now that there is a language model engine in use, and a customer- or context-specific tone of voice and relevant knowledge has been added to it, there is a significant qualitative difference compared to before. It is also a natural step to combine it with human customer service, so that they work seamlessly in parallel.” describes Kataja.

In addition to quality and the best possible customer experience, Takala considers it important that, with the help of the new product, their customers can also offer better service to their own customers:

“When sales and customer service merge together, the layers disappear, that is, the border between the answers produced by a machine and a person disappears. In our example case, we can see from the data and statistics that when our bot, i.e. just a machine, answers a question in the chat, it gets a bad grade. When a real person in live chat gives an exact identical answer, it is liked very much. With this technology, we blur that border, so the bot really becomes part of customer service.”

The project resulted in a tool that delivers on its promises.

“I got a tool that I can take into a sales situation and show what we can deliver. We also received evidence that we are moving in the right direction, which supports our vision and strategy. It is no longer just a promise, we now have an existing demo of an implemented artificial intelligence project”, says Takala happily.

Continuous development ensures a place on the leading edge of progress

In the spirit of continuous development, new applications and customer needs are constantly explored. Takala says that discussions are already underway with current customers and additional experience is being sought from new prospects:

“Through these discussions, we are sure to get a fairly comprehensive list of needs that will be addressed in this project. In addition to clients, we think about how we can organize our own work, and what our own production processes will be like.”

Kataja also estimates that in the near future the big language models will develop even more, which is why a successful demo is not a place to stop: “Now it is already possible to connect customer-specific knowledge to the language model, but in the near future there will also be good ways to connect entire processes to the artificial intelligence.”

“In view of future prospects, I would add that we do a lot of end-to-end service with customers’ enterprise resource planning systems. Thanks to that integration, we can use this product to automate these procedures as well, which means that in the future the application of AI would be to automate the customer’s business process.” says Takala.

The development of services is easier when you can trust the platform. Microsoft is committed to productizing OpenAI’s language models in the long term, and as usual, it refines the services into ones that are suitable for business use from the perspective of support, data protection, and security. “A European operator should, in principle, always choose Azure as the location for OpenAI services. An extensive, professional support structure instills confidence in the long-term productivity of a business-critical artificial intelligence solution.” reminds Jouni Heikniemi of Devisioona.

High-quality customer service and growth

Customers will benefit from future development: sales will increase and customer service will become more efficient. Takala summarizes the benefits of the implemented solution through various customer needs for service improvement, sales growth and the development of chatbots:

“Customer service is better, faster and more automated. The solution also acts as a sales accelerator. In addition, the complexity and depth of the bots’ responses will expand.”

“Multilingualism also works on a whole new level in the artificial intelligence of large language models. When a language is translated in the proper context and is built as part of the whole, it is significantly better than the automatic translation that has been used up to now,” adds Kataja.