Amazon Alexa for Business vs. Conversica

Virtual assistants at work are still new features and have a lot to improve. 
The more features we have, the more we want new features. 
In small environments we have "noise" between virtual assistants, making use inappropriate. 
But in more distributed environments it is very good.
We still have a lot to learn (both, us and our Alexas). 

Conversica is an excellent tool if you have a large database of potential students, sales leads, or other forms of potential customers/users. It does not replace human interaction, but instead supplements it - allowing your admissions/sales/retention team to spend their time with those individuals that are in most need of assistance - whether that be because they are "hot leads" for a sale, students with a sincere interest, or customers needing assistance beyond the capabilities of an automatic system.

Incentivized

• Communication between people on the team.
• Interactive personal assistant.
• Better workspace management.

• Conversica is great at working low level leads and surfacing those that are in fact interested in your product or service.
• Conversica is also useful in weeding out leads that are not strong.
• Since Conversica is sending emails to various prospects, customers and opportunities, it allows sales, account managers, service etc, to focus on other activities, thereby saving time and freeing up resources.

Incentivized

• Could have a feature for group chats.
• Alexa has some problems hearing nearby voices.
• Website suggestions are irrelevant sometimes (should have user evaluation functionality for the answer, improving accuracy).

• The method of standing up campaigns can be a little tedious for administrators because it uses copy/paste of Salesforce Campaign ID instead of just searching for active Salesforce campaigns.
• Understanding the conversation path options that the AI could take is improving greatly, but can still use some improvements for admin awareness when standing up a new conversation.
• Understanding what conversation types exist and how they differ from one another is sometimes difficult to self-serv, but the Conversica team is always very good about helping out explaining these.

Incentivized

Tool is extremely powerful but comes with a heavy price tag. As long as we close more than 30 deals with year with Conversica's assistance it will be an easy choice to renew. If we don't we will have to figure out if these funds are best spent in other lead generation places.

Standalone, it's very easy to use. It becomes a little more complicated when you're working with it as an integration in Salesforce.

Incentivized

Our account manager and support rep have been extremely helpful in helping us get the system where we wanted it. Given our original use case as a lead qualifier, a lot of the conversations needed to be altered or exceptions created in order to provide the customization we needed. Our AM and support rep were able to accommodate most of our requests and were extremely helpful in working with us on a solution.

Incentivized

The implementation went smoothly. The only advice I would give for anybody looking to integrate Conversica with Salesforce is to ensure that either you or somebody within your organization has experience with process builder as you'll need to create some processes to force your leads into Salesforce campaigns for the Conversica system to pick them up.

Incentivized

We looked at two other alternatives: Google Nest and Apple. But Alexa already has popular devices that many people on the team already had in their homes. And it would be easier to integrate into the professional environment. The cost of Amazon products is also much lower, which makes the product more competitive.

I haven't looked into many other conversational ai products - we received a solid recommendation about using this and have been happy with the process and experience. Price was also pretty good, so we didn't feel a need to shop around on that front. If things change I'll do that homework, but we're happy for now

Incentivized

• Difficulties with technology integration.
• Identify all possible uses.
• We still lost a lot of time making new settings.

• We have found that each conversation type has a different ROI. Some are very hard to report off of, whereas others are easy. this is because some are more built around building awareness of what we offer where they may not purchase it for months down the line.
• Has helped us to save on salaries. If staff were to try to do the same thing our AI Assistant does, it would take them many hours to be as successful.

Incentivized