Azure AI Bot Service vs. Verint Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA)

From personal experience, I can recommend the Azure AI service to reduce the burden on your customer service team, as we did. We created a customer service bot and automated our Frequently Asked Questions section, as well as an interactive platform for registering other complaints that the bot cannot handle, which are later addressed by our customer service team.

Incentivized

The IVA is very well suited to handle routine questions and basic actions that would typically require customer support. It may be a little more challenged handling edge cases but in those instances we have found it provides an easy transfer to a live agent

Incentivized

• Assembles conversational AI encounters for our clients
• Adds regular language, discourse, and vision
• Sends to well known channels with insignificant code changes

• Use of Acknowledgment base and AI engines.
• F&Q.
• Automate process such as consults, modifications and cancel reservations.
• Execute triggers for notify customer reservations.

Incentivized

• Limited Natural Language Understanding, especially in entertainment contexts where slang, humor
• Works only with Azure platform only not compatible with other platforms
• Complex customization as per organization need

Incentivized

• There is minimal documentation around what we can and can't do for IVA
• IVA seems to be a newer product so this is difficult when trying to implement new things
• IVA has a lot of non-Verint friendly terms (Think Prompt, vs. answer or Intent/Alternate vs. context).

Incentivized

While I enjoy the IVA product, there is still some fine-tuning of the platform that can be done. There are some nuances to the Verint platform, which can make it difficult to start quickly. We thought business users would be able to easily manage the work needed within the IVA platform for our business; however, with how complex we want to make the experience, that was not possible. We quickly realized we needed more support than just our business users, who were not familiar with how to add API information into a conversation flow. This is why we expanded to others within our business to support the tool.

Incentivized

Azure AI Bot Service comes with an Integrated Development Environment and Bot Framework SDK that simplifies development. Having a single codebase for multiple channels, such as MS Teams, Facebook, and Slack, makes it easier to target multiple platforms without requiring redevelopment. LUIS and OpenAI can be easily integrated with your Chatbot to provide a seammless chat bot expereince to customers.

Incentivized

It is well suited for employees with technical experience

Incentivized

Microsoft's customer service staff is friendly and extremely knowledgeable. They are always available to assist you with bot framework-related issues that you may be experiencing. They provide training sessions, manuals, and support personnel, among other things. Bugs were easily spotted and patched, which was one of my pet peeves about patching.

Incentivized

Microsoft Bot Framework is much better and well more established without a lot of proprietary software/coding language. Lex is very limited with integration with standard hardware and network configurations. Lex has performance issues and was too slow to meet near real-time collaboration requirements. Bot Framework complements many other Microsoft communication products and this was key to implementing without a lot of new training required.

Incentivized

Verint Intelligent Virtual Assistant had more features and functionality than the Genesys product as well as customization and further options for internal system integration to our existing on-prem systems. In addition, we also had a rapport with other Verint products and were more familiar with their AI capabilities, making them the obvious choice.

Incentivized

• Azure Bot will only deliver according to the granularity of the FAQ it is feed. Otherwise, it has been a cost optimization tool for our organization.

• Human agent hours operations
• More interactions will be attended by AI agents
• Reducing human agent licensing costs
• Attending more interaction in less time

Incentivized