Meet ultimate.ai: Driving exceptional customer service across Europe
Artificial Intelligence is buzzing in almost every industry with serious force and no signs of slowing down. Companies are rushing to be the first in theirs field to add AI, without necessarily being aware of its exact use cases. Already hundreds of companies have launched their own versions of what has now become a crowded space of chatbots run on AI to tackle customer service issues. The Helsinki- and Berlin-based ultimate.ai approaches AI as not a solution to customer service itself, but rather a tool for making agents smarter, more efficient and freeing them up for more demanding tasks.
Ultimate.ai was founded by three childhood friends in November 2016 and launched its first product in summer 2017. The team had, and still has, a strong belief that the role of customer service will only increase in the future. For example in the U.S. alone bad customer service costs companies $1.6 trillion in a year. In large corporations, customer agents are the only ones who have one-on-one discussions with the company’s customers every day. So why not invest in these dialogues?
“Companies have learned to see great customer service as a competitive advantage rather than just a cost center. In the future, we’ll see customer service develop into having a more sales-oriented role, which will only increase its importance,” says Reetu Kainulainen, CEO at ultimate.ai.
In search of solutions to develop customer service for clients in Finland, the team quickly ran into a serious obstacle — how to handle the relatively complicated Finnish language. There weren’t any technologies available that could’ve done the job, so the founders developed their entire deep learning stack in-house, which produced two significant breakthroughs.
Firstly, since having to deal with the complicated Finnish language, ultimate.ai’s technology is fully language-agnostic, meaning a language can be added at native fluency in just a few hours. With this key capability, the company is already driving expansion across Europe, with a heavy focus on the Nordics, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the UK.
Another unique component of their technology is the ability for clustering. Their algorithm will automatically use a client’s historical customer service logs to identify common questions and answers used to train the AI. By doing so, this radically decreases client onboarding times from months to weeks, which in turn seriously boosts the scalability of the company. In addition to customer service chats, their solution can be integrated to emails too, which still is the largest customer service channel.
Ultimate.ai has been on a roll ever since launching its product last summer. The company has grown tenfold since January, and already serves 25 major enterprise clients, among the likes of Zalando, Telia and Finnair, not to mention strong partnerships with industry powerhouses SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce and Genesys.
The team has their near-term plans set on delivering on their promises to every single customer, and gather the required data to prove how the product really brings value to customer service. Ultimate.ai is laying down the foundations to support its long-term growth, and soon will be ready to hit the ground running.
Ready to make history with ultimate.ai? Let’s.
