LogMeIn Goes 'Bold' with AILogMeIn Goes 'Bold' with AI

Following on its August 2017 acquisition of Nanorep, a provider of digital self-service chatbots and virtual assistants, LogMeIn last week enhanced its Bold360 customer engagement product portfolio with artificial intelligence (AI).

With this move, LogMeIn aims to bring AI and chatbots together with human agents for self-service and agent-assisted engagement, Ryan Lester, director of customer engagement technologies at LogMeIn, told me in a briefing.

The Bold360 family of products is aimed at any business, large or small, regardless of industry vertical, Lester said, because all companies today will have a website where customers go to solve problems. "Bold360 is about creating a front line of automated support with a live agent tied into the process" Lester said. "It's relevant to a variety of industries -- any place where customers interact."

The product family comprises the Bold360 intelligent customer engagement platform for contact center agents and Bold360 ai, a conversational self-service chatbot. With Bold360 ai, companies can add bots to their websites regardless of their knowledge bases -- no data scientists required. Once running, the bot will identify frequently asked questions the company can use to build its knowledge base, Lester said. For example, if many customers ask about a certain technical issue with a product, the company can create a troubleshooting resource. That way, the bot can then direct any other customer asking about the same issue to the document.

In addition, companies can tune their chatbots to escalate customer inquiries to live agents, Lester said. For example, a customer could tell the bot directly that he or she would like to talk to a live agent. Or, a customer could ask the bot a question -- for example, "How do I close my account?" -- and the bot would say, "That's not something I can handle well enough; let me pass you over to a live agent for assistance." Finally, the bot could pick up on sentiment so when a customer starts using words that indicate frustration, it could pass the conversation on to a live agent for better support. Interactions are escalated to live agents in the same chat window.

Beyond chatbot interactions, AI comes into play in other ways, too. On the contact center side, the Bold360 platform can analyze context to route interactions to the best live agent. It can also surface content to agents that helps them better address customer inquiries. Additionally, Bold360 integrates with other business software like Salesforce and Zendesk, allowing information from those applications to appear in Bold360 agent interface for easy accessibility.

LogMeIn is banking on two main differentiators with this product -- easy implementation and ease of use, Lester said. "We wanted to make the product very actionable so marketing or contact center managers can log in to the product and understand it," he said. "We're not trying to create something like IBM Watson; we don't think that's something that most of the market is trying to solve. At the end of the day, this is a business tool and we're trying to minimize the amount required from a data science perspective."

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