ADORE is a newly built automated software package that uses Artificial Intelligence to help organizations reduce errors, gain time, improve the quality of its services and increase customer satisfaction.
Customer service, GDPR cleaning and document handling are the software’s key components. Utilities provider Lampiris for one already uses the product to great success.
Setting priorities straight
ADORE helps to tackle the complex service requests many organizations are faced with, requests their customers want to see answered asap. “Customers today want to get the right answer as fast as they can. Not answering their service requests immediately is often a reason to look elsewhere. Customers have also become increasingly critical,” says AE CEO Stijn Vander Plaetse.
How does AE introduce ADORE at the companies that want to use the software? “As part of a training process, we determine the scope of the problem together with our clients. What are the sort of questions the company usually gets?” explains ADORE lead Bram Vanschoenwinkel. “Is there a lot of repetitive work to be done? ADORE can help automate that. Do the questions asked end up with the right person to answer them? No? Then ADORE can automatically send them on to the correct contact.”
“ADORE can even determine the priority by which a question needs answering. Is the question churn sensitive? Does it detect that the customer is in any way not satisfied? Then the request will be handled with a high priority.”
“Employees spend a lot of time identifying the nature of the question and collecting the proper information to answer it,” adds Vanschoenwinkel. “ADORE analyzes the question and scans for the information needed to really understand it and to formulate the proper answer. It even scans attachments.” This saves a lot of time and avoids that the info needs to be transposed to be used further down the process.
“A concrete example of such an ‘automated contract entry’-case is Mediagenix,” says Vanschoenwinkel. “This company produces planning software for broadcasting networks to import complex contracts, such as content broadcasting rights, into its systems. Today this is a manual process, but thanks to ADORE, this will become fully automated.”
Automated answers in the proper context
ADORE is so technically adept that it automatically suggests answers to the questions asked. “That’s a real breakthrough in natural language processing,” says Vanschoenwinkel. “At AE, we work with question-answering models: deep neural networks that are trained to handle giant amounts of data and add context to them. As such, they can provide the correct answers to customer questions.”
Learning by example
Every organization in every industry can make use of ADORE. “We’re continuously training our software. Some models are trained using public data such as Wikipedia. This data, however, is too general for, say, the pharmaceutical industry. That’s why we do ‘transfer learning’ with labeled examples: we feed ADORE with a whole slew of examples (texts, documents, …) from a specific industry, making ADORE learn itself new info all the time.”
Self learning through its own feedback loop
Not only can ADORE handle service requests automatically, it can also recognize documents, such as email attachments, by type and extract detailed information from it. “Handling an invoice, you would expect amounts and products, but in a contract, you’ll find no such info. ADORE knows these things.”
But what if ADORE does not recognize certain data? “Our clients get access to a user interface to signal such cases,” says Vanschoenwinkel. “If ADORE is unsure what do to next, the system creates a notification saying what it thinks is meant by the data. The user then gets to validate the information or not. This feedback loop back to the algorithm makes ADORE even more self-learning.”
GDPR cleaning in free text
Last but not least ADORE can also anonymize GDPR-sensitive data, even in free text. “Anonymization is a common term in data management, but quite often it only happens in structured tables. Our system also handles the cleaning in mailings or other free text. That’s quite unique.”
Human technology at your service
“ADORE in no way wants to push the human aspect aside. On the contrary: AI has to complement what people do. AE invests in human(e) technology: technology made for, by, and the service of people. We aim to help people and make them better,” concludes CEO Stijn Vander Plaetse.
