Vonage, a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, today announced that Australia-based startup Curious Thing is using the Vonage Communication Platform (VCP) to scale its solutions and improve customer experiences with automated and AI-enabled proactive customer engagement.
Curious Thing is a voice-based conversational AI startup. Its voice AI technology is currently used in proactive call outreach and inbound service augmentation, helping ecommerce, financial services and healthcare providers re-engage with customers and uncover deeper insights from conversations.
Vonage Communications APIs allow developers to easily enhance and build intelligent, intuitive customer experiences directly into their existing applications and devices. The combination of Curious Thing and Vonage APIs, including Vonage's Voice, SMS, Numbers and Reports, enables Curious Thing's customers to connect at scale, across geographies and channels.
Safely Establishing Contact During the Pandemic While Ensuring Business Continuity
At the beginning of the pandemic, a customer in the public sector approached Curious Thing with an urgent request to connect with service users and determine compliance with trading requirements. This information would impact public safety and people's livelihoods, but it was an insurmountable task if done manually. With Curious Thing and Vonage, the customer was able to establish intelligent conversations with 150,000 people in 10 days, in a reliable and secure manner. COVID-19 has fundamentally changed how businesses operate and how people interact with those organizations, underscoring the need for the customer to continue connecting with service users in multiple ways, in their preferred modality.
"With the Curious Thing engine, we can understand people in their own language," explains Rik Johnson, Head of Solutions, Curious Thing. "Without Vonage, we wouldn't be able to connect our customers with huge volumes of people at scale globally, while maintaining personalized connections. The combination of the Curious Thing engine and the near-limitless capability of Vonage APIs helps us solve a variety of problems for our customers."
The team behind Curious Thing is focused on building intelligent communications solutions that provide personalized experiences - from AI call outreach that mimics conversational interactions to automated conversational AI campaigns that have the capacity to handle thousands of calls per day. Backed by Vonage, Curious Thing is constantly innovating and re-imagining what it means to connect.
July, a direct-to-consumer travel brand, embarked on a conversational commerce AI project with Curious Thing and Vonage to understand cart abandonment and ways to encourage purchase completion.
"We are always looking for new channels to add to our marketing stack and conversational AI was a natural thing to try after the results we've seen with SMS and email marketing," said July co-founder Richard Li. "The real-time personalization of AI technology will get us a lot of cut-through compared to other channels. In the coming years, AI will continue to help e-commerce businesses scale and meet the demand of consumers, especially when it comes to customer experience."
"Through the Vonage Communications Platform, Curious Thing has been able to easily integrate scalable, international capabilities into its existing offering and improve customer experiences with automated and AI-enabled proactive customer engagement," said Savinay Berry, EVP of Product and Engineering for Vonage. "Businesses of all sizes are looking to engage with their customers more deeply by shifting from notifications and transactions to conversations and ultimately a future of immersive engagement."
