A couple of weeks ago, I was speaking with Chris Granger, COO of Empire Today, about how Empire approaches customer service at their contact centers. He brought up an image of a duck: gliding above the surface while paddling furiously below. Chris said the customer at the other end of the line should never see all of the work being done behind the scenes. It should look easy.
That analogy stuck with me throughout the next few days. It’s exactly how we approach our product, too! We don’t need our partners to understand complex orchestration or the model decisions we make (which isn’t to say our engineers wouldn’t be happy to break it down for whoever is interested.) At risk of being cliche, we want to make AI feel simple. Easy.
A great agent is just like a duck: the easier the call feels, the more work is happening out of sight. So what’s going on down there?
The customer’s experience
Susan calls in to a customer service center to make some changes to her order.
An agent on the line greets her by name, and asks if she’s calling about last week’s gift for her mom. She says yes! While Susan hunts down the confirmation number, the agent waits rather than jumping in on the first pause. Halfway through a thought, Susan remembers she needs to change the delivery address. The agent follows the correction, confirms the new address, and reassures her that the gift will still arrive in time. Before hanging up, Susan adds a card to the order. The call takes a few minutes, and Susan hangs up feeling taken care of.
The work behind it
A lot has to happen behind the scenes to make that call go as smoothly as it did. Here’s the paddling:
A natural, seamless conversation. This is the most important part of any voice AI conversation, and takes a lot of parts working together. Tango, our industry-leading conversational awareness model, accurately identifies interruptions and end-of-turn. Our voices sound like actual people, and answer fast enough that the line never goes awkwardly quiet. Tango also reads sentiment, which is how our agents pick up on how customers are feeling.
Knowing your customer. Our agents remember every customer: their history, their preferences, and what they ordered last. This same memory carries across phone, text, email, and chat. So every conversation picks up where it left off, and your customer always feels like a regular.
Knowing your business. Customers often call in hunting for answers. Does this product come in another size? Is it still in stock? What’s the current discount on a two-pack? Connecting an agent to a constantly updating knowledge base, while ensuring it never hallucinates, is a complex task.
Taking action. More often than not, customers need your agent’s assistance: placing an order, changing an address, filling out an application. Our agents do so inside your systems accurately and consistently, so the change is real by the time the call ends. Smart AI isn’t a stopgap or an attempt to route callers away from your human agents. It’s a solution.
Following up. In many instances, customers reach out to your call center over different touch points throughout their journey. Our agents handle their whole relationship. For Renewal by Andersen, that means pipelines that include lead qualification, appointment booking, reminders, and follow-ups. For JG Wentworth, it’s walking a customer through an application process, even when it takes a few tries.
On working hard, and why it pays off
Like Chris, we at Simple are obsessed with quality. We hire the best of the Silicon Valley, and put in the hours to ensure that our product is the best on the market. It’s a core part of the Simple philosophy, cemented by my years at MIT, Meta, and Y Combinator: we’re not afraid to put in the work. Actually, we’re motivated by it!
Also like Chris, we hope to make what we do look easy. You shouldn’t have to think about orchestration or models, and your customers shouldn’t either (most of our work goes into making sure they don’t). It’s a call center that just works. We’ll keep paddling away.
