Googles CallJoy phone agent for small businesses gets smarter, more conversational

Earlier this year, Googles in-house incubator launched CallJoy, a virtual customer service phone agent for small businesses that could block spammers, answer calls, provide callers with basic business information and redirect to SMS other requests, like appointment booking or to-go orders.

Today, CallJoy is rolling out its first major update, which now enables the computer phone agent to have more of a conversation with the customer by asking questions and providing more information, among other improvements.

Instead, the business owner has to program in the sort of customer inquiries it wants CallJoy to be able to respond to and handle.

The service already gathers call data like phone numbers, audio and call transcripts into an online dashboard for further analysis. Business owners can tag calls and run reports to get a better understanding of their call volume, peak call times and what people wanted to know.This information can be used to better staff their phone lines during busy times or to update their website or business listings, for example.And now, it can help the business owner understand what sort of inquiries it should train the CallJoy phone agent on, too.

Once trained, the agent can speak an answer, send a link to the customers phone with the information or offer to connect the caller to the business phone number to reach a real person.

Its considered a separate entity some of the apps produced by Area 120 dont even mention their Google affiliation in their App Store descriptions, for instance.

Original article
Author: Sarah Perez

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