【China Startup】 企业的“智齿”长啥样？How precisely can robots read humans?

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In 2011, inspired by Apple’s voice recognition Siri system, Xu Yi was determined to introduce China’s own intelligent assistant. And five years later, he has managed to turn his vision into reality. 

In 2014, after years of research, Xu set up his company, along with three other partners, in Beijing. And sobot Co. Ltd. was born.

“The overall service system in China’s companies are not advanced, which could be improved through intelligence and advanced management idea,” said Xu, CEO of sobot Co. Ltd., a company which aims to help Chinese enterprises build a complete and sound service-providing system.

Since it started operations, the company has expanded from 10 to 100 employees, and in Xu’s words, zhichi sobot system is “the world’s first intelligent customer service product”. 

To learn more about how zhichi sobot system works and what that means to the service industry, CCTVNEWS caught up with Xu at his office in Beijing’s Haidian district.

Q1: What is zhichi sobot system and how does it work?

Xu: zhichi sobot systemt is an intelligent assistant platform for business. But instead of simply providing robotic customer service, it assists companies to build a complete service system for customers.

So when a person comes to our interface, he/she willbe received by a robot first as the robot is capable of handling most of the questions. And in case the robot can’t answer some questions, our system will transfer it to operator.

But meanwhile, the robot will be working with the operator to comb and search for answers.

If the questions are still unanswered, our system is enabled to create a work sheet, through which, our entire staff can participate, cooperate with the operators to provide customer service. So zhichi  sobot system not only answers questions as apart of providing customer service but also helps companies to build a completeservice-providing system. 

Q2: What drove you to venture into this industry? 

Xu: In China, there are two modes in the customer service industry. The first one is the call centers, but there are many problems associated with it, such as high cost, and users normally do not end up with good experience. 

In the mobile Internet area, to solve problems through telephone is not a good approach. So a lot of companies have switched to online customer service. But it is still costly and one can only receive a maximum of five customers at a time, and 70% to 80% questions are repetitive. 

People haven’t integrated these two modes well. So we wanted to make something that can not only integrate them together and improve the work efficiency but also reduce cost.

Q3: How is your company different? 

Xu: Many companies in China provide traditional customer service. They focus more on management, which helps to bring value and expand business for companies. 

But apart from providing these services, we also help companies to reduce the cost and boost sales. During our nine months of operation, we have provided services to 15,000 customers, and we helped them lower the cost by 50% to 60%. 

Take LETV, one of China’s leading video providers, for example: the cost of their customer services have been cut down to nearly 40% per year. Besides this, we helped minimize the response time of a customer service staff from 60 seconds to 5 seconds, which means, we can now receive 20 customers in one minute, compared to one customer every minute in the past. 

Q4: Who is your target client?

Xu: Our services extend to around 10 industries, including e-commerce business, Internet finance sector, O2O, B2B, P2P, intellectual hardware sector and universities.

Q5: How accurate does zhichi sobot system work?

Xu: Almost 97%, which means the robot can handle 97 out of 100 questions, according to our company’s data and statistic monitoring department. 

Q6: What is your profit model?

Xu: We have 15,000 registered clients on our platform. They need to pay a certain amount of authorization fees, ranging from about 1,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan, depending on what kind of services they choose.

Q7: How do you see the possibility of Artificial Intelligence replacing human beings?

Xu: The arrival of each new technology will certainly optimize the complete industrial set up – just like the first and the second Industrial Revolution. 

It liberates people and allows them to materialize their values by producing things with much significance that spurs the development of the entire society. 

So I think, Artificial Intelligence saves more people from repetitive work and exponentially escalates the world’s wealth and values.

FOR FRESH STARTUP

Entrepreneurship is an attitude of how you treat your life and career. There are many bumps along this road, but I enjoy it, despite the pains and happiness. At the end of the day, it’s all about survival.

Xu Yi, CEO of sobot Co. Ltd.

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