The Product (pitch)

Enterprises today struggle to manage a high volume of interactions with customers and their employees across various channels and languages. Ignoring this critical aspect can lead to poor end-user experiences and drain the productivity of support teams.

Conversational AI can help provide instant, personalized, and contextual responses while automating low-value interactions, resulting in optimal business outcomes.

The Kore.ai Experience Optimization (XO) Platform is a comprehensive enterprise-grade Conversational and Generative AI platform designed to help businesses enhance and optimize their customer and employee experiences. With its Generative AI and no-code capabilities, the platform is ideal for non-developers and business users to create AI-powered assistants for automating high-volume and low-value business interactions. The platform is compatible with more than 35 voice and digital channels and supports over 100 languages.

Any Sub-products or modules:

Apart from Intelligent Assistants, the XO Platform comes with a contact center module, an Agent Assistance module, and an enterprise search module that can be enabled at an additional cost

The XO Platform is use case and industry agnostic and can be deployed for any use case across any industry. In addition, the Kore.ai product ecosystem has intelligent virtual assistant solutions (accelerators) catering to different industries and domains.

In terms of customer experience, Kore.ai provides

• BankAssist - for BFSI
• FoodAssist - for F&B Industry
• RetailAssist - for Retail/E-commerce
• HealthAssist - For Healthcare

In terms of employee experience, Kore.ai provides

• HR Assist - For HR teams
• IT Assist - For IT Help Desk automation

Core Value Proposition:

• Create and deploy intelligent virtual assistants quickly with No-Code and GenAI Platform
• • The entire assistant development lifecycle can be completed on the drag-and-drop builder. It can also be automated by just providing the scenarios and the Generative AI-building sample dialog flows that you can build upon. You can automate the creation of dialogs from use case descriptions with the flexibility to review, edit, or rebuild.
• Omnichannel and Integration Capabilities
• • 35+ channels and 75+ integrations are supported out of the box including all the popular channels and systems, eliminating the need to develop a custom integration approach
• Multilingual Assistants
• • Supports 100+ languages, allowing you to connect with your customers, across all regions

• Open and Extensible Platform
• • It can integrate with any and every business systems, live chat platforms via APIs, if available, or can also support custom integrations with in-house SDK

Key Differentiators:

• Complete end-to-end Platform: Kore.ai offers a trustworthy end-to-end Platform and a true Automation first Contact Center as a service, with runtime execution, tools, and pre-built functionality for enterprise integration and authentication with systems of record. It handles every facet of the message lifecycle – from message routing, storage, and encryption to establishing secure connections through your firewall to on-premise services – and simplifies virtual assistant creation and maintenance.
• Multi-pronged NLP engine: Our multi-pronged NLP approach uses fundamental meaning, machine learning, and an ontology-based Knowledge Graph, which requires less training data and oversight time. This leads to fewer false positives and more satisfying user experiences. Our Platform also provides logic exits that allow you to extend it to leverage your own ML models or custom task implementations.
• Innovative features that enable enterprises to continuously improve IVAs on auto-pilot and extend our open platform architecture. Ability to train your virtual assistants using Large Language Models and Generative AI technologies.
• Intelligent Context Management: The Platform can understand conversation context and connect intentions across multiple sessions as well as understand and identify personal preferences, past interactions, domain terminology, and context switching to process and respond accordingly.
• Explainable AI: Kore.ai eliminates the "BigTech Black Box" by making the decisions of algorithms transparent to both business and technical people. This lets customers trace how interactions are processed, identify drop-off points, and continually optimize the Platform and the organization.
• Lowest TCO: Kore.ai has the lowest total cost of ownership by providing more capability than competitors, limiting the number of vendors required to deploy conversational AI, and through session-based pricing rather than fixed costs per VAs.
• Rapid development: Kore.ai's Builder tool provides a low-code/no-code, repeatable, and uniform method for building, testing, and deploying virtual assistants, eliminating expensive resources like hardware, custom development software, or hosting. Unlike the competition, each component of the virtual assistants you build is reusable, saving untold hours repeating the same process repeatedly and giving you more time to innovate.
• Omnichannel deployment: Virtual assistants built with Kore.ai can be easily deployed to multiple communication channels with a single configuration while offering flexibility to customize responses and use UI elements of each channel. Unlike the competition, which often requires you to use and maintain up-to-date channel-specific BotKits or other connectors, Kore.ai's connectors automatically handle channel-specific APIs and adapt each message according to the channel's unique format. Kore.ai's Platform allows users to converse on 35+ channels, including Search, Digital, IVR, SMS, email, Facebook Messenger, Slack, websites, mobile apps, and many more, with the ability to switch between each easily and efficiently.
• Flexible Deployment Options: Our Platform supports flexible deployment models, including on-cloud, on-premise, and hybrid (virtual private cloud) models. It can be deployed on the cloud to leverage multi-tenancy, fast time to value, flexibility, and cost savings. It can be deployed on-premise for maximum control or through a hybrid model that supports various deployment scenarios.
• Use case-agnostic: Useful for every industry, every role - Our AI-powered virtual assistants can meet unique operational requirements and perform multiple functions across diverse sectors - including Retail, Banking, Insurance, Airline, Telecom, Travel & Hospitality

How is the Value Prop Experienced?

For Kore.ai Customers:

1. When the developers/business users create dialog flows in minutes just by describing the scenario, or by dragging and dropping the building blocks
2. When the developers/business users deploy assistants on different channels with just one click. No need of building flows again for a new channel
3. When the developers need not build integration flows, as the 'Actions' are already baked in and just need to be enabled (for ex: creating a case is Salesforce, a ticket in ServiceNow etc

For End-users (who will interact with the bot ultimately:

1. When they can interact in natural language, and on anychannel of their choice, or even on multiple channels in just one interaction, as the assistant remembers the context across channels
2. When they can type in their own language, and its auto-detected and the response is provided in their language
3. When they don't have to leave their chat screen to talk to a live agent

Define

User Segmentation

Casual/Core/Power and features used

ICP/Company persona Based (in Brief)

Please note that Kore.ai also offers its products to small startups as part of its PLG strategy. However, we are not considering it as part of the segmentation primarily because the deal value in such cases is negligible (as compared to regular deals), and the sessions consumed by such small companies do not impact the company revenue significantly. These small customers can be considered as a tool for the expansion of the brand name and are 'nice to have' at this stage.

Natural Frequency Based

It must be noted here that the frequency from an end-user standpoint will vary. We are segmenting this based on how Kore.ai customers interact with the product and not the end-users.

Revenue Generated

Here, the 'Strategic account' need not necessarily be only Large Enterprises. The below segmentation is basically based on the deal size, and each of our ICPs may feature as one of the below 3 categories, depending on the domain and industry we are looking at.

Best Engagement Framework

Engagement Campaigns

Who is an Active User?

Any user who has published (live) one virtual assistant (bot), on at least one channel is an active user.

Product Insights (as per user insights, reviews etc.)

Feature(s) people come back to

• No-Code Tooling
• Easy channel deployment
• Contextual capabilities of virtual assistants
• Testing module - you can 'Talk to your bot' and observe as the end-customer
• Ease of integration
• New language enablement with 3-clicks

Feature(s) valued the most

• The NLP engine
• Bring your own LLM
• LLM/Generative AI capabilities
• Flexible Deployment options (Cloud, on-prem, Hybrid)
• Comprehensive Analytics and Dashboards

Which feature(s) are least valued

• Process Apps
• Data Tables

Engagement Campaigns

Retention

Understand:

Current retention rate - The average industry retention rate is above 90%, and the Net Retention Rate is 100+%

Kore.ai has an annual gross retention rate of ~97.14% and a Net Retention Rate of well above 100%. It is meeting and even exceeding industry standards.

Retention Curve

Insights:

• Our best-performing customers are our Power users, who have a average contract period of 36 months, and close to 40% of the power customers continue the relationship beyond the 3 year mark. Some of the customers have been through 2 such cycles (6+ years), making them extremely committed to our platform.
• Our core users too, close to 50% of them continue the relationship for an average of 1+ years or more. However, the upsell, cross-sell opportunities are a little restricted (not captured in graph. personal observation)
• The casual users, which include small companies or PLG customers, usually churn by or before the 12 month period (with PLG ones being on a monthly contract drop off), with only a minuscule number choosing to continue the relationship beyond 2 years

Define

Top reasons for user churn:

• Pricing
• Platform issues
• Dissatisfied with the support service
• Poor user/platform adoption
• Complex tools for their needs
• Business shut down
• Competition from Giants (Google, IBM, Cisco etc.)
• ROI not realized
• Inadequate ongoing Implementation support

Voluntary and Involuntary reasons:

Negative Actions:

• Low NPS ratings
• Increased number of support tickets
• Focus only on the platform issues, during CSM interaction
• increased escalations
• Personal calls to executive leadership (only in case of big enterprises + power users)
• Refusal to participate in reference calls
• Refusal to attend event/webinar invitations
• Non-renewal of sub-product module (for power users)
• Releasing an RFP during contract renewal without your influence or discussion with you

Resurrection Campaigns:

Kore.ai has a strong retention rate. Also, given the massive investment, training cost and efforts it takes to implement a solution of this size, we do not experience too much churn for the enterprise and SMB users (core and power) on an annual basis. However, these are high-paying customers, and even a small churn rate from these segments will hurt the brand reputation, and, obviously the revenue.

Also, on the other hand, among the casual users who churn, the majority are small startups acquired through PLG strategy. Given their size and the deal value, it generally does not make business sense to put in the efforts of multiple teams to resurrect these customers.

Therefore, for the resurrection strategy, we will only consider the core, power, and casual users whose deal value is more than $60K annually.

We will base our strategies based on the churn reason

1. Pricing:

User type: The pricing issues are mainly observed in core and casual users

Pitch: We want to ensure you continue to benefit from the Kore.ai technology

Offer: We will check the unused sessions. If there is more than 30% sessions remaining at the time when termination intent has been expressed, customer is allowed to roll over all the remaining sessions to next billing period

In addition, the session pricing for the next billing period will have 10% discount, and discount will go up if they commit to a 3 year contract. Tiered pricing.

Frequency and Timing: Bi-weekly from the point when the intent of termination is expressed

Success Metrics: Customer signs a new contract

2. Unused Sessions/ ROI not realized:

User type: In the first year for core and power users

Pitch: Optimize your interactions, not just mere automation

Offer:

• • Workshop; A 4-hour curated session where advanced features of the bot are revisited, and the client team is educated on how they can extend it to complex use cases as well
  • A 'Did you know' series of mail and in-app communication getting their attention to these features, and how they can leverage the platform to its fullest

This ensures that users can fulfill more tasks through the bot, and in turn this positively impacts the session consumption, reduced AHT, response time, and user experience

Example:

Subject: Universal bots can help you connect all your standard bots under one interface

Did you know, ABC, a top healthcare customer with a similar use case to [client company name] has been able to provide a single user interface to their customers and employees, irrespective of their requirement. This was made possible with the help of universal bot concept provided by Kore.ai XO Platform

It provides a modular approach to your bot building activity and allows you to connect several standard bots under one master bot i.e. the 'Universal Bot'. Once connected, the universal bot intelligently identifies the user intent, and invokes the right standard bot to fetch the info, which is then passed to th universal bot, and ultimately relayed back to the end-user

Kindly select your preferred meeting slot for our team to walk you through and implement the universal bot at no additional fee (offer valid for next 30 days)

Frequency and Timing: During quarterly cadence or within 60 days from the date customer expresses dissatisfaction

Success Metrics: Increase in total sessions, top tasks, and goal completion rate

3. Platform Issues:

User type: Core and Power users

Offer: The first step before offering is to understand the specific issue each of these user is facing. We need to understand if this is platform issue, or if the issue is specific to this customer. If its a platform issue, obviously the logical action is to fix the issue. If its a customer specific issue, we will take appropriate actions based on user type

For core users: We will offer personalized support and educative videos and tutorials. Our team will consult and help them with workarounds.

For power users: On-site consultation. Our solution engineering resources will have a 1 or 2 -day workshop to understand and resolve the 'issues' these customers are facing

Frequency and Timing: After repeated creation of tickets, or 2 escalations within 6 months

Success Metrics: Improved NPS score, reduction in support ticket, NO escalations

4. Support Issues: Before we move forward, it should be noted that Kore.ai charges additional fee for enterprise support service, which usually is a high amount.

User type: Core and Power (high-value strategic account)

Offer: Face time and priority access to executive leadership till the issue reaches point of resolution and satisfaction. Also, assurance that if there 3 consecutive SLA misses, the customer will have the option to terminate the contract immediately

• To partner with one of their existing SIs, GSIs for partner-oriented support for Sev 2, and Sev 3 issues, with the Kore.ai support team coming in only for Sev1 issues

Frequency and Timing: After 2 escalations within the first quarter or more than 2 nudges/reminders on their support tickets

Success Metrics: SLA metrics, improved NPS

5. Champion leaving the customer org

User type: Power users (with >$1M Deal LTV only)

Offer: An exclusive all-expense paid invitation to the new stakeholders to our Annual conv AI summit. The pitch here is not to sell or reignite the partnership. It will be purely projected as a networking exercise and will be a semi-organic way of allowing our leadership to have facetime, and also allowing our existing customers to speak on our behalf (Fireside chats, recorded interviews, keynote speech)

The opportunity will be used by leaders to understand what is needed to win them back and meet/exceed the churned customer's requirements, all while not being too obvious about it.

Frequency and Timing: After the termination request has been made or initiation of our champion leaving, whichever is nearer to the summit date. The reason here is the summit is usually planned and scheduled strategically months before the annual renewals of our largest customers.

Metrics: Email open rate, BANT redefined new evaluation criteria defined