• by Ray Schultz , June 18, 2020

Astute has debuted a customer service tool that it claims processes inbound emails and writes responses.

The new offering, Email Virtual Assistant (EVA), cuts the time and cost of customer email management, the firm says.

EVA is designed to relieve the pressure of dealing with “massive spikes in contact volume” and the resulting email backlog, says Alex George, president and CTO of Astute.

The tool uses natural-language processing to read incoming messages, interpret the case coding from the text, and leverage response history from agents to create replies, the firm says.

In doing this, EVA can determine replacement products, coupons, gift cards and the type of goodwill that is needed, it says.

In addition, these responses can be passed to a human agent to review and edit before sending, Astute says.

EVA frees the agents of “tedious and repetitive work,” George adds.