Customer engagement

Our customers win prestigious 2021 Stevie® Awards & Nuance earns Technology Partner of the Year

The Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service are the world’s top honors for customer service, contact center, business development, and sales professionals. The Stevie’s are awarded annually, with 2020 having entries from more than 2,300 organizations from 51 nations and across virtually every industry. Stevie Awards winners are determined by over 160 expert professionals within nine specialized judging committees from around the world.

Since 2013, Nuance’s enterprise customers worldwide have won over 45 Stevie Awards across customer engagement, agent productivity, and innovation using Nuance’s AI-powered conversational AI, digital messaging, biometrics, and Agent AI capabilities. This year we are pleased to share our customer winners of 2021 Stevie® Awards:

USAA – Gold for Most Valuable Response by a Customer Service Team for COVID-19 Response: USAA’s Virtual Agent (Nuance-Powered Virtual Agent)

USAA, one of the world’s largest financial institutions serving over 13 million current and former members of the U.S. military and their families, worked with Nuance to develop an enterprise-grade virtual assistant capable of understanding context, making predictions, and efficiently handling member inquiries. Working with Nuance, USAA was able to offer its members rapid and intelligent responses during the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, including information on insurance premium credits, payment protection plans, stimulus check updates, and more.

Nuance Solution: USAA digital virtual assistant based upon Nuance conversational AI

Telefónica – Gold for Innovation in Customer Service (Telecommunications Industries): Using AI to Prioritize and Protect Seniors Using the Sound of their Voice

At the onset of the pandemic when increased fraud across digital channels was disproportionately affecting seniors, Telefónica turned to Nuance to enhance its AI-enabled age detection capability to identify seniors by the sound of their voice as they called into their contact center for customer care. As a result of this innovation, the solution helped ensure Telefónica and its customers were safe from fraudsters who would otherwise attempt to socially engineer their way into an elderly individual’s account to steal critical information. This not only enhanced customer experience but also aided a vulnerable population during an unprecedented time.

Nuance Solution: Automated voice biometrics using Nuance Gatekeeper

Cabify – Silver for Best Use of Technology in Customer Service (All Other Industries): Cabify Fuels Customer and Driver Experience with Launch of AI-based Virtual Assistant ‘ABI’

Cabify, a ride-hailing company akin to Uber and Lyft, with operations in Spain and throughout much of Latin America, underwent rapid expansion last year and continues to grow. Knowing that it needed to meet the growing needs of its customers and staff quickly, Cabify leveraged Nuance’s Customer Engagement Platform to deploy a VA named “ABI” to help answer communications coming in from different channels, from different countries, and in different languages. With ABI, Cabify customers enjoy personalized, convenient engagements across digital channels and its workers can focus on more valuable, user-facing requests. What’s more, ABI also supports drivers during the lengthy onboarding process by guiding them through the most common questions while advancing drivers with complex issues to human agents for additional help.

Nuance Solutions: Cabify ABI digital and voice virtual assistant based upon Nuance conversational AI

Nuance – Silver for Sales or Customer Service Solutions Technology Partner of the Year

At the onset of the pandemic, Nuance created a comprehensive list of no-cost solutions that would enable organizations to adapt to the challenges presented by the pandemic. They also fast-tracked the development of new, innovative features that would enhance their current software’s capabilities to tackle newly emerging issues the pandemic had created. With Nuance’s no-cost solutions and broader conversational AI innovations, its customers were able to quickly pivot to the new remote environment while continuing to deliver superior customer service and experiences.

Nuance Solutions:  Nuance Intelligent Engagement Platform: conversational AI, engagement AI, security AI.

IAG – Bronze for Innovation in Customer Service (Financial Services Industries): IAG Generated Meaningful Customer Insights with the Help of Messaging Bot, Arlo the Koala

Australian-based insurance company IAG is the name behind some of the most respected and relied-upon insurance brands in Australia and New Zealand, underwriting over $12 billion of premium per annum. To meet growing consumer expectations for effective and meaningful business-to-consumer communication, IAG deployed Nuance’s Digital Engagement Platform via Facebook Messenger to interact with customers on a deeper level – with some assistance from an animated koala named Arlo, who helped prove the power of messaging. With Arlo, IAG was able to increase customer engagement during crises like COVID-19 and the 2019 bushfires.

Nuance Solutions: IAG Arlo digital virtual assistant and digital messaging based upon Nuance conversational AI and Digital Engagement Platform.

“In the toughest working environment in memory for most organizations, 2021 Stevie Award winners still found ways to innovate, grow sales, please their customers, and secure new business,” said Stevie Awards president Maggie Gallagher. “The judges have recognized and rewarded this, and we join them in applauding this year’s winners for their continued success.”

At Nuance, we believe in creating technology that gets out of the way and takes us further. We are transforming customer experiences with AI-first intelligent engagement and security solutions that surround consumers and brands with intelligence from first contact to resolution. Our customers using this AI approach, including the innovative brands above, are achieving incredible outcomes—from improvements in customer and agent experience to reductions in cost and increases in revenue.

No matter the industry, outstanding customer care is at the heart of any successful organization. In today’s fast-moving digital environment, it has never been more important to innovate for customer service experiences. We are proud to be recognized by the Stevie Awards for the cutting-edge conversational and ambient AI technologies that Nuance continues to pioneer and we congratulate our forward-thinking customers for revolutionizing intelligent and natural experiences that their customers enjoy.

Details about the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service can be found here.

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Robert Weideman

About Robert Weideman

Robert Weideman is the executive vice president and general manager of the Nuance Enterprise Division, responsible for customer self-service solutions that are used by leading organizations around the world to automate and optimize the customer care experience. Robert is driving the team behind Nina, the virtual assistant for customer service, which delivers human-like customer service for contact centers, and mobile and web apps. In his tenure with Nuance, he has been the general manager for the Dragon and Imaging businesses, as well as SVP of international marketing in EMEA. Previously, Robert served as chief marketing officer for ScanSoft, and vice president of marketing for the Adobe Systems' portfolio company Cardiff Software. He has also held senior marketing and management roles at TGS.com and CA (Computer Associates). Robert holds a BS in Computer Information Systems and Software Engineering from San Diego State University.