Do You Dream Up (dydu): Introducing Conversationnal Strategy in Customer Experience

Thomas Dufermont, Marketing and Communications Manager

A vital element that differentiates a customer service operator from a chatbot is the ‘human touch.’ However, the evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) has made chatbot interactions much more human-like; similar to the one built by Société Générale, one of the largest banks in France. The bank wanted to create a chatbot for their customers to get immediate and automatic responses to everyday queries. Société Générale sought the expertise of Do You Dream Up (dydu)—a software editor specialised in natural language processing, one of the various AI application field—and built a chatbot for their customer engagements. dydu’s product allowed the Société Générale to craft an AI-powered chatbot with a conversational interface, capable of answering queries such as ‘What is my recent electric bill?’ or ‘How much did I spend for clothes this year?’ or ‘Have I received my paycheck yet?’ It also enables customers to have a graphic overview of their expenditure and revenue per category and time. “Our customer service experience as well as our conversational UX approach enables a humane relationship between the bank and their customers using NLP and AI,” says Thomas Dufermont, marketing and communications manager at dydu.

Innovation has always been the driving force behind dydu’s proficiency in the AI arena. To uphold the philosophy of staying on the edge of new technological advancements, the company has created a dedicated team under the umbrella of dydu.labs, which constantly and unceasingly pushes new ideas and converts them into viable projects.

We started working on chatbot long before the hype around it, and thus, we have earned the trust of quite a few pioneers in the industry

“We take new ideas wherever they come from—customers, employees, family, and friends—and build prototypes that will shape our products of tomorrow,” adds Dufermont.

With such approach and exceptional track record of 10 years, dydu is one of the earliest innovators in the NLP segment, specialising in ‘homemade voice-based interfaces’ for robots, smartphones, home automation, and customer service systems. The company’s flagship offering is crafted using NLP algorithms that understand a wide variety of questions, whose answers are provisioned through an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. The chatbot learns and understands conversations much more effectively, through regular usage, owing to the built-in supervised machine learning capability. It allows the users to manage and improve the bot upon the user interface on a regular basis, without coding or developing skills.

“We started working on chatbots long before the hype around them, and thus, we have earned the trust of quite a few pioneers in the industry. We manage more than 150 accounts, with 60 percent of the French Stock Exchange (CAC40) being a part of this portfolio,” states Dufermont. dydu’s NLP-powered software can be used for various applications such as the traditional conversational chatbots, voicebots, and callbots, with further enhancement lined up in the company’s roadmap for the future. Our open approach through API allows quick and easy connections to third party solutions—CRM, ticketing tools, Cognitive Services—that enable our customers to deploy complex use cases with customised answers.

It can even help the decision makers in organisations to streamline various business processes along with interdepartmental operations such as IT and HR. An example of this application is portrayed through the company’s collaboration with a Belgian Pharmaceutical firm, Solvay. Adopting dydu’s chatbot, Solvay assisted their employees in carrying out HR procedures such as document generation, holiday bookings, and internal operations.

Many such collaborations have cemented dydu’s foothold in the AI arena, rightly earning the company numerous recognitions such as “Pass French Tech” awarding its hypergrowth. The company has also participated in the ‘Prospecting Mission’ in North America that connects innovative ecosystems to promote newer technologies such as the one offered by dydu. “While the world competes for fundraisers, we are focused on our goal of achieving seamless product and business development. This virtuous cycle ensures a healthy growth for dydu,” concludes Dufermont.