Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, Tangoe is the industry-leading global provider of technology expense management and managed mobility services for enterprises. Nearly half of the Fortune 500 relies on Tangoe to pay their bills, process their orders, manage their inventory, and find savings. Hundreds of bots are working behind the scenes in Tangoe’s mobile ecosystem to streamline core functions. To make automation a little more fun and a little less intimidating, Tangoe personified a few of them, and last Thursday, the company introduced those bots. Tangoe noticed that the bots you’ll read about following represent only a mere fraction of all the automation capabilities performed at Tangoe. So, meet the Bots:
Mikey’s job involves venturing out to different carrier portals to collect invoice and billing information. Since every carrier requires a different path and has a unique set of circumstances when it comes to invoice retrieval, he’s been programmed to query these portals in a way that won’t trigger any denial-of-service attacks or interruptions (Tangoe holds a patent for this ML technology).
Johnny was built after Mikey’s conception to perform specific activities within the mobile user interface to eliminate repetitive, time-consuming tasks. He can handle things like suspending and unsuspending phone lines, changing carrier plans, and managing upgrades.
Audrey is a virtual assistant chatbot, which means she has real-time conversations with Tangoe’s customers! She recognizes messages, translates that text into an intent that she understands, and responds accordingly to fulfill the request. She can communicate with customers via both text messages and phone calls (here’s where IVR* comes into play), and she’s able to quickly determine whether she or Johnny can handle the inquiry or if she’ll need to pass it off to one of her human colleagues to complete.
As a communication parser, Otto’s role is quite simple. He’s tasked with surveying emails, pulling out pertinent information, and providing updates and alerts to allow for the completed cycle of procurement activity.
Rosie, an optimization bot, was designed to help save customers money. She examines waves of data to find discrepancies in carrier rates versus contract stipulations and searches for any inactive phone lines that have gone undetected. After obtaining and analyzing that data, she spits out cost-saving recommendations to customers.
*Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Technology that allows a computer to interact with and understand a human over the phone.
