Sierra launches Accelerators for common customer service workflows

Prebuilt workflows for routine interactions

Sierra describes Accelerators as a way to handle the basic building blocks of customer experiences, which it says are increasingly being commoditized by AI. The packages create and maintain high-volume workflows out of the box, together with basic integrations and guardrails.

Examples vary by industry. Retail workflows can cover order tracking and returns, while healthcare Accelerators include appointment scheduling, patient authentication and clinical safety guardrails. Banking examples include transaction search, dispute status and protections for conversations involving financial advice and lending.

Sierra also lists telecommunications and media workflows for retention journeys, billing, payments and proactive upsells. In insurance, the packages can support quoting and first notice of loss intake, alongside guardrails for coverage advice, coverage decisions and claims outcome promises.

Ghostwriter adapts the workflows to each company

Accelerators are designed to provide a common starting point, while Ghostwriter customizes the experience for a particular business. Sierra says this lets teams focus on their customer relationships, products and services, policies, and the quality of each interaction.

Many features are intended to work across industries, including greetings, multilingual interactions, accurate name matching and customer satisfaction feedback at the end of a conversation. In one example, a media company adds a retention Accelerator to its agent and uses Ghostwriter to adjust it to its cancellation policies and offers. Sierra says the agent is then ready for testing in minutes.

The company says Accelerators are packages added to an agent, rather than one-time templates. Changes made by a business are tracked separately from the underlying workflow. When Sierra releases an update, those changes carry over, and teams can review the full set of updates before deciding whether to apply them.

Designed to work with existing systems

Sierra says Accelerators can connect to different software systems without requiring a company to replace the software it already uses. For example, a transaction search Accelerator can contain the workflow for finding past payments, while the customer’s company connects it to the system where those records are stored.

The company also plans to let teams build and share their own Accelerators within the company. Sierra gives a login flow or legal-team-approved guardrails as examples of components that could be built and tested once, then added to other agents. It says material created by a team stays within its company.

The first Accelerators are available today in Agent Studio. Sierra directs customers to their account team for more information. For users, the offering could reduce the work required to create routine agent capabilities, while preserving company-specific policies and integrations, according to Sierra’s description.