Telviva, a company providing cloud unified communications, has launched Viva—an intelligent agent powered by voice and text. This agent is designed to make enterprise artificial intelligence practical, accessible, and affordable for businesses in South Africa. Viva is hosted and operates locally and represents the next stage in Telviva's work on business communication, transforming how companies interact and utilize their existing data.
Telviva CEO David Meintjes noted that the launch addresses a market need: moving away from rigid chatbots toward providing an integrated, autonomous customer experience while maintaining human involvement.
Meintjes emphasized that chatbots typically operate within a fixed, predefined structure, which often leads to a negative customer experience. In contrast, the digital agent is dynamic, easier to manage, and facilitates handover to a live operator when necessary. He added that it was critical to develop an agent capable of understanding natural language and deeply connecting with real business knowledge sources. This allows Viva to resolve customer queries completely without human intervention, while ensuring a seamless transfer of the query to a live operator at the right moment.
From Secretary to Customer Experience Influencer
The core concept of Viva is that job roles evolve alongside technology. According to Meintjes, the traditional role of a frontline administrator is transforming into that of a customer experience influencer. Since the digital agent handles routine routing and basic inquiries, the administrator becomes a process controller, focusing on a more valuable task—the customer experience.
Meintjes explained that these specialists not only handle complex interactions requiring deep empathy and judgment but also act as quality controllers for the digital agent itself. They analyze interaction context, optimizing the customer experience and ensuring the AI consistently meets company service standards. The company's philosophy is: 'digital when needed, human when necessary.' The company layers intelligence onto the robust infrastructure it has built over two decades, offering businesses a scalable and practical approach to enterprise AI.
Four Agent Tiers
Recognizing that not all enterprises are at the same stage of digital transformation, Telviva has structured its digital agent solution into four tiers. This allows companies to start with basic routing or static knowledge bases and gradually move toward full system integration:
- Viva Starter — Voice-only digital secretary: The agent answers incoming calls in natural language 24/7, checks user availability, and directs callers to specific people or departments. This helps manage high volumes of inbound calls and allows human secretaries to transition to a supervisory role.
- Viva Business — Knowledge-access text agent: The agent processes text traffic via WhatsApp and web chat, retrieving answers from the company website or an uploaded FAQ document.
- Viva Professional — CRM knowledge management agent: The agent connects to the company's existing CRM knowledge base as the single source of truth, ensuring answer consistency between the digital agent and human teams.
- Viva Enterprise — Live integration agent: The most advanced tier, allowing the agent to execute real-time queries in CRM or ERP systems and provide up-to-date information such as account balance, order status, or contract date.
Measuring What Matters
Telviva evaluates the performance of the digital agent based on tasks, context, and user experience using four key metrics:
- Intent Accuracy Rate: Tracks whether the agent correctly understood the user's intent and provided the appropriate response.
- Task Success Rate: Confirms that the interaction led to successful resolution through the execution of backend operations.
- Semantic Error Rate: Uses an independent evaluator, 'LLM-as-a-judge,' to assess the quality of the response relative to the user's intent.
- Turnaround Latency: Measures response speed down to the millisecond to ensure smooth voice interaction.
Built for the South African Market
While global AI tools are typically developed for worldwide markets, Viva is adapted to local conditions. It natively supports voice communication and WhatsApp for Business—the primary business communication channels in South Africa. The product is sold on a fixed monthly fee for unlimited concurrent interactions, eliminating the budget volatility inherent in consumption-based AI pricing. Meintjes stated that 'POPIA compliance is built into the architecture.' The entire infrastructure is hosted in local data centers, guaranteeing that customer personal data never leaves South Africa. Extended private cloud deployment options are also available for highly regulated sectors such as financial services, healthcare, and law.
Initial deployments show that Viva can resolve a significant portion of inbound contact center volume without human assistance. For companies utilizing the advanced integration tiers, Telviva claims this leads to reduced average handling time, increased first-contact resolution rates, and measurable ROI.
What About People?
Meintjes believes that instead of viewing workforce changes as a loss, businesses should redefine roles around empathy, judgment, and control. In his view, the test of the agent era is whether organizations use automation to augment human capabilities or delegate so much that human judgment becomes passive. Competitive advantage will be determined by the customer experience, which still requires human involvement when it truly matters. To determine which tier suits your business, one should contact Telviva.
About Telviva
Telviva is a market leader in cloud communications, striving to deliver higher quality conversations for businesses through Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). By integrating voice calls, PBX, video conferencing, instant messaging, contact center, and business analytics into a single service, Telviva simplifies collaboration, boosts productivity, and enhances customer experience. As a managed service, it is a secure solution that integrates with CRM and other cloud tools, providing historical context for informed interactions.