Telviva, a provider of cloud-based unified communications, has launched Viva, an intelligent voice and text-based digital agent designed to make enterprise-grade AI practical, affordable and accessible for South African businesses. Built and hosted locally, Viva is the next step in Telviva’s work on business conversations, changing how companies route interactions and draw on what their organisations already know.
Telviva CEO David Meintjes says the launch addresses a market need: moving past rigid chatbots to deliver integrated, autonomous customer experiences without losing the human touch.
“A chatbot operates mostly in a rigid, predefined structure that mostly results in a poor customer experience; a digital agent is dynamic and easier to manage and makes the transition to a human when needed easier,” says Meintjes. “It was vital for us to develop an agent that understands natural language while connecting deeply to real business knowledge sources. This enables Viva to resolve customer queries end-to-end, without human intervention, while ensuring a seamless handoff to a human agent the moment a query requires it.”
From receptionist to customer experience influencer
A core idea behind Viva is that workplace roles change with it. Meintjes says the conventional front-line receptionist role shifts into that of a customer experience influencer.
With the digital agent handling repetitive routing and baseline queries, the receptionist becomes the human in the loop and focuses on customer experience, a higher-value role.
“Not only do they handle complex human interactions that require deep empathy and judgement, but they also act as the quality controller of the digital agent itself,” says Meintjes. “They review and assess the context of engagements, optimising the customer experience and ensuring the AI continuously aligns with the company’s service standards.
“Our philosophy is digital when you want it, human when you need it. We are layering intelligence onto a reliable infrastructure that we have spent two decades building, giving businesses a practical and scalable approach to enterprise-grade AI.”
The four agent tiers
Recognising that no two businesses are at the same point in their digital adoption, Telviva has structured its digital agent solution into four tiers, so companies can start with core routing or static knowledge bases and grow into full system integration:
- Viva Starter – digital receptionist, voice only: The agent answers inbound calls 24/7 in natural language, checks user presence and routes callers to specific people or departments. This eases high inbound volumes and allows human receptionists to move into the oversight role.
- Viva Business – text and knowledge agent: The agent handles text-based traffic across WhatsApp and web chat, drawing responses from the company’s website or an uploaded FAQ document.
- Viva Professional – CRM knowledge management agent: The agent plugs into a business’s existing CRM knowledge base as its primary source of truth, so the digital agent and human teams give identical answers.
- Viva Enterprise – live integration agent: The most advanced tier, allowing the agent to run real-time queries in CRM or ERP systems and return live details such as account balances, order statuses or contract dates.
Measuring what matters
Telviva evaluates digital agent performance on task success, context and user experience, through four metrics:
- Intent accuracy rate: Tracks whether the agent correctly understood the user’s intent and responded appropriately.
- Task success rate: Confirms that the interaction achieved a successful resolution through backend execution.
- Semantic error rate: Uses an independent “LLM-as-a-judge” evaluator to assess response quality against user intent.
- Turn-taking latency: Measures response speed to the millisecond, to keep voice interactions smooth.
Built for the South African market
Global AI tools are usually built for global markets. Viva is tailored to local conditions. It natively handles voice and WhatsApp for Business, South Africa’s default business communication channels, and is sold at a fixed monthly fee for unlimited simultaneous interactions, removing the budget volatility that comes with consumption-based AI pricing. Learn more about the digital agent tiers.
“Popia compliance is built into the architecture,” says Meintjes. “All our infrastructure is hosted in local data centres, ensuring personally identifiable customer data never leaves South Africa. Enhanced private cloud deployment options are also available for highly regulated sectors such as financial services, healthcare and legal.”
Early implementations show Viva resolving a meaningful share of inbound contact centre volume without human intervention. For businesses on the advanced integration tiers, Telviva says that translates into reduced average handle times, higher first-contact resolution and a measurable return on investment.
What about the people?
Rather than treating the change in the workforce as a loss, Meintjes argues that enterprises should redefine roles around empathy, judgement and oversight. The test of the agentic era, on his account, is whether organisations use automation to raise human capability or hand over so much that human judgement becomes passive. Competitive difference will come from customer experience, and that still needs a person in the loop when it counts.
To work out which tier suits your business, contact Telviva.
About Telviva
Telviva is a market leader in cloud-based communications and works to enable better quality conversations for businesses through context-driven unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact centre as a service (CCaaS).
Integrating voice calls, PBX, video conferencing, instant messaging, contact centre and business intelligence into a single service, Telviva simplifies collaboration, boosts productivity and improves customer experiences. Delivered as a managed service, the secure solution integrates with CRMs and other cloud tools, providing historical context for informed interactions. Visit www.telviva.co.za.
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