Telviva launches intelligent digital agent Viva to fast-track enterprise AI adoption for SA businesses

David Meintjes, CEO at Telviva.

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Telviva, which positions itself as a leader in cloud-based unified communications, has announced the launch of Viva, an intelligent voice and text-based digital agent solution designed to make enterprise-grade AI practical, affordable and accessible for South African businesses. Built and hosted locally, Viva marks the next chapter in Telviva’s journey of enabling quality business conversations by transforming how companies route interactions and unlock organisational knowledge.

According to Telviva CEO David Meintjes, the launch addresses a critical market need: moving past traditional, rigid chatbots to deliver integrated, autonomous customer experiences without losing the crucial 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.”

A core philosophy behind Viva is the evolution of traditional workplace roles. Meintjes explains that the conventional role of the frontline receptionist is fundamentally shifting into that of a customer experience (CX) influencer.

By allowing the digital agent to handle repetitive routing and baseline queries, the receptionist steps into the role of “human in the loop” and focuses on the customer experience, which is a higher-value, strategic role.

“Not only do they handle complex human interactions that require deep empathy and judgment, but they also act as the quality controller of the digital agent itself. 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.”

Recognising that no two businesses are at the same point in their digital adoption, Telviva has structured its digital agent solution into four scalable tiers. This allows companies to start with core routing or static knowledge bases and seamlessly grow into full system integration:

• Viva Starter – digital receptionist and CX influencer (voice only): The digital agent answers inbound calls 24/7 in natural language, checks user presence and routes callers to specific people or departments. This instantly alleviates high inbound volumes, allowing human receptionists to transition into CX influencers who oversee system quality and complex escalations.
• Viva Business – text and knowledge agent: The digital agent handles text-based traffic across WhatsApp and web chat, drawing accurate responses to queries directly from the company's website and/or an uploaded FAQ document.
• Viva Professional – CRM knowledge management module (KMS) agent: The digital agent plugs directly into a business’s existing CRM knowledge base as its primary source of truth, ensuring both the digital agent and human teams deliver identical, consistent answers.
• Viva Enterprise – live integration agent: The most advanced tier, enabling the digital agent to perform real-time queries in CRM or ERP systems to deliver live, personalised details such as account balances, order statuses or contract dates.

Telviva evaluates digital agent performance by focusing on task success, context and user experience through four core metrics:

• Intent accuracy rate: Tracks if the agent correctly understood the user's intent and responded appropriately.
• Task success rate: Confirms that the interaction achieved a successful resolution via 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 down to the millisecond to ensure smooth voice interactions.

Together, these metrics provide a comprehensive, real-world view of agent effectiveness.

While global AI tools are often built for global markets, Viva is tailored specifically for the local operational landscape. It natively manages voice and WhatsApp for Business – South Africa’s de facto business communication channels – and is offered at a predictable, fixed monthly fee for unlimited simultaneous interactions, removing the budget volatility often associated with AI consumption models. Learn more about our digital agent tiers.

Furthermore, it complies with local data protection requirements.

“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 that Viva can successfully resolve a significant level of inbound contact centre volume without human intervention. For businesses deploying the advanced integration tiers, this translates directly to reduced average handle times, higher first-contact resolution and a rapid, measurable return on investment.

Within enterprise environments, frontline workers – such as traditional receptionists – are elevated to "customer experience influencers" and human-in-the-loop quality controllers who govern the AI.

Rather than viewing human workforce evolution as a loss, society and enterprises must redefine human worth around high-empathy judgment, relational nuance and strategic oversight. The true test of this agentic era lies in whether organisations leverage automated efficiency to elevate human capability or allow total delegation to render human judgment passive and secondary. Future differentiation as a business will lie in improving the customer experience, which requires a human in the loop when required.

Telviva's digital agents solution is structured into four scalable tiers because the company recognises that no two businesses are the same. To discover which one best suits your business, contact us today.