Telviva brings intelligent digital agent Viva to South African businesses

Telviva , 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 artificial intelligence (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 front-line 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 judgement, 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,” Meintjes explains.

“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:

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

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

“Popia compliance is built into the architecture. All our infrastructure is hosted in local data centres, ensuring personally identifiable customer data never leaves South Africa.