Entries by Mandy Reed

Building a Cohesive Virtual Agent and Live Chat Solution

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing Virtual agents. Live chat. Some of you may remember the days when companies wanting to implement customer support on their website believed they had to make a decision: either a virtual agent or live chat; either automated self-service or human-assisted web chat. This was the common thinking a […]

Celebrating a Platinum Jubilee and Long-Term Relationships

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO As we celebrate Her Majesty The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I couldn’t help but reminisce on meeting the Queen and Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace in July 2017. Our company had won The Queen’s Awards for Enterprise: Innovation, and Peter Behrend, our Chief Technology Officer, and I got to attend […]

Would You Rather Call Customer Support or Clean a Toilet?

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing 42% of Americans would rather clean a toilet and 46% would rather go to the dentist than call customer support. These stats, just two of many in the 2022 Achieving Customer Amazement Study, likely have you nodding in agreement thinking about your own painful customer service experiences. Long […]

Gen Z and your Customer Self-Service

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing When it comes to your customer service strategy, does age matter? Do you make decisions about how and where you deliver support based on the generations of your target customers? Are you planning for the expectations of younger customers as they gain more buying power over the next […]

Integrate Your Way to a Better Self-Service Experience

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing If you give visitors to your website the option to self-serve with a chatbot or virtual agent, kudos to you for recognising the importance of easily accessible digital support! Both current and potential customers appreciate being able to engage with automated self-service anytime, anywhere. However, what they don’t […]

Solving Common Conversational AI Project Issues

This post was originally published on AI Time Journal. By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO, Creative Virtual Back in 2019, I wrote an article on reasons why chatbot projects were failing or being abandoned before they even reached the testing stage. At the time, the conversational AI industry had been saturated with both false promises […]

How to Make Your Chatbot More Conversational

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing When customers use your chatbot to self-serve, what kind of experience do you deliver? Does your chatbot need questions asked a particular way to return the correct response? Do your customers have to guess the correct keywords to enter or know specific terminology to locate the right information? […]

Better Digital Support with the Virtual Insurance Agent

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing Insurance companies have always had the challenge of delivering personalized support for their customers. From selecting coverage and understanding benefits to confirming payments and filing claims, both policyholders and agents need information that is customized to them. As the expectation for companies across all industries to offer digital, […]

Set your Chatbot up for Success with the Right Budget

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing I think it’s safe to say that we all love to get a good deal – or at least feel like we are! – and save a little money whenever we can. I think we can also all agree that are certain times when going with the cheapest […]

Can Conversational AI Make Your CX More Human and Empathetic?

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing For years automated self-service tools like chatbots and virtual agents have been criticised as being a cold and impersonal way of supporting customers. Opponents of these conversational AI solutions claim they remove the human touch from the customer experience and keep companies from being able to build real […]