Good, Better, Best. How Does Your Self-Service Rank?
By Mandy Reed, Marketing Manager (Global)
“Good, better, best. Never let it rest. ‘Til your good is better and your better is best.”
I have very distinct memories of my mother repeating this saying to us kids when we were growing up and, in a classic ‘I’m turning into my mother’ moment, found myself saying it to my niece a few weeks ago as well. I think we can all relate to striving to be our best and the great feeling of having someone else acknowledge our hard work to get there. Creative Virtual takes great pride in the self-service technology we provide, and so it’s an honour to be named Best Self-Service Solutions Provider – UK by the 2017 TMT Technology Awards.
There has been a huge surge of interest lately in chatbots and virtual agents with new start-ups offering the technology popping up every week, but not all chatbots are created equal. When it comes to using the technology for customer self-service, it’s really important to select the right solution for your company and your customers. In particular, organisations need to look for technology that has a proven track record in the customer experience space.
When it comes to providing conversational self-service, Creative Virtual’s V-Person™ virtual agents and chatbots stand out as the best for a lot of reasons, including:
- Knowledge management platform – Knowledge management is key for delivering accurate and consistent information to customers. With V-Portal™ (Creative Virtual’s knowledge management, workflow management and business intelligence platform), organisations can use a single knowledgebase to power their chatbot across contact channels and ensure that customers are receiving reliable, consistent information no matter how they chose to engage. Instead of trying to guess which contact channel will give them the correct information, customers can contact you with confidence in the way that’s most convenient for them. Backing our chatbots with V-Portal also gives organisations the option to customise responses by channel (for example, give a shorter answer on a mobile app) and easily update content across all customer support channels in one place.
- Integration with personalised account information – Logged in or authenticated users should be able to receive responses specific to them. This integration allows the virtual agent to provide individualised information about a customer’s orders, billing, devices, subscriptions, accounts, sales advice, etc. to create a personalised self-service experience.
- Integration with other channels and support options – Customers should never feel like they are starting over when they transition between channels or support options. Our technology offers options to put the proper integrations in place in order to give customers the flexibility to move to other channels while maintaining the context of their conversations. For example, a customer using the chatbot on the website can be offered the option to be seamlessly escalated to a live chat agent and have their conversation history passed from virtual to live agent for a continuous experience.
- Combination of machine learning and human curation of content – A customer service chatbot is not the place for pure artificial intelligence (AI). Based on our extensive experience, Creative Virtual has developed a hybrid approach to self-learning that enables our V-Person implementations to adapt in a very predictable way. The combination of human and machine learning allows the system to continually improve while also enabling organisations to maintain control over the reliability of the virtual agent responses.
- End-to-end support journey – Even though effective self-service is key to keeping customers happy, we don’t ignore the role that contact centre and live chat agents play in the support journey. Our technology allows organisations to also support their human agents with the same knowledgebase that’s powering the self-service chatbot. This not only reinforces consistency across contact channels – both self-service and human-assisted – but it also gives the opportunity to implement a feedback loop in line with industry best practice. V-Portal offers workflow functionality that allows support agents to submit feedback and suggestions to chatbot responses in real-time. This feedback can then be reviewed, changes made to the knowledgebase and updates deployed quickly across all contact channels. This feedback loop enables live agents to keep content accurate and up-to-date for themselves and the chatbot just by doing their normal jobs.
Our thanks to the TMT Technology Awards for recognising Creative Virtual’s self-service solutions as the best! You can read our official announcement here.
On a personal note, I’d also like to thank TMT News for recently awarding me Best CX Solutions Business Marketer – UK in their 2017 Businesswoman of the Year Awards. I’m proud of the work I do at Creative Virtual and am thrilled to be acknowledged as the best. It’s an honour to be personally recognised for my hard work in a rapidly growing industry filled with so much marketing talent.
Ready to take the next step in making your self-service the best? Reach out to us for a live demo to see how your customer support strategy can benefit from Creative Virtual’s award-winning virtual agents.
