Tag Archive for: customer experience

An Experience Designed for Your Customers

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

Every month I write a column for Wharf Life, a fortnightly publication that’s available for free around Canary Wharf, Docklands, and east London as well as in an E-Edition online. Titled Virtual Viewpoint, I use this column to share my thoughts on a variety of technology related topics as well as my recent experiences. My latest Virtual Viewpoint was about grocery shopping at the local Canary Wharf Waitrose, something I’ve done regularly – and without much fanfare – since the store opened over 20 years ago.

For all those years I was always baffled by the wine bar in the middle of the food shopping court. On many occasions, I would wonder why on earth people would want to combine the drudgery of picking up their spuds and toothpaste with a glass of wine. I was especially perplexed considering the abundance of lovely bars in such close proximity. Yet, it’s always appeared consistently busy and continued to be a fixture of the store despite the updates and renovations over the years.

The penny finally dropped the other day after my wife and newborn son arrived home from the hospital, and we were suddenly thrust into the two-under-two club. A few days into the lovely chaos of both chasing a toddler and caring for an infant, and suddenly a trip to Waitrose felt quite exciting!

With a spring in my step, I put on my noise cancelling headphones with some relaxing music and the experience felt completely different to normal – more like a trip to a health spa. Oblivious to the mundanities of my shopping trip, I suddenly stumbled upon the bar. And that’s when the light bulb moment happened. I was in my personal spa, and the idea of a glass of champagne amid the shoppers made perfect sense.

Every company has a target customer base, and it’s no secret that designing your experience for your target customer is good for business. Yet within that target group there are a variety of subgroups that have different needs and expectations. Those variations could be based on age, location, access to technology – even number of children! It’s important that you consider these differences when making customer experience (CX) decisions.

As the leader of a conversational AI company, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I am a huge supporter of implementing technology to improve your CX. But I am also a huge supporter of keeping the human at the centre of all CX decisions. While Creative Virtual’s V-Person™ solutions successfully automate digital customer service, forcing all customers to only self-serve with a virtual agent is never a good CX decision.

This is just one reason why it’s key to consult with experts on your CX strategy. This group of experts should include those experienced with your industry, with the technology, and with your identified use cases. It should also include your customers – the true experts on their experiences with your organisation, products, services, and employees.

Go beyond the typical customer surveys and dig into rich data like conversations with your virtual agent and contact centre. See what customers are actually asking, where they are experiencing pain points, and what they really love. Look for ways you can make experiences easier and more personalised. And be sure to take into consideration the varying preferences and needs of your whole customer base – get insights from both the carefree dad of one young child and the sleep-deprived parent of two-under-two!

If you’re local to Canary Wharf and want to discuss customising your CX with conversational AI, I’d be happy to meet you at Waitrose for a glass of wine and a chat. You can also arrange a session with one of Creative Virtual’s experts around the world by contacting us here.

A great resource if you’re evaluating different conversational AI solutions is the 2023 Chatbot Buyer’s Guide. It includes a technology comparison chart that can help you determine the specific functionality you’ll need to design the right experience for your customers.

#CXDay: You Gotta Understand Expectations if You Wanna Meet Them

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Last week my neighbor sent me the image below with the caption: How to ruin Trick-or-Treat!

trick or treat

Is there anyone who has gone Trick-or-Treating who doesn’t remember that house that always gave a crappy “treat”? For me, it’s the woman who ran a little hair salon in her basement and always handed out combs – and insisted on chatting with each kid forrrr-ever, slowing you down from getting to all the houses with the good treats!

So, what’s wrong with handing out combs or mini salad bags on Halloween? Why do those kinds of treats get a bad rep? The problem is that they don’t meet the expectations of Trick-or-Treaters. If you are going house to house in your costume, you are expecting a sugary piece of candy, a salty snack, or a fun little toy or gadget. When the Trick-or-Treat experience doesn’t match with your expectation, you are left disappointed.

Today the world is celebrating CX Day, as we do on the first Tuesday of October every year. This celebration is an opportunity to recognize the professionals who create and deliver great customer experiences and to share insights into how to make our CX strategies better. It also happens to be the second day of Customer Service Week, which is fitting since customer service is an important piece of a customer’s experience.

Creating and successfully implementing a CX strategy that delivers consistently positive experiences is hard. It requires a team effort across the entire company. It requires the right processes and procedures. It requires properly integrated technologies. But most importantly, it requires a true understanding of your customers’ expectations.

Understanding the expectations of your customers has to be at the core of your CX strategy or you’re doomed to fail. Implementing the latest technologies, conducting training workshops for your employees, or launching cool new product updates can be great for your customer experience, but only when they are approached with your customers in mind. Defining customer expectations – of your digital tools, of your staff members, of your products – must always come first.

For most companies, the digital experience they provide has now become central to their overall CX. It can be tempting to think that throwing a new technology at a digital issue or pain point will provide a quick fix. Unfortunately, this approach often fails to resolve the underlying problem or creates an unnatural, frustrating, and disjointed interaction. The reality is that unless that technology is strategically selected and deployed, it can actually make the experience worse for customers.

Before you implement a CX technology, be sure you can:

  • Define how it will meet the expectations of your specific customer base.
  • Explain the ways it will improve the experience for customers and employees.
  • Identify your own internal expectations and goals for the solution, both short-term and long-term.

When it comes to CX, there’s no shortcut to success. You gotta understand your customers’ expectations if you wanna meet them.

That is why I always aim to give the Trick-or-Treaters who come through my neighborhood what they expect – and that means no mini salad bags at my house! In fact, this year my costumed visitors will be greeted by a big basket of fun rubber duckies, back by popular demand after overwhelming positive reviews last Halloween from kids of all ages.

This CX Day, ask yourself: Does my business really understand our customers’ expectations?

Conversational AI Doesn’t Have to Be a Risky Investment: Step 1

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

In the technology industry there tends to be a focus on being innovative, cutting-edge, and ground-breaking. Industry awards, conferences, and articles frequently showcase and reward vendors for technological innovations. Analysts and expert speakers regularly highlight case studies of companies that are early adopters, deploying technologies in inventive ways, or finding success by taking a chance on something new and unproven.

Innovation is essential to the advancement of technology but doesn’t automatically equal practical business benefits. Having companies try out new technological developments and deploy existing solutions in creative and unfamiliar ways is important for finding practical applications for new innovations. However, being the organisation that deploys an innovative technology typically requires being comfortable with a high level of risk.

Most companies don’t have the financial flexibility or company culture to take that degree of risk, whether real or inferred. For them, proven and reliable results are more important than being innovative and flashy. Projects that get budget approval and management backing are ones that are considered safe bets because they utilise established technologies that have documented business benefits.

Conversational AI is one technology that is regularly described with words like ‘innovative’ and ‘cutting-edge’. Simply having ‘AI’ in the name makes some people think of it as being futuristic or only for companies with the resources to implement it for the cool factor. It can be easy for business leaders to associate conversational AI with being a high-risk investment.

Deploying conversational AI solutions like chatbots and virtual agents can be risky but doesn’t have to be. Your organisation doesn’t need to be an early adopter of new innovations to benefit from this technology. Chatbot and virtual agent technology has been used by businesses for over two decades as part of their customer experience and employee engagement strategies, and you can take advantage of those learnings to leverage conversational AI within your organisation.

Over the course of this three-part blog series, I’ll outline three steps for minimising risk and maximising benefits of conversational AI projects. Let’s get started with the first and most important step:

Step 1: Be selective when deciding on a vendor and technology.

The conversational AI market is oversaturated with new, inexperienced start-ups and technologies that haven’t been well-tested in the real world. The first step to reducing your risk is to choose a vendor that is established in the industry and provides a technology that has proven results. Both criteria are important when it comes to risk level.

Vendor experience is critically important because the more knowledge your selected provider brings to your project, the more confident you can be in their advice and guidance. You want a vendor that will become an extension of your own team and knows what they are doing because they’ve done it all before. Working with experts means you benefit from their many years of experience, thereby making your investment less risky even if your company is new to this type of technology.

When evaluating a vendor’s experience, ask specifically about how many years the company has provided conversational AI technologies, as these solutions may be an offering added recently even though the company has been in business for decades. Also ask about the experience of their individual team members and staff turnover rates. If they have high staff turnover and are constantly training replacements for departing employees, then you will likely miss out on the risk-reducing personal expertise you want the vendor to bring to the collaboration.

Just as critical as the vendor experience is having proof of their technology delivering positive results in real world applications. Don’t assume that just because a provider isn’t a brand-new start-up that they have a well-performing conversational AI technology. If the company has been in business for four or five years and only has one customer, you should question why more companies aren’t using their technology and if working with them is a risky option.

To reduce risk, ask about how the vendor has deployed their technology within your industry and what documented business benefits those solutions are providing. Saying they have the ability to deploy important features and functionality is great, but you want to see the technology in action in live installs. Also ask them about the length of their customer relationships as long-term engagements indicate that existing customers are happy with the technology, their results, and the collaboration. The vendor should be able to provide you with customer references so you can get first-hand feedback on their conversational AI projects.

Keep in mind that even if your company is minimising risk by selecting a proven solution with reliable results, you still want to partner with a vendor that is consistently innovating. You may not be the organisation trying out those new innovations first, but you don’t want to invest in a solution that’s not going to improve as those advancements become well-tested and are shown to deliver business benefits.

In my next post, we’ll explore building a realistic business case as part of Step 2 for reducing risk. In the meantime, check out the Guide to Selecting a Virtual Agent or Chatbot Vendor: Forget the Technology & Focus on Experience. It explains in more detail the most important questions to ask a vendor about their experience during your procurement process.

A Seamless Support Experience is Music to Your Customers’ Ears

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Every month Creative Virtual’s Founder & CEO writes his Virtual Viewpoint column for Wharf Life, a local newspaper available in the area around the company’s headquarters in London. You can also read the paper online, getting an insider’s look at what’s going on in the area as well as Chris’ perspective on a variety of topics from technology developments to stress management to space exploration.

In his latest Virtual Viewpoint column, Chris shares his recent experience attending a string quartet recital. He marvels at how in sync the musicians were, each bringing their own style and sound together for a cohesive performance. He compares this to running a successful company. Each member of the team contributes their unique skills and style but must work together towards a common goal.

The same principles are true for delivering a positive customer service experience. Creating your overall strategy is similar to writing a musical score – you have to pay attention not only to the performance of each individual component but also how they interact with each other over the course of the journey. You need to ensure each element is utilised to emphasise its strengths but do so in a way that creates a joined-up, seamless experience.

I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that a number of my own personal customer service experiences have revealed a strategy that is out-of-sync. Way too often a company’s digital experience appears to come from a completely different strategy than other parts of the experience. While many customers were willing to cut businesses a little slack as they dealt with sudden pandemic-related changes, that’s no longer a valid excuse for the disjointed support experience so many companies are still delivering.

Recently I’ve come across some articles claiming customers, who are increasingly turning to digital channels, hate using chatbots and just want to talk to a human. However, when you delve into the real reasons behind these claims, you realise that it’s not the automated self-service tool that customers hate but rather the poor experience that some of them are delivering. If the chatbot can understand their questions, provide accurate and relevant information, and give the option to escalate to a human if needed, then customers have no issue with using a chatbot.

This highlights a failure in both the development of these chatbot solutions and their implementation as part of a synchronised support strategy. A quality chatbot must be backed by conversational AI technology that combines machine learning with a human-in-the-loop. It must be integrated with human-assisted support channels, such as live chat, for a seamless handover. It must be approached as one piece of a comprehensive customer service strategy and not as a stand-alone tool or side project. All of these elements are essential for your solution to be effective, but companies often struggle because they don’t have enough knowledge in this field.

Rachel F Freeman, a conversational AI expert, started working with chatbots and virtual agents in 2000. She has experienced first-hand the evolution of the technology, and today collaborates closely with organisations on the development and implementation of their solutions. She shared this important piece of advice in a chatbot vendor selection guide:

“You should feel comfortable saying to your vendor, “we don’t know what we don’t know and are looking to you as the experts”. This applies to everything from possible use cases to suggestions for conversational flows to UI design tips. If you don’t have confidence they will guide you in the right direction, you’re working with the wrong team.”

This is sage advice for companies as they make conversational AI a part of their customer service strategy. If you don’t want your customers to hate your chatbot, then give them a chatbot that delivers the experience they want. That requires working with knowledgeable experts to ensure your self-service tool is properly developed and integrated with your overarching support strategy, goals, and customer needs.

While engaging with a company for customer support will likely never be as enjoyable as listening to a professional string quartet recital, the experience should be just as seamless and in sync. This is certainly not an easy feat, but is one made easier when you work with the right experts. And when you are able to deliver a seamless, omnichannel support experience, it will be music to your customers’ ears.

Stop Trying to Improve Efficiency at the Expense of CX

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Earlier this year my niece starting reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie book series, and I’ve been rereading them along with her. It’s been fun having discussions with her about the books and hearing what part of the stories stuck out for her as most interesting or surprising about Laura’s pioneer life. It’s also made me grateful to have modern conveniences like running water and refrigeration!

Over the course of history, humans have always looked for ways to improve efficiency and productivity. Think about all the inventions you studied in school, like the printing press and cotton gin, that initiated key moments of change for industry and society. Innovation drives progress, but that progress doesn’t innately mean a better experience or quality of life for everyone.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have meant more potential use cases for automation technologies. Businesses see this as an opportunity to improve efficiency and productivity – and it is. However, being too focused just on those goals often means they overlook the importance of the experience.

Forrester analyst, William McKeon-White writes about this as part of his research on help desk chatbots. He points out that prioritizing efficiency over experience leads to the critical element of user success being overlooked. If users don’t have a good experience with the chatbot, they won’t keep using it. And if users aren’t coming back to the tool, there’s no way for the organization to achieve positive longer-term outcomes.

It’s important to understand this as you build your business case for a conversational AI tool. As chatbot expert Rachael Needham explains in a vendor selection guide:

“Having a clear business objective will dictate much of what and how the chatbot is implemented. For example, is the objective to reduce phone calls or live chats – and how will that be tracked? Is it to improve customer satisfaction – and how will that be measured? Another key question to ask when thinking of customer experience is: are we really meeting the needs of our customers or are we just trying to make a score look better?”

Improving productivity and efficiency are worthy and important goals but shouldn’t be attempted at the expense of the user experience. Your chatbot or virtual agent should be designed to create a better experience by providing quick, easy support. Reducing phone calls or live chat sessions because you’re giving customers a better way to get help, without having to take the time and effort to engage with a contact center agent, is an efficiency improvement that’s positive for your business and your customer experience (CX).

In a recent discussion with ISG, Creative Virtual Founder & CEO, Chris Ezekiel, pointed out that he has seen a shift in the focus of organizations when implementing conversational AI. Five years ago, the business cases for these solutions were heavily centered around contact deflection. However, as businesses come to recognize the competitive advantage of improving CX, that focus moves to creating better experiences as the key priority.

This doesn’t mean that organizations shouldn’t have the goal of improving efficiency and productivity with conversational AI tools. Instead, they should identify those objectives as part of their strategy to improve the overall experience. Often, you’ll find they go hand-in-hand. Efficiency improvements can be a crucial means by which the experience is made better. Expert conversational AI professionals understand the best ways to balance these needs and set goals that go beyond just making a score look better to achieving real success.

For more tips on creating a conversational AI strategy and building a business case, check out these resources:

Changing Digital Expectations and CX Trends in 2020

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

As with many other aspects of life and business, customer experience trends and expectations have been greatly impacted by the global health crisis this year. The closing of physical store and office locations, restrictions on in-person activities, new guidelines to keep contact centre agents safe, rapidly changing information – these challenges and disruptions to business-as-usual have forced organisations to adapt quickly and re-evaluate the needs of their customers.

CX Network’s The Global State of Customer Experience 2020 report breaks down insights from customer experience (CX) experts, looking at the opportunities and hurdles over the first half of 2020 as well as forecasts for the remainder of the year. Survey respondents’ observations about customer behaviour present a very telling story about the challenges of CX today:

  • 68% strongly believe that expectations from customers are rising
  • 52% believe customers are more willing than ever to switch brands if unsatisfied
  • 49% believe there are clear trends in customer segments that prefer certain contact channels
  • 47% believe it is getting harder to please customers
  • 43% believe that customers are more impatient than ever before

For years there have been predictions about when CX will overtake other factors, such as price and product, to become the number one way companies differentiate themselves from competitors or when CX will become the most important consideration for customers when making purchasing decisions. Regardless of whether we’ve reached that point, businesses can’t ignore the facts that customer expectations are rising and that failing to make changes to meet those expectations negatively impacts customer retention and spending.

The global pandemic that the world is dealing with right now has further shone a spotlight on CX, particularly on the importance of a quality digital experience. It should come as no surprise that in CX Networks’ survey, digital transformation and digital customer experience ranked high in responses from CX practitioners, solution providers and industry commenters when asked about top trends.

2020 cx trends

Organisations that already had a focus on their digital CX prior to the start of 2020 had an advantage as they adapted to COVID-19 related restrictions and changes. For example, those with existing virtual agents or chatbots were able to relieve pressure from their contact centre by proactively encouraging customers to self-serve. Branded virtual agents around the world saw a massive spike in usage during the first half of the year, further proof of the importance of digital customer care.

The survey also asked participants about challenges companies are facing when trying to close the gap between customer expectations and the reality of the experiences being delivered. ‘Building a customer-first culture’ was in the top three responses for all three groups and ‘Siloed customer data’ also ranked high in the answers selected.

2020 cx challenges

Both of those challenges can directly impact the creation and success of digital transformations and digital customer experience strategies. Having a customer-centric culture is essential for selecting and implementing the right digital changes and tools to address the real needs and preferences of customers. However, achieving success can also be derailed by having siloed customer data, incomplete customer profiles and disconnected customer experiences. Creating a single source of truth for customer data requires time and resources but is a necessary and worthwhile investment to create seamless, omnichannel customer engagement.

While it’s impossible to know exactly what the future holds for customers and businesses, what has become clear is that delivering positive digital and self-service experiences is going to continue to be important to a company’s bottom line. Check out this three-part blog series for more insights and tips:

As customer expectations and preferences continue to evolve, smart organisations will evolve with them. They will find ways to meet customers where they are, whether that be in-person or on digital channels.

For a Better CX, Get Out of Your Customer’s Way

By Björn Gülsdorff, Chief Business Development Officer

It is Customer Service Week, time to give customer service and customer experience (CX) some thought. Wait a minute – even more thought? Isn’t it all about CX these days?

It is, albeit lip service most of it. Also, we know we have gone too far when you are being asked about your “shopping experience” in a supermarket. Or, as happened to me the other day, how to improve my airport experience. Seriously? Well, get the “airport experience” out of the way. Whatever you plan, the money is better spent on quicker security and boarding, minimizing my time at the airport.

I admit I am ranting a bit based on some recent unpleasant travel “experiences”, but there is a relation with CX. It was all well when it meant to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and be less product or project centric. But we lost it at some point when we still said ‘experience’ but started thinking ‘sensation’.

Instead, if you want to deliver good CX, get out of the way! Do not get between the customers and their goals. Integrate your various tools seamlessly. Don’t just be multi-channel (or omnichannel), go beyond channels and blend the different touchpoints as you blend different information sources.

Provide a one-stop shop for information and self-service, powered by natural language conversations. Make it as easy as possible for the customer – great CX is when they don’t notice.

My current travels have taken me to GITEX Technology Week with our partner ixtel. GITEX is the biggest tech show in the Middle East and has all the global players plus a lot of “local” ones which just happen to serve millions of people. They all have some cool stuff in the pipeline. All of which need NLP (natural language processing) power, of course. 😉

Scanning Twitter for some inspiration on where to look next I came across https://t.co/8zmViTW5r9, which I liked a lot and which is definitely far on the sensational side. So, I considered deleting my half-finished blog post. But then I did not, because all of this is certainly cool, but it will only be a great experience if it helps me do what I want. When it helps me to get my shopping done, not when it interferes with it. So, while I cherish all the nice visuals, I cling to my claim: A great experience is when it it easy, seamless and smooth.

Check out our annual Customer Service Week blog post roundup for some trends, tips and statistics to help you deliver an easy, seamless experience for your customers.

#CXDay: Serving Your Customers a Custom Support Experience

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Happy CX Day! Today is the annual global celebration of the professionals and companies that make great customer experiences happen. In a world of growing expectations for on-demand service and highly connected, always-on customers, creating and delivering a great customer experience (CX) is no easy task.

A couple of weeks ago I was at an alpaca farm, a stop on my local annual County Farm Tour, with my niece. She was excited to get a chance to feed and pet the alpacas but, having already endured a few hours of attention from random strangers, the animals were not so interested in what the afternoon visitors were offering. I chuckled to myself as I watched the children – and a few adults – follow the alpacas around with outstretched hands offering them a bite to eat as they ran up and down the fenced in area. As we followed some into the barn, my niece noticed that a couple alpacas that had refused to eat from her hand were eating from the feed trough instead. She wondered aloud why, if the alpaca was hungry, it hadn’t just eaten what she offered.

Digital customers, like those alpacas, aren’t always interested in engaging in a one-on-one human interaction – even though companies often feel that is the best way for them to build connections and loyalty. In fact, analyst firm Gartner reports that millennials are four times less likely to pick up the phone to resolve issues than older generations, opting instead to try to self-serve first. When companies don’t offer a way for customers to do that on their website or mobile app, those customers will end up looking, and possibly failing, on non-company channels. Organisations that want to empower customers to self-serve, and ensure they have a positive experience while doing so, need to offer those tools to customers themselves.

While self-service is increasingly imperative to a customer’s experience, that doesn’t mean that the one-on-one human interaction is no longer important. After watching numerous alpacas eat from the feed trough, my niece was ecstatic when one showed interest in the food she was offering and suddenly her hand was empty. The same is true with customers – not every customer wants to self-serve and not every customer issue or question is best resolved with self-service. A successful digital customer experience strategy never leaves out the human touch completely.

Here are a few CX Day tips to help you deliver a custom support experience for your customers:

  • Get to know your customers – It’s great to offer customers options for getting the information and support they need, but make sure they are the right options for your customer base otherwise you’re wasting time and money. For example, Rest knows that nearly 75% of their customer base is under 40 and most start their experience on the company website. In order to improve engagement with their growing customer base of digital natives, they now offer 24/7 support with virtual agent Roger on their website as well as other channels, such as Google Home.
  • Integrate self-service and human-assisted channels – As mentioned, self-service is not always the preferred method or the best way to answer customer questions. Other times customers will want to self-serve but then reach a point where they need or want to escalate to a human. This is why your self-service options can’t be standalone tools. Chatbots and virtual agents should be integrated with human-assisted channels such as live chat or call back to provide customers with a seamless experience. When customers are escalated from virtual agent to human agent, a full history of their conversation should be passed over as well. Internally, if you are using a virtual agent to assist contact centre agents, make sure you have feedback loops in place so your live agents can help keep the virtual agent’s content accurate and up-to-date.
  • Start small with a plan to grow – As with most things in life, trying to tackle a huge digital CX transformation project all at once just won’t work. Start small and then use what you learn from the first stages of your plan to make improvements as you scale your solutions and work through later phases. Transport for NSW started with their chatbot RITA on Facebook Messenger, a popular channel with their customers, and then grew their solution to be deployed across other channels, including their website and Amazon’s Alexa. This step-by-step approach has improved their customer experience and has won them numerous awards.
  • Work with vendors that have both the technology and expertise – Designing and delivering a customised support experience for digital customers requires a significant investment from companies and their employees. Selecting the best technologies for your goals is very important, but it shouldn’t be the only focus of your strategy. The customer support landscape is littered with failed and frustrating solutions, and the best way to avoid becoming one of those statistics is to work with an expert team that can provide consultation experience along with the technology. You want to work with a vendor that will collaborate closely with you and can provide guidance on both general industry and sector-specific best practices. Just as the service you offer customers needs to be a combination of self-service solutions and human support, your digital customer experience strategy needs to bring together the right blend of technology and human expertise.

Frost & Sullivan predict that the year 2020 will be the point when customer experience will overtake product and price as the number one way companies will differentiate themselves from the competition. Are you serving your customers a custom support experience that makes your company stand out?

Digital CX Challenge: Humanising Your Self-Service

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

For as long as virtual agents and chatbots have been used by companies to provide customer self-service, they have been criticised for removing the human touch from interactions and taking away the opportunity to build an emotional connection with customers. While some organisations have used that as a reason for not providing automated tools for customer service, they are now facing the reality that more and more customers want – and expect – self-service solutions. This is putting more pressure on organisations than ever before as they try to figure out how to bring together self-service with the human element.

On 3rd October, a new event is coming to London that is focused specifically on this challenge. The Humanising Digital & Self-Serve Conference is a one-day event being held at the Museum of London Docklands. Creative Virtual is proud to be an event sponsor, and Founder & CEO, Chris Ezekiel will present a session titled ‘Conversational AI & the Human Touch’. As someone with many years of experience working with enterprise executives and industry experts, Chris understands the challenges companies face when implementing self-service as part of their digital customer experience strategies:

“This conference is addressing an important aspect of today’s customer experience – keeping the human element even as organisations transition to more digital and self-service solutions. Offering intelligent chatbot and virtual agent tools should never mean a removal of humans from your customer service and support strategy.”

During his presentation, Chris will share industry research and live demonstrations as he explores best practices for combining conversational AI and self-service with the human touch for a seamless, omnichannel customer experience. He’ll help attendees gain a better understanding of:

  • Current challenges companies face when implementing chatbots, virtual agents and live chat
  • Reasons why conversational AI and self-service solutions need a combination of self-learning and human input
  • Tips for selecting, deploying and maintaining successful digital self-service tools

More information and a full copy of the event programme can be found on the Humanising Digital & Self-Serve Conference website. As an event sponsor, Creative Virtual is able to offer our blog readers a discount on tickets – use code Partner150 when booking your pass online.

If you’re unable to attend the event or just want to learn more about how you can bring together humans, AI and self-service in a way that creates reliability and consistency for your organisation and your customers, request a live demo with a member of our expert team.

“Virtual Moron-Idiot!”: Why Chatbots Fail and the #ChatbotRescue Mission Saving Them

This post originally appeared on AI Time Journal as part of their Conversational AI Initiative.

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

It’s hard to find anyone involved with the chatbot and virtual agent industry who hasn’t heard the cautionary tale of Microsoft’s AI chatbot Tay. In less than 24 hours, Twitter users trained Tay to give offensive, racist and inappropriate responses which resulted in Microsoft taking Tay offline. Described as a ‘machine learning project designed for human engagement,’ Tay ended up becoming an often-cited example of an AI chatbot gone wrong.

As someone who has been working with virtual agent technology for nearly 20 years, Tay reinforced for me that pure AI is not the right answer for customer service and employee support virtual agents and chatbots. Yet, when Facebook announced the launch of chatbots on their Messenger platform and the media frenzy around AI and chatbots took hold, some conversational AI vendors jumped on the AI bandwagon. The industry suddenly became saturated with both false promises about the capabilities of the technology and a plethora of new start-ups claiming to have AI-powered customer service bots.

Fast forward a few years, and the chatbot and virtual agent landscape is now littered with poor-performing implementations and failed projects. In some cases, these failing projects have garnered negative press for companies. Telecommunications company Telstra was in the news when their virtual agent Codi was branded a ‘virtual moron-idiot’ by customers for failing to answer even basic questions. The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA), a government agency in Australia, was criticised for spending more than $3.5 million AUD on a chatbot project that never even reached the testing stage. In other cases, enterprises are struggling behind the scenes with internal chatbot projects. It’s not unusual to find companies with more than 10 projects in progress, but none of them delivering on their potential.

This is a common theme in organisations around the world. Yet, it’s not all doom and gloom for the industry. While there are many chatbot and virtual agent projects failing or never coming to fruition, there are also lots of highly successful implementations that have been in place for years. For example, at Creative Virtual our very first enterprise customer is still a customer today – that’s over 15 years of consistently delivering successful virtual agent solutions for them. So why do some chatbot projects fail while others achieve long-term success? There are two main pieces to the puzzle – the technology and the people.

As with any other product or technology, not all chatbot and virtual agent solutions are created equal. Here are just a few of the common problems enterprises are encountering because they don’t have the right virtual agent technology in place:

  • Channel-specific solutions – While providing 24/7 self-service on one channel can be a great way to get started with a chatbot, organisations are discovering that technology designed only for one channel is now creating a disjointed experience for customers because the tool can’t be linked up with any other channels. These companies are struggling with the challenge of having yet another siloed tool to maintain that makes it harder to deliver a seamless, omnichannel customer experience.
  • ‘Dumb’ solutions – Basic chatbot solutions are designed to do just that – have basic interactions. Organisations using these platforms are struggling to create unstructured conversation flows and deliver intelligent self-service that can help users solve issues using natural language. Without options to integrate with existing content sources, other support options and account information, simple chatbot solutions don’t allow for the easy, personalised experience users want. They also don’t have the right combination of machine learning and human input on the backend to help them continually improve in a reliable way.
  • Tough-to-grow solutions – Some enterprises thought their chatbot was on-track until they tried to grow their solution. Not all platforms give organisations the ability to scale their chatbot to other touchpoints, to support millions of users, to expand into other business areas, to link the contact centre to digital channels, to meet specific security and hosting requirements, to control the amount of machine learning and human input used – the list goes on and on. A self-service tool that can’t grow with the company won’t deliver long-term success.
  • DIY solutions – Lots of companies jumped at the chance to build their own chatbot only to discover that they don’t have the experience, know-how and data to create a tool that will meet their customer and/or employee engagement goals.

That last issue is just part of the reason why people are the other main ingredient for a successful chatbot implementation. As I mentioned in my Conversational AI interview, I truly believe that the key to a successful chatbot/virtual agent/conversational AI strategy is to work with an experienced team of people. There are lots of confusing options and challenges in the industry today, and enterprises need to be smart about the choices they make. Organisations need to work with an experienced partner that can help guide them in creating and implementing a chatbot strategy that will work today and also set them up for future innovation and expansion.

Often chatbot projects fail because the organisation isn’t working with a vendor that can provide consultation experience as well as the right technology. It’s important to work with a team that will collaborate closely to design a customised solution and provide guidance on both sector-specific and general industry best practices. This expertise needs to go beyond the initial implementation process to include experience in ongoing development and optimisation. New start-ups typically can’t provide that type of insight and support, and most organisations don’t have that expertise internally.

The good news for enterprises struggling with poor performing chatbots and projects that never got off the ground is that there are options for getting their projects back on track. Instead of abandoning these projects, they can save their investments by leveraging what they already have and building on that to create a successful chatbot by upgrading to the right platform. As someone who has been involved with this technology since its infancy, I’m passionate about helping these organisations save their investments. The expert team at Creative Virtual and I know intimately how well this technology can work for enterprises and don’t want them to continue to miss out on those benefits.

If your organisation is struggling with a chatbot or virtual agent project, I encourage you to reach out to learn more about Creative Virtual’s Chatbot Rescue Mission.

If your organisation hasn’t started out on your conversational AI journey yet but is worried about selecting, deploying and maintaining a successful solution, I recommend downloading these Top Tips for Implementing a Chatbot or Virtual Agent in 2019.