By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Anyone who has ever planned a wedding, a surprise birthday party, or a family reunion knows how difficult it can be to get everyone and everything involved coordinated. All the pieces are interconnected, and good communication is essential to putting your plan into action. Often, even seemingly small details can be key in making sure all the moving parts are in sync.

The same is true for customer service strategies. Those that achieve real success are part of a bigger customer experience (CX) approach that is designed to create an integrated, coordinated strategy. Every piece is important and must be linked together to create a cohesive, seamless experience.

Within many companies, the digital customer service experience has evolved slowly and separately from other pieces of the support puzzle, such as the contact centre. For many years, when having a static set of FAQs on a website was enough for online self-service, organisations could get away with that siloed approach. Today that’s not the case. Customers expect a connected and more sophisticated digital service experience.

It’s not unusual for companies, especially large enterprises, to struggle with delivering an integrated customer support experience. Often, they have many of the pieces they need but aren’t sure how to link those pieces – or silos – together.

A good example is an organisation that has built up a robust content repository to house all of their customer help information. This was an important step in their journey to create a more consistent experience because it established a single place for them to manage content. They even enabled visitors to their website to leverage this repository by adding a simple search tool on the help page.

Now the company acknowledges that forcing users to scroll through a list of search results and read through long information articles is not delivering the online self-service experience they want to give existing and prospective customers. It’s the same as selecting a caterer and deciding on a menu for your party, but not making arrangements for the food to be delivered to the right venue at the right time. Despite all the effort you put into the food, you end up with a poor experience – and hungry guests! – because you haven’t put together the pieces of the puzzle behind the scenes.

Rob Foster, Knowledgebase Engineer and a conversational AI expert, shares a way to deliver a better self-service experience with a virtual agent that utilises an existing repository of help content. He explains:

“If you already have an existing content repository in use, consider integrating with it rather than spending time transferring all the data to a separate knowledgebase. With this option, your virtual agent recognises the user intent and makes an API call to retrieve the relevant information directly from the repository. This simplifies content management for you because you aren’t juggling multiple systems. It helps ensure accuracy because when content is updated in the repository, the changes are instantly reflected in the virtual agent. The integration also removes the danger of having conflicting information between the virtual agent and other online help pages since everything is managed in a single place.”

In 2017, a large Telecommunications Company took their first steps to do just this. They had already invested in an Oracle Knowledgebase that housed about 3,000 information articles. They wanted to provide a better user experience for their online help by adding a virtual agent to their website but did not want to move or replicate their help content. Their solution was to set a challenge as part of their conversational AI vendor selection process: 24 hours to build a working integration with their existing content repository.

You can find more details about that 24-hackathon and how their conversational AI solution currently works in the full Customer Success Story. Their approach is saving them an estimated £3 million per year from reductions in support calls and delivering better insights into their customer needs. It is also helping them make the most of their CX investments by linking up the pieces of their customer service strategy for a consistent, seamless experience.

You wouldn’t let your party guests go hungry, so why would you let your website visitors struggle to find information you could easily serve to them with the right tools?