Tag Archive for: National Customer Service Week

Will Your Customer Service Project Sink or Swim?

By Rachel F Freeman, Operations Director

Creating a plan and an overall inspiring vision for which you imagine receiving accolades and awards sounds like a great place to be. However, the key to deciding whether the vision is going to sink or swim is based on the details, the objectives, and the team responsible for delivery.

Quick example: a 90-year-old woman decides that she’d like to make some fitness gains. Whilst she is an avid horseback rider, her thoughts move to jumping out of an airplane. She tells a local newspaper, and you can picture the publicity and the thrill of the activity. The small print is less than ideal: the woman, although fighting fit at first glance, has a recurring problem with blood pressure and dizziness. Altitude could wreak havoc on both of those issues, but she forgets to mention this. The news reporter is so caught up on the potential of the story, that he never asks for more details. The story never goes to print because the woman never jumps and pursues hiking instead on the advice of her doctor. Perhaps not quite as exciting on the surface, hiking is actually the best outcome for her situation and still an impressive achievement. This example ends well but not with the anticipated fanfare.

When applied to business solutions, this scenario can take on much heavier implications. Imagine a chief stakeholder has a vision for a customer service project full of whistles and bells but does not quite understand how to reach that point and leaves the details to the team. The team is so enthralled by the vision and the prospect of a new shiny development, as well as being caught up in the enthusiasm the chief has for the project, that certain basic and very important questions are not asked.

Questions such as: The idea is great, but what is the use case? What are the customer pain points to solve?  What are the measurable objectives? Can we achieve the objectives by doing something less time consuming and complicated if we try another option? And my particular favourite, have you considered the end-to-end journey for the project across all channels?

Failing to take the time to ask and answer these questions doesn’t necessarily mean the project will sink. It can, however, mean lots of wasted time and unnecessary confusion or frustration. The end result may be effective, but it probably won’t be as shiny as the initial vision.

Here is the controversial question: Do shiny things tarnish more quickly than a solid solution that is effective? I work for a software solution company where innovation and shiny, cool things are what we do.  I strongly believe based on my experience that you can have shiny and solid simultaneously when it comes to customer service solutions.

What I do not advocate is applying “shiny” without considering the questions above. For example, a smooth end-to-end digital user journey is a holy grail for online customer service. Yet just because you can help a customer smoothly journey through multiple channels for support doesn’t mean you should always do that. Don’t get caught up in the excitement of showing off all the whistles and bells of different channels. Instead, always ask if there is a real use case or a point beyond it seeming to look impressive.

Customers don’t care if your tools and channels are innovative and shiny if they aren’t getting their questions answered. They don’t care about your inspirational vision if their time is being wasted because you haven’t planned your customer journeys based on the real way your solutions are going to be used.

Likewise, why waste your team’s time by trying to solve all customer problems across multiple channels when, for instance, certain use cases will truly only be used via a mobile device and not on a desktop? If the team is caught up in the hype and overlooking the details, you risk delivering a mediocre project that just floats along instead of maximising on the potential of the initial vision.

Digital customer service awards are given to those projects that showcase shiny developments, but only when they take the customer down the right path at the right time and serve the right information as required.

This Customer Service Week let’s celebrate the people on our teams that pay attention to the details and make sure we answer the important questions. They are the ones that enable even the most ambitious and shiniest visions to become a reality through solid, successful solutions.

I’d much rather swim with the confidence that my project has buoyancy based on the right questions being answered than risk sinking in a sea of bright and unchallenged options – and I’m guessing you would, too! If you’re interested in learning more about how the Creative Virtual team can help you with customer service solutions that are both shiny and solid, contact us here.

Showing Love for Customer Service Week

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Happy Customer Service Week! Observed every year during the first full week of October, Customer Service Week is an international celebration of the importance of customer service and of the people who serve and support customers on a daily basis.

Delivering service and support that customers love doesn’t happen by chance. Companies known for their positive customer service have a strategy that encompasses the whole organisation. They support their employees and contact centre agents with the right tools. They are available to their customers on the channels they prefer. They regularly review feedback from both customers and employees and take action to improve. They are agile and adapt to changes with a customer-centric approach.

This week we are showing love for the efforts of everyone involved with delivering customer service – employees helping customers face-to-face in brick-and-mortar locations; contact centre agents delivering support over the phone, live chat, and social media; team members working behind the scenes to build and maintain customer service tools.

It’s become tradition at Creative Virtual to start Customer Service Week with our annual blog post roundup. This will be the seventh year I’ve combed through the previous 12 months of posts on our blog to put this together. It’s always a challenge to decide which posts to include, but my goal is to select ones on a variety of customer service topics that deliver expert insights, actionable tips, and/or thought-provoking questions.

And so, without further ado, here are some of the best customer service posts shared on the Creative Virtual Blog over the past year:

  • Solving Common Conversational AI Project Issues – Conversational AI is widely recognised as an important technology in digital customer service and employee support strategies. However, some organisations are struggling with a chatbot that’s not performing as expected, can’t be scaled as their business grows, or doesn’t properly reflect their brand. It’s possible to get these projects back on track without abandoning the investment.
  • The Generic ‘Chat Now’: Virtual Agent or Live Chat? – Customers are more comfortable with and increasingly seeking out digital self-service options. However, if those tools are easily accessible or clearly identified as the place to self-serve (without having to engage with a human) then both customers and businesses are missing out on their benefit.
  • Gen Z and your Customer Self-Service – If you aren’t planning for the expectations of younger customers as they gain more buying power over the next few years, you are missing out on a prime opportunity to put your customer service efforts on the path to future success. Younger generations not only prefer self-service options but are also coming to expect intuitive self-service.
  • Take Your Customer Support from ‘Talking At’ to ‘Listening To’ – Good customer service means listening to your customers and creating a dialogue, not just talking at them. It also means using what you learn from customers to constantly improve. This requires courage – customers will speak their mind! – and the will to act.
  • Can Conversational AI Make Your CX More Human and Empathetic? – No matter how advanced and integrated a self-service tool may be, some support issues are best handled by a real person. However, as companies work to increase customer empathy and provide better service for vulnerable customers, they are finding that supporting their employees and contact centre agents with specially designed conversational AI solutions can actually make engagements with customers more human and empathic.
  • Contact Centres are Crying Out for Help – Contact centres and contact centre agents are under immense pressure, dealing with increased contact volumes, rising customer frustration, and agent attrition. While technology won’t solve all the issues facing the contact centre industry, the right solutions will go a long way in alleviating some of the stress being placed on agents.
  • Conversational AI and the Employee Experience – Your customer experience starts with your employee experience. Employees that feel supported and have the proper tools to do their jobs are going to be happier and more engaged. In turn, that means better products, services, and support for your customers.
  • Building a Cohesive Virtual Agent and Live Chat Solution – Once rival solutions, virtual agents and live chat are now seen as complementary tools for customer service. Organisations are having discussions about how to incorporate both into their digital customer support strategies. The tips in this post address adding a virtual agent to an existing live chat deployment, adding live chat to an existing virtual agent deployment, and adding both solutions or changing providers.
  • Not All Chatbots are Conversational AI Solutions – There are many names often used interchangeably in the industry, but what makes a virtual agent or chatbot a true conversational AI solution? How the technology is using artificial intelligence both in the development stage and for ongoing maintenance is important. However, don’t overlook the need for integration and personalisation, too.
  • Composable CX: Becoming Agile and Flexible – Over the past two years, composability has become a key discussion point for many organisations looking to take a more agile approach to their customer service. Composable CX is about being able to create and deploy solutions quickly but doing so in a way that responds to customer needs in a thoughtful and empathetic way.

The Creative Virtual team is once again marking this week with our annual Customer Service Week Blog Celebration – a series of posts written by expert members of our team on the present and future of customer service. Subscribe to our Blog to get them all delivered right to your Inbox and find them all listed here as each is published.

Two Thumbs Up for Customer Service Week

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Happy Customer Service Week! Today we kick off the annual week-long international celebration of the importance of customer service, the people who deliver that service and the impact it has on successful business practices. 2020 has brought new customer service challenges for companies and altered the way customers engage with businesses, perhaps forever. Delivering service that gets two thumbs up from customers has been – and continues to be – no easy feat!

This is the fifth year I’ve put together a blog post roundup to start off Customer Service Week, and it might just be the most important one yet. The global pandemic has put digital transformation projects on the fast-track for many organisations, including digital customer service initiatives. Having expert insights, resources and industry stats is important for getting those strategies right. Here are some of the key blog posts on customer support we’ve shared over the past year that can help you with improving and extending the customer service you provide:

  • Delivering Self-Service During the COVID-10 Uncertainty, Part 1: Supporting Customers – COVID-19 has put organisations under immense pressure to deliver quality service and support over digital channels. This three-part blog series explores the business value of using a chatbot or virtual agent to provide easy-to-use self-service, starting with supporting customers. Also take a look at Part 2: Supporting Contact Centre Agents and Part 3: Supporting Employees.
  • Helping Financial Organisations Deliver 24/7 Customer Support: Part 1 and Part 2 – This two-part blog series dives into the real experiences of financial organisations as they took quick action to keep the information they were providing to customers up-to-date during a period of fast-paced changes. They used their existing virtual agent implementations both to analyse customer needs and deliver 24/7 support for better customer service.
  • Virtual Agents in 2020: Usage Spikes and the Banking Sector – Starting in late February and early March, Creative Virtual saw a spike in virtual agent traffic that surpassed anything the company had seen in over 16 years of being in the industry. By the end of the first week in July, those virtual agents had already recorded about 75% of the total transactions completed the previous year. While some sectors saw a return to more normal usage after the initial spike, the Banking sector continued to see increased usage compared with the first two months of 2020.
  • A New Ebook and a Conversational AI Success Story During Times of Pandemic – In August, AI Time Journal published a new ebook, Conversational AI Trends 2020, exploring the rapid advances in conversational AI technologies and the new applications and use cases emerging across industries. The ebook also covered several conversational AI success stories, including one telling how an international financial services group’s virtual agent rose to the challenges of customer support during the pandemic.
  • The Chatbot & Virtual Agent Experts Have Spoken: Experience Matters – If you are considering virtual agent or chatbot options and providers, then you will benefit from the expertise of this group of industry insiders. Together they offer 83 years of experience in a field that has only been commercially viable for about two decades. Learn about the six areas of experience that are necessary for the success of a conversational self-help tool.
  • APAC Contact Centres Embracing AI and Virtual Agent Technologies – There has been a shift in the APAC region as an increasing number of organisations look to use AI and virtual agents within the human customer service area of their CX strategies to support contact centre agents, relationship managers and other employees. Contact centres need to be prepared for the impact of new technologies on their operations, structure and workload.
  • Hindsight May be 20/20 But CX Needs a 20/20 Vision – Customers are expecting more from the companies they give their business to, and that includes effective service across touchpoints. Just as each company is unique, so should be their chatbot, virtual agent and live chat strategy. There is no one-size-fits-all approach that guarantees success.
  • A Successful Self-Service Strategy Requires Looking at the Bigger Picture – While companies needing to implement a new self-service solution or upgrade an existing one are feeling a sense of urgency, they still need to be thoughtful about the technology they select and how it is implemented. Having a successful self-service strategy requires looking at the bigger picture of your overall customer service and experience to avoid frustrating customers with a disjointed, unhelpful experience.
  • Tips for Deploying AI Chatbots & Virtual Agents – Chatbots, smart help, virtual assistants, virtual agents, conversational AI – there are lots of names for this automated, self-service technology being used today. Whatever you call it, the objective for including it as part of your customer service strategy is to deliver quick, easy access to information. Selecting and deploying the right technology for your company is key to achieving success.
  • Out with the Old and in with AI for a Better Contact Centre – A ContactBabel customer service survey found business leaders agreed that AI will be important to the future of the contact centre. While long-established customer communication channels haven’t disappeared, companies need to look to new technologies to help them support those channels in a better and more cost-effective way.

 

What are You Doing to Deal with Stress?

By Rachael Needham, Head of Delivery Management

A key to good relations with our (yours and mine) clients is dealing with stress. When we’re negatively stressed or stressed out, we are less likely to be friendly, come up with creative solutions, or handle difficult situations well.

There is lots of great information about stress and handling it, so this is just a little reminder and snapshot of stress and handling it. Let’s take a look!

1. Is stress good or bad?

It’s both. There is stress that gets you up and going, which is good. However, bad stress is distress. It impacts you physically as well as mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and just about any another “ally” you can think of.

2. The physical impact of stress

Stress sets off inflammation in the body, stomachaches, headaches, and a long list of other issues. The biggest cause of inflammation in the body is from stress. The physical impacts can lead to illness, fatigue, brain fog, etc. And what happens when we have physical issues?

3. The psychological impact of stress

What affects us physically affects us psychologically, and vice versa. Studies show that just one night of poor sleep impacts our reaction time while driving and our decision making. Negative stress will have a knock-on effect as we work with colleagues and clients. Negative stress can sneak up on us, and begin impacting our decisions, words, and interactions, which can cause smaller issues to become escalations. Escalations create more stress and may draw others into negative stress, compounding issues by triggering stress motivated reactions.

4. Simple Solutions

There are lots of solutions for dealing with stress. Sometimes the smallest changes to your regular routine can have a major impact. Which of these things could you start doing for yourself?

  • Go to bed 30 minutes early a few nights a week
  • Walk barefoot in the grass once a week / month
  • Bounce on an exercise ball / on a trampoline / in place for 5-15 minutes a day
  • Stop looking at your phone / watching TV an hour before going to bed
  • Take a pharmaceutical grade, bio-available, quality nutritional
  • Eat a fresh salad / avocado twice a week (or an additional time if you’re already great about consuming veggies)
  • Chat with a trusted friend or co-worker
  • Take two 15-minute breaks a week to breathe / pray / meditate
  • Read a book on personal development / techniques to handle stress
  • Meet with a therapist
  • Watch a funny video that will make you laugh out loud

stress less

If you’re dealing with high negative stress and feel like it’s more than you can handle, please reach out to a doctor or professional counselor who is willing to look at both your physical and mental health.

 

Here’s to a great life ahead as you pursue stress-free health and supporting customers and clients from a place of wellbeing!

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.

Meeting Customer Service Expectations in India

By Anand Gupta, Knowledgebase Author

India is one of the fastest growing economies of the world but is yet to hit the peak.  Climbing up the ladder of success, and boosting the economy, has been aided by several technologies. They helped in cutting down costs and incorporating quality. Now, as the competition is increasing, maintaining economic growth is a huge challenge. Customers are spending their money with companies that can save their time and provide accurate information.

Yet major Indian companies and organisations are falling short on customer satisfaction. Most of them are shockingly unaware of it. While basking in the glory of success, they tend to think everything is alright. This is where they lose the connection with people.

Small companies in India are unable to afford call centres for resolution of customer issues. A contact centre requires a huge budget and infrastructure in place. Yet, having a call centre isn’t always the best way to serve customers. Connecting to a call centre agent consumes customers’ time. One needs to go through the grind and wait until the agent receives and answers your query. It may take a while and causes people to lose interest in buying from the company.

In India, people are often confused when it comes to contacting product manufacturers. There’s not much information available to them sometimes as to how to get the information and support they need.

Luckily there are solutions available to Indian companies to build better connections with customers. Chatbot technology is easily the most compatible, affordable, and easy to use solution. It is hassle-free, connects 24/7 from any place with just an Internet connection, and systematically answers the most FAQs without any human intervention.

India is an explicitly diverse nation housing multiple languages and dialects being spoken in distinct states. Not every company is capable of hiring a bunch of people at call centres to meet the needs of its customers’ languages. But a chatbot can accommodate the regional languages. It can process the queries in them and revert to the client in the same.

Here in India, Creative Virtual has successfully executed the technique in two states: Rajasthan and Maharashtra. We created our NLP (natural language processing) in the local languages, including Rajasthani, Marwari, Hindi (along with English) for Rajasthan (for the government project Bhmashah), and Marathi for Maharasthra (PCMC, government). It was a unique exercise that became pathbreaking in the industry with others looking to emulate. Now, people from remote areas don’t need to walk down to a government office. They can check the government schemes on mobiles phones and download e-cards provided to them for availing facilities.

As we celebrate Customer Service Week, here are some expectations of customers that companies in India need to keep in mind to better serve their customers:

  • Options to connect with a company without a long wait
  • Accessibility from anywhere
  • Proper and deep information of a company’s product or service
  • Resolution of their problem in their local language
  • Responsive user experience
  • Information readily available and help that is customary and free
  • Ability to connect with a human helper if they have a complex issue that can’t be resolved through self-service

Research is key for companies in India as it is a country of over a billion people with different needs. They must get to know their customers so they can build connections. Companies must be artisanal in their approach to customer service which includes flexibility when catering to a varied customer base. Requests and suggestions made by customers must be respected and worked upon. Word of mouth is key in success in the Indian market.

 

Building a Positive Relationship for Better Customer Service

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

The relationships you have with your customers directly affect your bottom line. Happy customers are more likely to be loyal, repeat customers and recommend you to their friends, family and social media connections. Every service and support engagement you have with a customer can make or break that relationship.

At Creative Virtual one of our passions is helping our customers deliver a positive service experience to their customers. In order to do that, we work to build a close and collaborative relationship with each of our customer organisations. We get to know their business and goals and then strive to deliver the support they need to achieve their customer service objectives.

Customer Service Week is all about celebrating the people around the world who are delivering great service and support, and so I’d like to give a special shout out to the Creative Virtual team. It is your experience, expertise and dedication to building those positive relationships that have enabled the company to cultivate a growing list of happy customers for over 15 years.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Over the past several months, some of Creative Virtual’s customers have been leaving verified reviews of our company and technology on the Gartner Peer Insights* website. Here’s what they have to say about working with our team:

Relation Based on Trust and Successful Deliveries

“Working with Creative Virtual is easy. Our key contacts are always available to support us on any issues, new projects or last minute requirements. We appreciate the rapidity of answer as well as the flexibility around the Vendor Management. HSBC is working with Creative Virtual since 2011. A real trust has been developed as long as successful projects are delivered. This is a real win-win situation.” (Read the full review)

 

Moved Fast to Launch a Chatbot that Answers Inquiries in a Conversational Way

“Creative Virtual is very responsive to our needs. They are supportive and agile as our business evolves to take advantage of their product offerings.” (Read the full review)

 

If You Want a Company that Focuses on Your Needs, Only Look at Creative Virtual

“Creative Virtual are a very professional company that treats each company as an individual. They get to understand a companies’ needs and offer solutions, they don’t try to apply a one solution fits all approach. I highly recommend Chris as I have worked with him for over 10 years in large corporations. CV place the customer first and this comes through in every interaction.” (Read the full review)

 

Responsive and Adaptive, Thought Leaders, Consistently Delivers Meaningful Results

“Responsive and adaptive; very nimble delivery model (fast ramp up time, fast engagement and assignment of resources). Collaborative and agile approach. Highly skilled resources with deep subject matter expertise. Strong thought leadership. Meaningful results (improved call deflection rates). Innovative product set and roadmap, with particular strength in process mining tools and method combined with intent libraries.” (Read the full review)

As they say, the proof is in the pudding – and there’s no better feeling than knowing we have happy, satisfied customers. So happy, in fact, that they are willing to take time out of their busy days to complete a review and share their positive experiences with their peers. Thank you to all of our customers for collaborating with our team and trusting us to help you with your customer service!

To learn more about our technology and working with our team, request your own live demo. We’d love to add you to the Creative Virtual family!

 

*Gartner Peer Insights reviews constitute the subjective opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and do not represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.

The Cycle of a Successful and Harmonious Customer Service Experience

By Rachel Freeman, Operations Director

It’s 2019 and time again to celebrate Customer Service Week. It’s Autumn and leaves are falling in the Northern Hemisphere – a testament to the changing seasons of a cyclical and (hopefully) never-ending cycle. The cyclical concept seems apt this week as we mark this week-long celebration again this year (although we should be thinking about customer service every week of course!) and seasons are changing.

So many aspects found in our lives are cyclical. On a personal level we have the cycle of life. One of my personal favourites is the circle of fifths which, on the most basic of levels, can be defined loosely as a musical concept involving the relationship of various tones found in major and minor keys which can explain why certain things might sound sharp or flat or in perfect harmony. Stay tuned for more on this later.

Moving into business we can look at software development, with stages including planning through to maintenance with the objective to move back to planning for more improvements based on feedback. Similarly, we can look at the product cycle where there is a season for production after research and development, and then an ultimate season of decline which feeds right back into R&D to work out what can be improved for the next version.

Closer to home, I consider how Creative Virtual’s suite of customer and employee engagement tools fulfil a tidy cycle which feeds upon itself to deliver a successful and harmonious customer experience. Like the circle of fifths, there is no end point. The relationships of tones and questions and points of contact exist in a wheel and the feedback loop – whether musical or user generated – provides enough information to confirm either perfect harmony or an experience needing more tuning.

customer serviceTo explain further – picture a user needing information about an upgrade to a banking service that may affect his/her account. The user asks a question via the self-help portal and gets a response that delivers an accurate explanation, but it is not specific enough for his/her unique situation. So, the user decides to escalate to live chat. The virtual agent passes the user over to the live chat advisor along with the transcript of the conversation so the agent can respond to the latest query and not start over at the beginning. The live agent “speaks” to the user who then asks another question about the bank policy on “xyz”. The agent, not knowing all of the policies, seeks advice on the internal advisor-facing self-help portal (serviced by Creative Virtual from same knowledgebase), finds the reference on policy number and feeds back the info to the user quickly.

The “journey” went full circle: user finding information on the self-help tool – self-help tool escalating the user to a live agent – live agent finding information on the internal self-help tool – a combination of humans and technology delivering exactly what the user needed to know. Possibly not a symphony but I’d call that a most successful and enjoyable customer prelude.

Happy Customer Service Week!

The Ever-Changing World of Customer Service Chatbot Creation

By Jeff Clifford, Project/Account Manager

I started building virtual agents and chatbots for customer service more than 12 years ago. A lot has certainly changed in that time. I talked about some of the changes in my Meet the Team interview a couple of years ago, but the industry has continued to evolve since then.

In my experience, there has been a major shift in customer expectations since 2015/2016 in the customer service chatbot industry. Pre-2014, most companies were looking to deploy chatbots that were pretty straight forward and consisted largely of FAQs, scripted conversation flows, keywords and a flat or standard UI. Some forward-thinking organisations were exceptions to that, and Creative Virtual worked with companies that took their solutions to the next level with innovative functionality like account integration to give personalised answers to logged in users.

Now, as we approach the end of 2019, chatbots and virtual agents are increasingly becoming the face of company help centres. Simple chatbot implementations are no longer enough to meet customer expectations. Customers also now expect self-service on new channels, such as Facebook Messenger and Amazon Alexa, that weren’t popular for customer service even a few years ago. The look of chatbots has also changed, with many companies now embedding their virtual agent into their own UI to give a cleaner, streamlined look and experience.

While previously personalised self-service was a major differentiator, now customers expect an experience tailored for them. Chatbots designed for enterprises have the features, functionality and integration options to deliver that. For example, chatbots are able to detect a customer’s language and country via integration with their user profile. This means the chatbot can display the user’s preferred language and can also return location-specific responses, such as a correct payment cut-off time that varies by country or time zone. Chatbots can also provide customised responses depending on where it was launched from, such as a section of your website about a particular product or service.

The goal of a seamless, omnichannel experience is becoming standard practice in organisations. Chatbots that can be deployed across channels are helping companies move away from a siloed approach to their customer service. When backed by the right orchestration platform, a single knowledgebase can be used across all channels while still delivering a specific answer based on the user’s device (such as a shorter answer on a mobile). A tight integration with live chat allows the virtual agent to pass a user over to a live agent seamlessly in the same panel while in the background passing over a full history of the conversation.

Perhaps one of the biggest changes in the chatbot industry is the use of more artificial intelligence (AI), and companies now want a chatbot that has AI capabilities. A good chatbot technology brings together different methods including semantic algorithms, deep learning, neural networks and machine learning in a way that still gives companies control. Chatbots are able to learn customer behaviours based on how users interact it with it and what suggested questions they are selecting in order to continuously improve. However, this shouldn’t be a black box. To be successful in a customer service role, the chatbot needs to have some level of human intervention and sign-off on content to keep information accurate and compliant.

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of simple chatbots out there today that leave customers annoyed and with a bad impression of the technology. The team at Creative Virtual are on a mission to help save as many of these chatbots as we can by transforming them into tools that meet customer expectations and are worthy of being the face of the company’s help centre.

The chatbot and virtual agent industry is an exciting space to be in, and I love being able to help my clients implement the newest developments in their virtual agent projects. At Creative Virtual, we’re always pushing the boundaries of what the industry thinks is possible and consistently striving to bring new innovations to the table. It gives me a real feeling of pride to see long-standing chatbot implementations evolve along with these changes and continue to deliver the service that customers expect.

Three Cheers for Customer Service Week

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Happy Customer Service Week! Every year during the first full week of October we celebrate the importance of customer service and the people who serve and support customers around the globe. The customer service landscape is more challenging than ever with a growing number of customer contact channels and increasing expectations for always-available support.

Even though the customer service industry is constantly evolving, the goal is always the same: to create happy, repeat customers through quality service and support. Here’s our annual blog post roundup of trends, tips and stats to help you consistently deliver a five-star customer service experience:

  • Top Tips for Implementing a Chatbot or Virtual Agent in 2019 – These eight tips address the most important items organisations should consider when evaluating and deploying chatbot or virtual agent technology. Get recommendations on how to build your business case, implement the right combination of humans and AI, and achieve long-term success with conversational self-service.
  • Are We Chatting or are We Serving? – The balance of chat and getting the solution quickly – In our digitised world with expectations for immediate access to information, is it right to assume that we are so busy that we’d rather just get an answer than exchange any pleasantries? This post explores creating the right chat/service balance when supporting digital customers.
  • Leverage Your Chatbot to Its Full Capacity – The long-term pros of having a chatbot go beyond providing basic self-service to customers. They can also be personalised marketing and sales tools and powerful sources of customer insights and feedback for companies that leverage them to their full capacity.
  • Creating a Better Experience for Indian Customers – There’s no denying the importance of providing a positive customer experience for digital customers. This post shares insights from this year’s Customer Experience Management (CXM) event held in Mumbai and a video of Creative Virtual’s presentation, including live demonstrations of our CX technologies.
  • The Digital Workplace in 2019 – Organisations are coming to understand the benefits of providing better and easier support for employees and are placing an increased focus on improving employee engagement. Chatbots and virtual agents are proven tools in the digital workplace for everything from onboarding new employees to helping troubleshoot common IT issues to training contact centre agents.
  • “Virtual Moron-Idiot!”: Why Chatbots Fail and the #ChatbotRescue Mission Saving Them – The chatbot and virtual agent landscape is littered with poor-performing implementations and failed projects, but it’s not all doom and gloom for the industry. Not only are there highly successful implementations that have been in place for years, but there are also options for getting failing projects back on track.
  • #CXDay: Serving Your Customers a Custom Support Experience – 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. Here are four tips to help you deliver a custom support experience for your customers.