Tag Archive for: CX

CX in 2018: Digital Transformation Means Combining Humans and Chatbots

By Mandy Reed, Marketing Manager (Global)

For years there was much more talk about digital transformation than any actual changes for many organisations, but that’s starting to change. More and more digital transformation projects are getting off the ground, and 2018 will be an important year for understanding the reality of the changes needed and putting plans into action.

During a recent roundtable event Econsultancy found that for many, digital transformation programmes are all about survival. Organisations are ‘trying to disrupt ourselves before being disrupted by others’. There is a fear of being made obsolete and digital transformation is a way to head off bankruptcy, particularly for those already struggling or less profitable than their competitors.

Yet well-established and profitable organisations are also moving forward with these types of programmes, particularly when it comes to customer experience. In Hong Kong, some of the biggest banks are launching smart chatbots as a way to serve tech-savvy customers as part of their digital transformations. The corporate banking unit of HSBC, Hong Kong’s largest bank by assets, launched the very first chatbot of its kind in the city. Chatbot Amy is an important part of their innovative digital banking experience and allows customers to get answers quickly and easily.

I recently read an article predicting that 2018 will see AI-enable chatbots providing a better customer experience than human-to-human chat exchanges. I would argue that in some cases they already are. While I disagree with the authors on that point, I wholeheartedly agree on their insistence that customer service chatbots should have human ‘escape hatches’ which seamlessly pass users over to a human.

When it comes to customer service and engagement, digital transformation means combining humans and machines. Organisations that ignore the importance of the human element or try to rely on pure artificial intelligence (AI) are going to see their initiatives crash and burn. Chatbots can be brilliant additions to digital engagement strategies but they need to be implemented in the right way and with the right expectations, like HSBC Hong Kong’s Amy.

One thing that has held back digital transformation efforts is coming to grips with the reality of implementing plans, which is often very different than expected. It’s important to work with an experienced, expert team – particularly when it comes to customer service chatbots. Don’t rush to deploy any old chatbot just to be able to say you have one. Be strategic about it as part of your overall digital customer experience transformation. Know how it can best serve your customers and how you want to integrate it with other support options such as live chat. The whitepaper Virtual Agents and Chatbots and Avatars – confusing or what! gives some key features to look for when selecting a chatbot for customer support:

  • Personalisation – Can the chatbot be integrated with personalised account information?
  • Consistency and Accuracy – How will the chatbot help me keep my customer experience consistent and accurate?
  • Seamless Experience – Can I integrate the chatbot with other channels and support options?
  • End-to-End Support Journey – Can the tool bring together virtual and human support channels?

As you embark on new digital transformation initiatives to improve your customer experience this year, ensure that you examine them in context of your overall strategy and customer needs. And don’t overlook the importance of combining humans and machines, live agents and chatbots to best serve your customers and reach your CX goals.

A Look Back: 2017 in Review

By Mandy Reed, Marketing Manager (Global)

The end of 2017 is quickly approaching and so, as has become our tradition, it’s time to take a look back at Creative Virtual’s year. To say this has been an exciting and busy year for us, our customers and our partners would be an understatement! 2017 will go down as one of the most important years in Creative Virtual’s history, so let’s take a look at some of the year’s highlights.

Queens Awards for EnterpriseBy far our biggest company announcement came in April when we were officially recognised as the winner of The Queen’s Awards for Enterprise: Innovation 2017! The Queen’s Awards for Enterprise is the UK’s most prestigious business award for British companies, and we were recognised for innovation for our V-Person™ and V-Portal™ technology. Over the summer, our Founder & CEO, Chris Ezekiel, and CTO, Peter Behrend, attended a Royal Reception at Buckingham Palace for the winners and got to meet Her Majesty the Queen and several other members of the royal family. In September, the company hosted our official award ceremony and celebration, bringing together Creative Virtual team members from around the world, customers, partners and a variety of other guests in London. Mr Leslie Morgan OBE DL, Deputy Lieutenant of Greater London, presented our award on behalf of the Queen, and Jim Fitzpatrick, our local Member of Parliament (MP) for Poplar and Limehouse, also said a few words.

Creative Virtual was recognised by a variety of other awards programmes this year as well, being named ‘Best Customer Service Solutions Provider 2017’, ‘Most Innovative Customer Support Tool: V-Person Live Chat’, and ‘Best Virtual Assistant Solutions Provider 2017’ among others. We were also a proud part of the APPEX Omnichannel Catalyst which took home the Outstanding Performance in the Catalyst Program award at TM Forum Live! 2017.

Two individual members of our UK team were recognised by independent awards programmes this year for their contributions to Creative Virtual. Rachel F Freeman, Operations Director, was a finalist in the Women in IT Excellence Awards in the category of ‘Hero of the Year (SME)’ for demonstrating excellence in her support of others and going beyond the call of duty to achieve a business goal. And I was honoured to be named ‘Best CX Solutions Business Marketer – UK’ in the 2017 Business Woman of the Year Awards for my success in driving brand recognition, thought leadership and lead generation activities. It was certainly a big year for award wins for us as a company and individually!

While we enjoyed celebrating – and walking the red carpet! – this year, we were also busy sponsoring and hosting industry events and delivering thought leadership presentations in 11 different countries – India, the United States, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, France, Luxembourg, Singapore, Germany, Australia and Hungary. Our fifth annual Technology Innovation Showcase webinar (Chatbots, Virtual Agents and Your Contact Centre) with CRMXchange had a record-breaking number of registrations, highlighting the huge surge in interest in chatbots, virtual agents and artificial intelligence (AI). You can still watch that webinar on-demand, as well as our most recent webinar AI, Chatbots & Live Chat: Separating Truth from Myth.

While there has been a marked increase in interest in chatbots and virtual agents this year, there’s also a lot of confusion, unrealistic expectations and false promises being perpetuated in the marketplace. We drew on our expertise to share a realistic view of AI and chatbots in the customer space in our whitepaper AI, Chatbots and Virtual Agents: The Threat to Mankind and the Contact Centre. Founder & CEO Chris similarly tackled this topic in a column for CMRXchange, Are Chatbots, Virtual Agents and Artificial Intelligence Threats to Your Contact Centre?. Chris also shared his expertise in interviews with ReadITQuik and The Wharf Newspaper, and Mike Murphy, CEO of Creative Virtual USA, shared his thoughts on the industry in a CRMXchange Executive Interview. Following on the heels of our launch of V-Person Live Chat last year, early in 2017 we created a new video showing how you can combine self-service virtual agents and human-assisted channels to deliver a fully integrated support experience.

This year we welcomed a number of great organisations to our expanding Global Partner Network. Our V-Person Family continued to grow throughout 2017 with new virtual agent and chatbot deployments across the globe in a variety of languages, and our collaborations with current customers resulted in new features and functionality being added to existing installs. This year Motability Operations’ award-winning ‘Ask Mo’ and National Rail Enquiries popular ‘Ask Lisa’ virtual agents both celebrated their 10th birthdays. REST Industry Super’s virtual agent Roger played a part in two award wins for them this year: ‘Best Innovation Super Feature’ in Money Magazine’s Best of the Best Awards and ‘Best Fund: Innovation 2017’ in the Chant West 2017 Super Fund Awards.

As he does every year, Founder & CEO Chris took the award for most travelling as he once again flew around the world visiting with the Creative Virtual team, partners and customers and taking part in a number of different events. In November, he also added a new job title to his CV, taking on the role of monthly technology columnist with The Wharf Newspaper.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to check out our 2017 in Review photo album on the Creative Virtual Facebook page. We’ve compiled shots from our official presentations and events as well as our fun group activities and award celebrations – everything from Founder & CEO Chris meeting to Queen to him taking a pie in the face during our fundraising efforts for the RSPCA. There will still be more photos to come, so be sure to like our Facebook page so you don’t miss any.

It’s Time to be Realistic about AI, Chatbots and Live Chat

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

Recently I had the opportunity to present a webinar with Engage Customer titled ‘AI, Chatbots and Live Chat: Separating Truth from Myth’. I’m sure we can all agree how hot the market is for all things artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots and live chat at the moment. It really is exploding out there! We’re also seeing a lot of confusion, false claims and inflated expectations. My goal during this webinar was to separate the truth from the myth by showing some real-world customer examples and, through a series of live demonstrations, share best practices in deploying chatbots and human assistance for customer support.

I’m sure you’ve seen the stories of when AI goes wrong, such as Microsoft’s chatbot Tay which became sexist and racist because it learned from the way people were interacting with it. This is the simple reason why artificial intelligence on its own is not the answer for customer support. Companies like Microsoft and IBM have been responsible for setting false expectations in regards to how AI can be deployed for customer service, so you need to be very careful there. Companies need to be realistic about chatbots and virtual agents, but also make sure they select a system that fits with their roadmap for implementing this technology. And, just as important as the technology, is working with a team of people who are highly experienced in deploying these solutions.

Right now we’re in a digital and artificial intelligence revolution, and there’s no doubt that the contact centre in its current form is finished. Every organisation is in the midst of digital transformation initiatives and, of course, the contact centre needs to be a key part of that. All too often the contact centre is still siloed and we’re seeing them being left out of those discussions, though. In the future, there will be a paradigm shift and the contact centre will go from dealing with repetitive inquires to being the centre of excellence for knowledge and playing an important role in keeping self-service chatbots up-to-date.

When it comes to using artificial intelligence for customer service chatbots, a blended approach – not pure AI – is best. Creative Virtual’s V-Person™ technology uses a hybrid approach that allows organisations to tune how much machine learning and how much human curation of content they want to provide for the solution. Companies already know their top call drivers and machine learning isn’t needed to determine that. In fact, it gets in the way and gives a bad experience if it doesn’t take into account the learnings that the organisation already has. A hybrid approach of human curation of content and self-learning enables the system to continually improve while also allowing control over the reliability of chatbot responses.

I encourage you to watch the recording of the webinar on-demand to get a better understanding of this topic and to see the live demonstrations I shared of chatbots, virtual agents and live chat solutions that are currently being used around the world.

My thanks to Steve Hurst and Engage Customer for hosting this webinar.

Resisting Change Can Spell CX Disaster

By Mandy Reed, Marketing Manager (Global)

Over the summer, one of my Netflix obsessions was ‘Call the Midwife’, a TV drama that follows a group of midwives working in London’s East End during the 1950s and 60s. There often seemed to be a conflict between the traditional customs or ways of thinking and modern ideas that drove the storyline of the episodes. For example, patients resisting new medical practices such as giving birth in a maternity home instead of at home or the older generation of midwives dismissing the younger nurses’ ideas on topics like allowing husbands to be present for the birth. Often the arguments came in the form of “If it was good enough for my mum, it’s good enough for me!” or “We’ve always done it that way!”

Humans – and companies – are creatures of habit and often resistant to change. While the ‘but it’s always been done that way’ reasoning makes for a relatable and compelling TV show, it can spell disaster for organisations when they resist recognising changes in customer behaviours and preferences. Blockbuster has become a posterchild for missed opportunity, passing on the chance to purchase Netflix and then trying to get into the streaming trend too late, which ultimately led to the company’s demise.

When it comes to customer experience, organisations can’t afford to ignore the impact technology is having on the way we communicate with each other and with brands. Today’s highly connected digital customers are looking for 24/7 access to information and support across multiple channels and devices. They want a seamless experience that is personalised, consistent and easy. Companies like Amazon are often applauded for their superior customer experience, and customers are now expecting that same level of service from all the organisations they engage with, regardless of industry.

As consumers increasingly turn to self-service and digital channels, organisations need to analyse the changing preferences of their customer base and look to incorporate new channels and technologies into their customer support strategy. The change to self-service needs to happen in conjunction with an evolution of the contact centre. Current capabilities of AI-powered chatbots and virtual agents put these solutions in the perfect position to be complementary with the contact centre and live agents.

While some sceptics talk about chatbots and virtual agents in the customer service space as a passing fad, the reality is that they are a tried and tested tool for providing digital self-service and are helping to define the future of customer engagement. Since the days of the early chatbots, these tools have improved greatly in their conversational abilities thanks to advances in natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI). The evolution of customer expectations has also driven massive amounts of innovation in the technology to allow for flexible back-end integration, easier maintenance and a reliable hybrid approach to self-learning.

Take the first step toward meeting the expectations of digital customers with chatbots by requesting a demo to see this technology in action. Change can be hard, but smart organisations (and midwives!) know it is the way forward.

A Buzz About Chatbots at G-Summit Melbourne

By Patrick Gallagher, Managing Director ANZ & North Asia

There was a definite buzz at this year’s G-Summit Melbourne, hosted by Genesys earlier this month, around the event theme: Together – Together, we can deliver iconic customer experiences by powering digital business with a human touch. The event was busy this year with a very strong turnout and plenty of interest in chatbots.

I had the pleasure of being on-hand in the AppFoundry Hub to represent Creative Virtual, an event sponsor and founding member of the Genesys AppFoundry, and show our chatbot and virtual agent solutions in action. V-Person™ technology enables organisations to provide customers with smart online help and is designed to be integrated with the Genesys platform to provide a seamless experience.

G-Summit MelbourneThe theme of this year’s event really resonated with us at Creative Virtual. Our mission is to help organisations provide seamless, end-to-end customer engagement by combining the digital channels with a human touch. Based on a set of customisable rules and triggers, our self-service virtual agents can seamlessly escalate users from virtual to real agent, with a complete history of their conversation being passed to the live agent. Live agents can pick up the conversation where the virtual agent left off without the customer needing to repeat the question or issue.

We also know that ‘pure’ AI solutions being promoted in the marketplace as virtual agents are not ready to be deployed for a support and service experience for customers. Virtual agents should employ self-learning capabilities, and deliver benefits from this, but in a way that gives companies control over the reliability of the responses. Our virtual agents and chatbots use a combination self-learning and human input to provide consistent and reliable information to customers and allow organisations to be absolutely sure that their solution is responding to users in a predictable way.

My thanks to Genesys for hosting another great G-Summit event and to everyone who visited us in the AppFoundry Hub to see our solutions in action. It was a pleasure to be a part of the event buzz and catch up with many friends from Genesys and Interactive Intelligence – now all one family!

Want to learn more? Request your own personalised chatbot demo to see our solutions in action.

Together We Can Deliver Iconic Customer Experiences

By Patrick Gallagher, Managing Director ANZ & North Asia

Over the years, companies have invested millions in their contact centres to provide support to customers calling to purchase, enquire, complain, apply or seek assistance. Traditionally this has been the ‘tried-and-tested’ option as companies continued to invest in their contact centre in order to build their customer support capability. But as customers have moved to digital channels, this approach is no longer enabling organisations to meet their customers’ expectations.

G-Summit Melbourne, Genesys’ customer experience event taking place 7 – 8 August 2017, will address this change with their event theme of ‘Together – Together, we can deliver iconic customer experiences by powering digital business with a human touch’. Creative Virtual is looking forward to taking part as a Genesys AppFoundry partner and event sponsor.

Today’s customers want effortless interactions with organisations. Research shows that they are increasingly leveraging self-service and digital channels for customer service for this reason. However, at first we were seeing the change to self-service happening separately from the contact centre, particularly in Asia Pacific, which was creating new challenges for companies and not delivering the seamless omnichannel service customers were expecting. The change to self-service needs to happen in conjunction with an evolution of the contact centre and an internal shift in attitudes toward joined-up customer engagement across traditional and digital channels.

It’s key for organisations to recognise that it’s more than just support today’s online customers want – they want an effortless experience. This means companies need to embrace the digital channels and build smart help online, not force customers to use a traditional search tool that returns pages and pages of results. Customers also want a seamless experience and the option to escalate from self-service to human-assisted service if they want or need further support.

I’ll be on hand in the Partner Pavilion at G-Summit Melbourne to showcase Creative Virtual’s V-Person™ intelligent virtual agent and chatbot solutions. This technology enables organisations to provide customers with smart online help and is designed to be integrated with the Genesys platform to provide a seamless experience. With properly integrated virtual agents, customers benefit from 24/7 access to consistent, accurate and personalised information and a convenient, seamless customer experience. Contact centres benefit from lower costs, reduced staff turnover and more engaged, skilled and happier agents.

I hope to see you in Melbourne for a great day of CX discussions, networking and demonstrations! Can’t attend G-Summit Melbourne but want to learn more? We’d be happy to arrange a personalised demo at a time that works for you.

The Most Innovative Customer Support Tool

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

At Creative Virtual our vision has always been to offer organisations the technology to enable seamless, fully-integrated, end-to-end customer engagement, and to back that technology with the experience of an expert, knowledgeable team. We saw this vision come to fruition last year when we officially added V-Person Live Chat™ to our suite of Smart Help solutions. Since then, our roadmap has continued to be all about providing a world leading enterprise level end-to-end customer engagement platform.

It is an honour to have this vision and hard work recognised for a third straight year by the Technology Innovator Awards. This year I’m proud to share that we’ve been awarded ‘Best Global Customer Engagement Software Provider 2017’ and ‘Most Innovative Customer Support Tool: V-Person Live Chat’! These awards are a testament to the Creative Virtual team’s dedication to providing enterprises with innovative customer support solutions.

Our technology is designed to assist organisations in aligning their contact centre directly with the digital function to meet the growing expectations of customers for 24/7 access to accurate information and support. We are defining industry best practice through the tight integration of a single knowledgebase for both virtual and real agents and a unique feedback loop that allows live agents to help keep content accurate across self-service channels and human-assisted channels just by doing their normal jobs.

At the heart of our suite of products is our V-Person virtual agent technology which is utilised by organisations around the world to improve their customer support experience, reduce costs, increase sales and build brand loyalty. Our multi-lingual chatbots and virtual agents are currently answering over 50 million questions a year – and that number is always growing! We’ve had a number of exciting additions to our V-Person family over the past several months including Helen, the new chatbot communicating with Octopus users in Hong Kong Cantonese which was implemented with our partner Continuous Technologies. Forward-thinking companies like Octopus recognise that customers are increasingly turning to digital channels and self-service first and are leveraging conversational chatbots to improve their digital engagement.

My thanks to the Technology Innovator Awards for recognising Creative Virtual and our innovative software and solutions for a third year. You can read our official award announcement here.

Check out the video below to learn more about our innovative integration of virtual and real support and request your own personalised demo to see our technology in action.

What’s the Point of Contact Deflection?

By Björn Gülsdorff, Head of Business Development

Contact Deflection – is there a reason why so many companies have this as an objective? Well, our clients tell us what their goals and pain points are, but I can’t help thinking that treating one’s contact centre as a cost centre is past its prime. Also, if you want to make money, contact with your customers is a good thing. At least, that was my theory.

I was therefore quite happy to be able to speak in front of the Call Center Verband (Call Centre Association) in Halle, Germany, as well as meet the European customer service directors of the Deutsche Telekom AG at their gathering in Budapest. An opportunity to talk to people from the field and test my thinking. I expected at least some consensus, though: DTAG gave me 90 minutes of airtime for a speech on “Growth Through Customer Service” (funnily enough the title of one of our blogs from 2015), so I could tell I was on the same page with the organisers at least.

As the Budapest event was with the service directors while the one in Halle was with those who actually run the call centres, the two meetings represented two different points of view on the same topic. Still there was a lot of agreement: Customer service has become a differentiator for companies and a driver of revenue. People expect immediate, seamless service and their user journey starts on a (mobile) device. If you make them call, you can forget about first time resolution, channel containment and similar metrics, because it is too late. When people call or email, they have tried to get help through other channels before – and failed. Another thing came up: In this new scheme, agents need new skills. It was never fair to look at them as FAQ answering machines, but the demand for social and selling skills has grown a lot. It is now all the more important to support them in their work, serve them facts, help with procedures and let them focus on the relationship with the customer.

Not everything received such unanimous consent, however. The pace of such changes, the differences between industries and the rise of voice messages as a new channel left more than enough room for debate. Quite enjoyable, because nothing beats the voice of the customer – ours and theirs!

Check out this contact centre guide to learn more about the changes contact centres are facing and the transitioning role of agents.

Creative Virtual Continues 2017 Digital CX Road Tour – Chicago and Now Indy!

By Christina Wilson, Director of Customer Success, Creative Virtual USA

May began with several of our Executive team members traveling to Chicago for the Argyle CX event last week. This was our second time attending the event and again, we were not disappointed by the success we found in the numerous conversations that took place. This year we had the opportunity to Sponsor the event and had the privilege of hearing a great panel that also included one of our very own, Frank Schneider, VP of Customer Experience Solutions. Simultaneously, our sales team attended the Forrester Digital Transformation 2017, also in Chicago, to pick up strategies on innovation and growth in the digital enterprise.

The collaboration that goes into attending these events for us is simple. We enjoy the engaging conversations we have with both our partners, but also with potential prospects and industry leading practitioners. Having an open forum during the panel gave us insight into the type of breakthrough strategies and approaches driving real innovation in CX. The specific panel we did was titled: “The Modern Day Customer Care and Customer Experience Executive”.

2017 Argyle ForumA few of the day’s highlights included:

  • It was awesome hearing Renee Cacchillo, from Safelight AutoGlass regarding their vision for Customer Experience and using technology to delight the customer.
  • Jasper Weir’s introduction of ENPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) shed a creative light on creating happy employees and in turn elevating Customer Experience at TaskUs.
  • Dan Gingiss, author of Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Design Engaging Experiences on Social Media, spoke about measuring the Customer Experience you want to achieve by having a sincere heart and comparing your experience with your customer’s best experience all around.

What’s next on the CV Road Tour? Genesys CX17 Indy in Indianapolis on May 22nd-25th where we are Genesys AppFoundry Sponsors. Come by Booth #A05 and speak with Scott Tompkins or Rick Hancock. Both have over a decade of enterprise digital CX consulting experience and have had great success with Creative Virtual.

Improving the Customer and Employee Experience with Live Chat Innovation

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

Last year Creative Virtual officially introduced our new live chat product, V-Person Live Chat™, to the market and realised our vision of offering organisations the technology to enable seamless, fully-integrated, end-to-end customer engagement. That was an important milestone for the company, and since then we’ve been proud to see organisations use this technology both as a way to improve their customer service as well as to provide better employee support internally.

This week V-Person Live Chat earned us a spot as a finalist in the UK National Innovation Awards’ Live Chat category. Created by the Directors’ Club United Kingdom, the National Innovation Awards recognise business technology innovations and their impact on customer experience, employee engagement, operations performance, product creation and profitable growth. We’ll join the three other finalists in this category on Tuesday, 7th March for a live online final which will be judged by over 100 senior leaders involved in the customer service, customer contact, customer experience and digital spaces.

In order to qualify for this awards programme, those entering needed to show that their live chat technology results in one or more of the following positive impacts on an end-user’s organisation:

  • Improve the operational efficiency of delivering the live chat channel
  • Improve live chat integration in an omnichannel contact centre
  • Improve the customer experience of using live chat
  • Improve the contact centre agent’s experience of delivering live chat
  • Improve customer engagement and satisfaction
  • Improve employee engagement and satisfaction

I’m very proud of the fact that V-Person Live Chat ticks all of these boxes. We have designed and developed our entire suite of Smart Help solutions, including live chat, in order to help enterprises make these improvements. With V-Person Live Chat, we specifically looked to blend virtual and real customer support in a way that will assist contact centres with the transition to more automation. Our unique feedback loop, which enables live chat agents to help keep content accurate and consistent for both virtual and live agents without any extra effort, is defining industry best practice.

As we look to the future of the contact centre, it’s clear that live agents will become knowledge experts sharing the responsibility of keeping self-service channels up-to-date. This will help bridge the gap between these previously siloed engagement channels to improve the overall customer experience and meet the growing expectations of customers for 24/7 access to accurate information and support. By empowering customers with constantly improving self-service tools, live agents no longer have to repeatedly deal with basic questions and are freed up to develop expertise in dealing with more complex issues that require human assistance. This means contact centres benefit from lower costs, reduced staff turnover and more engaged, skilled and happier agents.

My thanks to the Directors’ Club United Kingdom and the National Innovation Awards judges for recognising our innovative live chat technology by naming Creative Virtual as a finalist. I’m looking forward to taking part in the live event final next month.

If you are currently using live chat and/or a chatbot to support customers or employees, or are just starting to think about implementing these tools, I encourage you to read more about V-Person Live Chat and request a personalised demo.