Tag Archive for: #cxday

A Look Back: 2021 in Review

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Welcome to Creative Virtual’s annual year in review blog post for 2021! It’s that time once again when we take a look back at the happenings and accomplishments of the last 12 months. That time when we reflect on the highlights of the year for our company and celebrate the latest developments in the conversational AI industry.

There’s no doubt that one of our biggest highlights of the year was being named a Leader in the ISG Provider Lens™ for Conversational AI! Published in March, the report compared 19 vendors based on the depth of their service offerings and market presence. The analysts at ISG found Creative Virtual to be a clear Leader based on our comprehensive solution portfolio and industry experience, emphasizing our long history of developing and delivering conversational AI solutions that provide real results. Here’s Mrinal Rai, Lead Analyst at ISG Research, explaining why we are a Leader in conversational AI:

 

Mrinal also joined our Founder & CEO, Chris Ezekiel, and Jan Erik Aase, Partner and Global Head – ISG Provider Lens™, for a (virtual) discussion on conversational AI. Their conversation covered current industry trends, the impact of the pandemic, and setting conversational AI project goals. They also discussed the findings of ISG’s research and current successful virtual agent implementations. Here’s a recording of their full discussion:

 

When ISG held their awards ceremony in October, Chris and Liam Ryan, Sales Director, were able to accept Creative Virtual’s trophy in person from Jan Erik. And while there were no ceremonies for these awards, Creative Virtual was also honored this year with: ‘Most Innovative Conversational Self-Service Solutions’ in the Corporate Excellence Awards, ‘Best Conversational AI Solutions Provider – London’ in the 2021 Media Innovator Awards, and recognition in The 2021 CRM Top 100 Companies in Customer Service, Marketing, and Sales. We continued our five-year-long celebration of our Queen’s Awards for Enterprise: Innovation 2017 as well, recognizing that all of these awards are the result of the hard work and collaboration of our entire global team.

With travel and in-person events still restricted this year, we kept our focus on producing content that could be shared, read, and watched virtually over digital channels. We teamed up with our partner Spitch as co-sponsors of The European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit, presenting a joint session at the virtual event on combining chatbots with speech recognition to create voicebot solutions. We were also one of the sponsors for destinationCRM’s roundtable webinar Conversational AI: The Future of Customer Service?, sharing insights on how to maximize the benefits of this technology through integrations and personalization.

We drew on our industry expertise and deep understanding of the conversational AI marketplace to publish a number of educational and thought leadership materials, including:

One of my personal favorite ways the Creative Virtual team shares our individual insights is through our annual blog post celebration for Customer Service Week and CX Day in October. This year we had 10 posts from nine authors – Chris Ezekiel, Khushal Hirani, Rachel Freeman, Susan Ott, Maria Ward, Rachael Needham, Björn Gülsdorff, Scott Tompkins, and me – covering a variety of customer experience, employee support, and contact center topics. I’ve compiled our 2021 collection here so you can easily explore them all.

All of that expertise and our nearly two decades of experience as a company are also being channeled into the development of our next V-Person™ release, Gluon. Gluon includes updates to our chatbot, virtual agent, and live chat technologies as well as a re-architecture of our V-Portal™ orchestration platform. Gluon will enable our customers and partners to create accurate, reliable conversational AI solutions quicker and easier than ever, resulting in better experiences for their customers and employees. Learn more about our Gluon release here and check out this video for a sneak peek:

 

As we come to the end of 2021, we celebrate the highlights of this year and look forward to the ones the next year will bring. Stay tuned for new educational resources, updated conversational AI research, and our Gluon release of V-Person – coming in 2022!

#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?

Customer Experience: It’s all about long-term relationships

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

CX Day and Customer Service Week this year, like everything else, is held with the dark cloud of the pandemic hanging over us. Customer experience has always been a key competitive differentiator, and this has never been more apparent than this year. It’s a true saying that when the chips are down you find out who your true friends are. As the CEO of Creative Virtual, I’ve been on two sides on this equation during these tough times: supporting our customers and being a customer myself.

Customer experience is a much-debated subject of course, but the thing that’s often missing from these debates is the importance of building strong customer partnerships that can stand the test of time. Creative Virtual is fortunate to have many long-term customers: one of our first customers has been with us since the formation of the company (nearly 17 years ago!). Having a great team, who are empowered to make decisions in the best interests of the customer, is the main attribute for a long-term partnership. Being flexible, listening and supporting our customers as they face their own challenges, and taking a longer-term perspective, is an inherent part of our company culture.

I’m always studying how other companies treat their customers, and there’s no better way than being a customer yourself. The pandemic has brought out the best, and the worst, in the customer experiences that myself or people I know have encountered. Like all of us, I’ve been truly inspired and humbled by our key workers. The dedication and positivity from staff at the local Waitrose, for example, has been a breath of fresh air (service with a smile!). There are some bank and landlord experiences that I’ve heard about that have been pretty bad. And these cases are particularly beguiling when there’s been a long-term relationship in place and the bank/landlord has turned their back in a moment of need. Purely from a business perspective, these actions are completely counterproductive as this often leads to a loss of business.

Today much of the customer experience is automated, and when I consider what makes our chatbot/ virtual agent and live chat technology successful, it’s taking that long-term view. Building the right foundations at the beginning means the technology can be easily adapted as business priorities change and can be readily scaled up as required. This was particularly put to the test during the height of the pandemic when our customers saw a dramatic increase in virtual agent transactions and required quick updates to the chatbot/ virtual agent content. Taking a long-term perspective is just as important for chabots/ virtual agents as it is for human relations!

If you’re planning to add a chatbot virtual agent to your CX strategy to help improve your customer relationships, you’ll want to download this whitepaper: Guide to Selecting a Virtual Agent or Chatbot Vendor: Forget the Technology & Focus on Experience. The guide provides insights from industry experts on how having a strong partnership with your technology vendor sets your self-service solution up for long-term success.

As you celebrate CX Day and Customer Service Week this year, consider the approach you are taking with your customer experience strategy. Are you striving to build strong, long-term customer partnerships? Are you empowering your employees to make decisions to strengthen those customer relationships? Are you taking a long-term view to achieve success with automated CX tools?

Customer experience is all about long-term relationships – and that’s never been more important than right now. When the chips are down, are you a reliable partner for your customers?

A Look Back: 2019 in Review

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

The new year is just around the corner, which means it is once again time for our annual look back over the past 12 months. 2019 was another busy and exciting year for Creative Virtual and the chatbot, virtual agent and live chat industry. It’s always difficult to condense a whole year into one blog post, so here are just a few of the highlights.

We continued our five-year-long celebration of our Queen’s Awards for Enterprise: Innovation 2017 as we also celebrated the 15th anniversary of Creative Virtual. Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO, took a look back at the changes in the company and the industry since he started Creative Virtual in London’s East End in his blog post, Fifteen Years & Counting: Navigating the chatbot, virtual agent and AI revolution. During the year Chris also participated in industry interviews, including one with the AI Time Journal as part of their Conversational AI Initiative and one for the Executive Interviews website, where he shared more insights into the myths and realities of chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI).

This year we have also been celebrating another impressive recognition for the company: Frost & Sullivan’s 2019 AI-Enhanced Customer Self-Service Product Leadership Award! In selecting us for this award, the analysts at Frost & Sullivan evaluated chatbot and virtual agent vendors across two key factors, each with five benchmarking criteria. Creative Virtual was rated as ‘Excellent’ across these categories. You can download a copy of their full independent report here. I had the honour of joining Andy Madge (Head of Technical Services) and Liam Ryan (Sales Director) at the Awards Dinner in London to accept our plaque and meet other Best Practice Award winners from all over Europe.

Special congratulations also go out to Maria Ward, Account Manager/Knowledgebase Engineer, for being shortlisted for the 2019 Women in IT Excellence Awards in the category of ‘Role Model of the Year (SME) – Tech Industry’! You can read more about Maria’s journey from Creative Virtual customer to partner to team member in her Meet the Team interview. Maria was also one of our Team Animal runners in our charity runs for the RSPCA this year, joined by Laura Ludmany, Rachel Freeman, Björn Gülsdorff and Chris Ezekiel. Instead of all meeting up to run a group race together, each runner registered for a local race instead and took part in runs in Hamburg, London, Ipswich and Dublin. This was the fifth year we fundraised for the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), a cause we feel passionately about as a company of animal lovers.

The team was also involved with our annual blog celebration of CX Day (1 October) and Customer Service Week (7-11 October), making this year the best one yet. Authors based in four different countries covered topics ranging from customer expectations to chatbot creation to managing stress for better customer relationships. If you missed any, be sure to check them out:

We were also excited to be featured in the Wharf Life Newspaper during Customer Service Week. You can read the full article here.

While 2019 saw an increase in the adoption of chatbot and virtual agent technology, we also saw more companies struggling with poor performing tools or projects that never came to fruition. Founder & CEO Chris explored some reasons for this in an article for the AI Time Journal, “Virtual Moron-Idiot!”: Why Chatbots Fail and the #ChatbotRescue Mission Saving Them. As a successful pioneer in the chatbot and virtual agent space, Creative Virtual is in a unique position to help these companies save their investments. That’s why we launched our Chatbot Rescue Mission, offering organisations a no cost consultation workshop and initial chatbot upgrade to get their projects back on track.

This year we sponsored, attended and joined our partners at a variety of industry events around the world, including ones in the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, India, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and Thailand. Team members presented, participated in panels and gave demos at many of these events, including several keynote addresses. We also welcomed some new organisations to our growing Global Partner Network and expanded our V-Person™ Family with new deployments around the world.

Our Founder & CEO, Chris Ezekiel continued his monthly Virtual Viewpoint column for the Wharf Life Newspaper this year. You can find all of his past columns here. He also saw his name in print in the 6 October edition of The Sunday Times where he was quoted in an article about British entrepreneurs and their tech giant competitors. Subscribers to The Times can read the article online here – and we also have a copy available here.

As we head into 2020, Creative Virtual is preparing to celebrate the company’s Sweet Sixteen – 16 years of helping enterprises deliver better customer and employee support and of bringing new innovations to the virtual agent, chatbot and live chat market. We’re looking forward to seeing what the next year will bring!

Be sure to check out our 2019 in Review photo album on the Creative Virtual Facebook page. As we do every year, we’ve compiled photos from industry events, company celebrations, fundraising runs and group activities. There will be more photos added over the next couple of weeks, so make sure you’re following us so you don’t miss any.

#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?