Tag Archive for: employee experience

Better Digital Support with the Virtual Insurance Agent

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Insurance companies have always had the challenge of delivering personalized support for their customers. From selecting coverage and understanding benefits to confirming payments and filing claims, both policyholders and agents need information that is customized to them. As the expectation for companies across all industries to offer digital, 24/7 support and self-service has grown, delivering a positive experience has become more challenging than ever for the insurance sector.

Fortunately, advances in conversational AI technology are helping insurance companies escape from the dangers of frustrating, disjointed experiences by creating the seamless digital support options policyholders and agents need. According to industry experts at Insurance Thought Leadership (ITL), “The sky is the limit for conversational AI.”

In their whitepaper The Virtual Insurance Agent, ITL takes a detailed look at how conversational AI is allowing insurance companies to greatly improve their customer experiences while also reducing costs. With the right integrations, conversational AI tools – like virtual agents and chatbots – can reach across silos and into back-end systems to pull together all the relevant information and customer data to deliver the right responses in a consistent tone. The technology has the capability to both provide the best self-service options to customers and improve insurers’ interactions with agents.

ITL identifies six common use cases for conversational AI in the insurance industry, explaining the benefits and limitations of each example.  All of these – selecting coverage, filing a claim, understanding benefits, updating policies, educating insurance agents, and supporting the contact center – represent perfect opportunities for successfully automating top service queries through personalized, integrated conversation flows.

Being able to respond to such a high percentage of contacts from customers and agents with conversational AI delivers valuable benefits for insurance brands. They can:

  • Create better customer experiences and meet expectations for digital support
  • Improve agent experience and boost productivity
  • Reduce contact center traffic and alleviate pressure on busy live agents
  • Increase revenue by reducing customer churn and making the buying process easier
  • Lower support costs and improve efficiency by simplifying complex processes

According to ITL, “Conversational AI is one of those rare beasts in business: It delivers demonstrably better service to customers while cutting companies’ costs.” Isn’t that every insurance company’s dream?

Read more on these insights from ITL by downloading the full ‘The Virtual Insurance Agent’ whitepaper.

Also check out the short video below for a closer look at how Creative Virtual’s V-Person™ for Insurance brings together chatbot, virtual agent, and live chat technologies with extensive industry experience to create reliable digital support that is personalized, convenient, and efficient.

 

Satisfied Customers and Happy Employees Require a Long-term Mindset

By Rachel F Freeman, Operations Director

Whilst we celebrate customer service with a special week, we should always acknowledge that customer service is not something we can only think about 7 days out of the year! Equally, with the imminent COP26 taking place soon in Glasgow, we shouldn’t only spend a few weeks thinking about sustainability and climate change as a flavour of the month for it to then be tucked away until the next global summit.

We should use these special and timely events to do a deeper dive into what we can do to improve for the rest of the year and ways we can treat these topics with a focus year-round. In fact, I think that Customer Service Week and COP26 have a few overlaps in their objectives.

Part of the many aspects of ESG (environmental, sustainability, governance) objectives includes ensuring diversity and inclusion in the workplace as well as providing a safe working environment. Having happy and safe workers, who feel valued, increases both productivity and retention levels.

The parallel for how we should approach our customers is strikingly similar: well-treated customers, who feel safe in the care and attention given to them, are likely to be retained as customers. So long as the value we have for them continues and develops with their requirements, we will have happy, long-term customers.

Valued employees are more receptive to learning, listening, and wanting to support the company, which in turn means supporting our important customers – and they are ALL important! – in the best possible way. It is a team effort to create value in a company’s products, services, and support.

This creates a cyclical process which rewards everyone yet is crucial to maintain and takes ongoing attention and nurturing.

A linear customer experience can be defined as: customer asks for product; company gives product, end of story. This works well if you are buying a hot dog, for example.

However, a cyclical customer experience includes having the “lifecycle” of the exchange extended through communication and understanding of requirements and working to see how the customer can be supported. The experience covers everything from design to implementation and after-care. It aims to draw from core company values and expertise to offer best-of-breed advice.

This sounds so simple, but the key is to continue to monitor the cycle and check in on both employees and customers regularly to evaluate motivation, satisfaction, and success. Those are the prime elements for keeping satisfied customers and happy employees and for working towards sustainable ecosystems.

October and November will offer specific opportunities to consider all of the above. We should take advantage of these events with the mindset of carrying their importance with us for a lot more than just the next 12 months. Creative Virtual’s Founder & CEO, Chris Ezekiel, often ends his internal company communications with “Onwards”, and I feel this is a perfect moment for me to do the same.

Onwards and upwards towards never quenching the thirst for keeping both employees and customers happy and for operating within a sustainable working model that maintains the long-term investment ethos.

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

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Past the Point of No Return: Customer and Employee Experience Post-Pandemic

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Last month I attended Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo 2020, EMEA which was fully virtually this year. As you’d expect, there were lots of presentations discussing the various impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic and what the ‘new normal’ will look like for communities, businesses and individuals as we head into 2021.

In a number of the sessions I streamed, the presenting analysts specifically made a point about the fact that when it becomes safe for our day-to-day lives to return to a more pre-pandemic ‘normal’, we will not be able to take that step as the same people we were at the beginning of 2020. We will all bring with us the experiences and knowledge we internalised during this year of lockdowns and quarantines. Students and teachers will return to classrooms with a new set of technology skills. Employees and employers will re-evaluate the need for physical office space based on the successes and failures of remote working. Customers will approach buying decisions with new access to and experiences with digital and online options.

This observation isn’t ground-breaking. Any significant life event we experience creates a change in who we are and how we view ourselves and the world – the birth of a child, a life-threatening illness, a major career change, living or studying abroad, a natural disaster. The difference with the experience of COVID-19 is that it has happened to the world. And while each of us has still had an individual experience and been impacted in our own unique way, it has also been a global event that is leaving lasting, substantial effects on communities and companies everywhere.

Keeping this in mind will be essential as your company moves forward into the new year and beyond. Your business plans and strategies must take into account the impacts – both good and bad – the current public health crisis has had on your employees and customers. At the end of the day, your organisation’s success depends on the people and the experiences you deliver internally and externally. If you don’t adjust those experiences based on the new skills and knowledge and the changed expectations and views of employees and customers, you can’t be successful in a post-pandemic world.

That might be pushing ahead plans to add or scale up customer self-service. That might be giving more opportunities and support to employees wanting to work remotely. That might be continuing to utilise digital options for client meetings when possible to decrease your team’s carbon footprint. That might be providing trainings and workshops for employees to improve their stress management and emotional intelligence.

We are collectively past the point of no return. We have experienced too much uncertainty, overcome too many unexpected challenges, developed too many new digital skills and created too many new expectations to be the same as we were prior to this global pandemic. Your organisation needs to acknowledge these changes and leverage them to become a better company.

An Employee Self-Service Strategy for Evolving Workforce Realities

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Raise your hand if you are working from home for the first time in your current role.

I’m guessing a lot of hands are up, and along with those raised hands have come lots of fresh challenges for companies struggling to support the new reality of a remote workforce. Digital strategies are evolving as organisations address the immediate needs of their employees and also look to the possibility of a more permanent switch to remote work. Twitter was in the news this week when they notified employees that they could continue working from home even when offices begin re-opening. It’s likely that other companies will offer employees similar options to continue to work from home on a full or part-time basis long after stay-at-home orders are lifted.

Whether your workforce is home-based, office-based or a combination of the two, having the right digital tools in place allows you to not only provide essential support for employees but also improve productivity and efficiency. Just as customers are increasingly adopting self-service channels, employees are also increasingly open to using self-help options. In particular, AI-enhanced virtual agents and chatbots empower employees to self-serve when and where they need help, reducing support costs while at the same time improving the employee experience.

The flexibility of this conversational AI technology lends itself to a wide range of successful employee support use cases across areas such as IT Service Management (ITSM), human resources (HR) and staff training. Depending on the size of your workforce and nature of your business, it’s likely that your company could benefit from implementing self-service options in multiple areas.

When it comes to creating a successful employee self-service strategy, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. The brand new guide Creating a 20/20 Vision for Your Employee Self-Service Strategy will help you get started on your unique strategy with:

  • Three steps for creating and implementing a customised digital self-service strategy
  • Successful use cases for employee-facing virtual agents and chatbots
  • Questions to ask when selecting self-service technologies
  • Advantages to starting with a proof of concept (POC)

There are lots of benefits to improving your employee experience, from increased staff retention to the knock-on effect on your customer experience. Whether your workforce ends up adopting a permanent work-from-home option or everyone returns to your office or place of business, having the right digital tools in place to support them is a necessity. Download this employee self-service guide for insights on how to make your vision a reality.

Employee Engagement, Employee Experience and Employee Self-Service

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

Over the past several years companies have begun to place more importance on their employee experience and to make more strategic investments in employee engagement initiatives. There are lots of benefits to improving your employee experience, from increased staff retention to the knock-on effect on your customer experience. However, companies need to be careful not to mistake high engagement for a positive experience.

According to Caroline Walsh, Director and Team Manager at Gartner:

“Employee engagement remains a valuable baseline measure for any organization. But engagement is an outcome of experience; it doesn’t necessarily signal the expectations employees have for their work experience or help you identify their priorities.”

A Gartner survey found that of highly engaged employees, only 21% report having a high-quality experience. This highlights the fact that engagement must be viewed as part of your overall experience and not as the sole measurement of the success or failure of your employee initiatives. It also highlights the need to make strategic investments in experience improvements.

One way companies can easily improve the experience of employees is by offering personalised self-service options for routine support. Just as virtual agents and chatbots are ideal tools for customer self-service, they also lend themselves well to supporting employees in areas such as IT Service Management (ITSM), human resources (HR) and staff training. They give employees a way to easily access the information they need.

To really be effective though, the virtual agent needs to be integrated with the right backend systems to provide an extremely personalised experience. That could be Single Sign-On (SSO), ticketing systems, knowledge management platforms, employee profiles, voice systems, live chat systems, call back and/or third-party databases depending on your organisation and the use case for your virtual agent. Selecting a technology that allows for the right integrations and customisation is key.

Giving employees an easy way to self-serve and troubleshoot common problems is impactful because it improves their day-to-day experience. When used for IT support, employees can easily self-serve for things like application support, system access and password resets and other help desk requests. A HR virtual agent can provide instant support on company policies and procedures, payroll questions, time-off requests and expense report assistance. The technology can also be used for staff training, customer-facing employee support and product guides. They are an efficient way for employees to find information and get answers to their questions as they go about their daily jobs.

It was predicted last year that by 2020, 20% of organisations would include employee engagement improvement as a performance objective for HR and IT. And with the business benefits associated with higher employee engagement, that’s no surprise. Just as companies are working to better serve digitally-savvy, highly connected customers, they also need to do the same for digitally-savvy, highly connected employees if they want to create a better experience and improved engagement.

Check out Creative Virtual’s V-Person™ for Employee Support overview for a more detailed look at how our chatbot and virtual agent technology is currently being used by organisations around the world – from large government departments to international financial brands – to improve the employee experience.

It’s Time to be Smart About Your AI Strategy

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

I first started working in the world of virtual agents in 2000 and, even though the technology was very much in its infancy at the time, saw huge potential for innovation and growth in the industry. Having now led my own company in this space for over 15 years, I have a unique perspective on the advancements of conversational AI technology and the ways it can be used. I was pleased to share some of my insights with the AI Time Journal recently in an interview for their Conversational AI Initiative.

Whether you use chatbots, virtual agents, conversational AI or one of the other numerous terms in the market today to describe this technology, one of the biggest challenges the industry faces (besides the inconsistent terminology!) is the lack of understanding within organisations about deploying these solutions. Just a few years ago this was due to them not really knowing much about virtual agents or how these tools can be used to improve the customer and employee experience. Now there is typically a general understanding of what virtual agents are, and the lack of understanding stems more from the media hype around AI and the confusion created by other vendors making false promises about the capabilities of the technology.

As I discuss in the interview, I truly believe that the key to a successful conversational AI strategy is to work with an experienced team of people. Enterprises need to be smart about the choices they make and not get swept up in the AI hype and empty promises if they want to have a strategy that will not only work today, but also set them up for future innovation and expansion.

This is why the Creative Virtual team is the company’s biggest asset. We’re able to provide organisations with the consultation services they need to really understand the possibilities – and limitations – of the technology and develop a customised implementation plan rooted in industry best practices. It is our combination of an experienced, expert team and our award-winning technology that sets us apart from other vendors in the space. In fact, this was one of the reasons that Frost & Sullivan selected Creative Virtual as the AI-Enhanced Customer Self-Service Product Leader this year. You can read more in their independent report.

In a world where customer experience is THE differentiator, one of the biggest opportunities for organisations implementing conversational AI is the ability to provide a superior and personalised experience to their customers. They can deliver on customer expectations for an experience that is effortless and embedded within their normal day-to-day activities. The interaction with your company becomes like that of friends interacting with each other.

Enterprises also shouldn’t overlook the big opportunity to leverage this technology to provide that same type of effortless, personalised experience for their employees. That can be onboarding new team members, training and supporting contact centre agents, delivering internal service desk support, offering easy self-service for HR questions – just to name a few! We’ve seen a huge increase over the past few years in these types of internal implementations with impressive results.

My interview also delves into my thoughts on voice-enabled conversational interfaces, challenges of channel-specific chatbots, and future technology trends that will impact the industry. My thanks to the AI Time Journal Editorial Staff for including me in their Conversational AI Initiative! You can read my full interview here.

The Digital Workplace in 2019

By Liam Ryan, Sales Director

In the survey results published by HR.com at the end of 2018, 79% of Human Resources (HR) professionals responded that chatbots and virtual assistants will become an increasingly viable way for employees to get real-time answers to their HR-related questions. Yet that same report identified that only about 10% of organisations are currently making use of artificial intelligence (AI) for HR purposes now.

One of the main takeaways from the recent Digital Workplace Directors Forum in London reflected the findings published in that report. While many organisations understand the benefits of using this technology, only a limited number of forward-thinking companies have done anything about it yet. That’s changing though as organisations add AI, chatbots and virtual agents to their 2019 roadmaps and digital workplace initiatives.

The agenda for the forum included a variety of speakers covering current workplace case studies and predictions for the future of the digital workplace. Creative Virtual Founder & CEO, Chris Ezekiel, was one of the expert speakers and shared insights and live demonstrations of conversational AI solutions for employee engagement. He showed how our virtual agents and chatbots are being used by organisations in a variety of sectors to provide a quick and easy self-service solution for HR and IT service desk support. He also showed how these automated solutions can be seamlessly integrated with human-assisted channels, such as live chat, as well as other existing backend systems, such as ticketing systems and third-party databases. One success story he shared was how a large government department is using our technology to reduce internal service desk costs and improve employee productivity.

Many of the discussions I had with other forum attendees reflected conversations I had at a customer and employee engagement event a couple of months ago. 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 in 2019. 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.

If you weren’t at the event or missed Chris’ presentation, be sure to request a live demo to see our chatbot, virtual agent and live chat technology in action for yourself.

Our thanks to Engage Employee for inviting Creative Virtual to sponsor your first event of the year.

Employee Engagement and the Digital Workplace

By Mandy Reed, Marketing Manager (Global)

Organisations are dealing with the rapid pace of digital change, both internally and externally, and the ways those changes are affecting their employees. From HR to internal IT support desks, companies are increasingly placing a focus on improving the employee experience through new digital initiatives. If you’re working to improve the employee experience in your organisation, then be sure to join us at the Digital Workplace Directors Forum on 30 January in London.

The one-day conference will feature case studies, innovative digital workplace solutions and tips for improving employee communication. Creative Virtual Founder & CEO, Chris Ezekiel, will draw on his experience in the industry to present on Conversational AI for Employee Engagement. He’ll outline the essential components for using conversational AI solutions to improve the employee experience, from best practices for implementing chatbots, virtual agents and live chat to using an orchestration platform for centralised, consistent information and delivery. His session will include live demonstrations of current implementations so attendees can experience first-hand how this technology can have a positive impact on the digital workplace.

The Creative Virtual team will be on hand during the Networking Breaks to provide more information on our employee-focused chatbot, virtual agent and live chat solutions and to share tips to help you build a business case for implementing these technologies in your organisation.

Visit the Digital Workplace Directors Forum website for the full agenda and ticket information. Hope to see you there!

Not able to attend the event in London but interested in learning how we can help you increase employee productivity, reduce internal support costs and improve engagement? We’d be happy to arrange a personalised demo at a time that works for you – request your demo here.

Employee Engagement Remains a Top Priority Alongside Customer Engagement for 2019

By Liam Ryan, Sales Director

Welcoming a new year often goes along with an ‘out with the old, in with the new’ mindset, but two things that are staying hot on companies’ 2019 agendas are customer engagement and employee engagement. This was glaringly obvious at the recent AI & Robotics Directors’ Forum: AI Enhancing Customer & Employee Engagement. From the delicious smoked salmon and cheese bagels served for breakfast to the final moments of the drinks reception at the end of the day, the event highlighted companies’ increased focus on improving engagement across the board.

Customer experience and engagement has been a top priority for most organisations for years, but improving employee engagement is a more recent addition to agendas. Organisations are coming to understand the benefits of providing better and easier support for employees. They are also coming to understand that many of the same digital tools, such as chatbots and virtual agents, that they are utilising to improve their customer experience can also be leveraged to improve their employee experience.

The event agenda featured presentations and panel discussions focused around practical uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in the customer and employee engagement spaces. I was joined at the event by Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO, who presented a morning session titled ‘Taking Engagement to the Next Level: Conversational AI for customers & employees’. He shared some insights into the expectations of customers and employees and then took an in-depth look at how organisations can bring everything together to centrally control a consistent, convenient and efficient experience for both customers and employees.

Using a single orchestration platform enables you to deliver consistent information and support across touchpoints and allows you to more easily engage users on the devices, channels and apps they are already using in their everyday lives through chatbots, virtual agents and live chat. For conversational AI to be effective, it must use a hybrid approach of machine learning and human input. The orchestration platform you put in place must allow you to manage that combination of humans and AI so you can deliver the best experience to users and maximise on your investments.

During his session, Chris shared a few live demonstrations to illustrate industry best practices. The best way to really understand how this all comes together is to see it in action, so if you weren’t at the event I encourage you to request a demo. Our team is always happy to arrange a time that works with your schedule so you can experience the ways conversational AI can help you improve your customer and employee engagement.

Our thanks to the AI & Robotics Directors’ Forum organisers for inviting Creative Virtual to take part in your last event of the year!