Tag Archive for: personalisation

An Experience Designed for Your Customers

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

Every month I write a column for Wharf Life, a fortnightly publication that’s available for free around Canary Wharf, Docklands, and east London as well as in an E-Edition online. Titled Virtual Viewpoint, I use this column to share my thoughts on a variety of technology related topics as well as my recent experiences. My latest Virtual Viewpoint was about grocery shopping at the local Canary Wharf Waitrose, something I’ve done regularly – and without much fanfare – since the store opened over 20 years ago.

For all those years I was always baffled by the wine bar in the middle of the food shopping court. On many occasions, I would wonder why on earth people would want to combine the drudgery of picking up their spuds and toothpaste with a glass of wine. I was especially perplexed considering the abundance of lovely bars in such close proximity. Yet, it’s always appeared consistently busy and continued to be a fixture of the store despite the updates and renovations over the years.

The penny finally dropped the other day after my wife and newborn son arrived home from the hospital, and we were suddenly thrust into the two-under-two club. A few days into the lovely chaos of both chasing a toddler and caring for an infant, and suddenly a trip to Waitrose felt quite exciting!

With a spring in my step, I put on my noise cancelling headphones with some relaxing music and the experience felt completely different to normal – more like a trip to a health spa. Oblivious to the mundanities of my shopping trip, I suddenly stumbled upon the bar. And that’s when the light bulb moment happened. I was in my personal spa, and the idea of a glass of champagne amid the shoppers made perfect sense.

Every company has a target customer base, and it’s no secret that designing your experience for your target customer is good for business. Yet within that target group there are a variety of subgroups that have different needs and expectations. Those variations could be based on age, location, access to technology – even number of children! It’s important that you consider these differences when making customer experience (CX) decisions.

As the leader of a conversational AI company, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I am a huge supporter of implementing technology to improve your CX. But I am also a huge supporter of keeping the human at the centre of all CX decisions. While Creative Virtual’s V-Person™ solutions successfully automate digital customer service, forcing all customers to only self-serve with a virtual agent is never a good CX decision.

This is just one reason why it’s key to consult with experts on your CX strategy. This group of experts should include those experienced with your industry, with the technology, and with your identified use cases. It should also include your customers – the true experts on their experiences with your organisation, products, services, and employees.

Go beyond the typical customer surveys and dig into rich data like conversations with your virtual agent and contact centre. See what customers are actually asking, where they are experiencing pain points, and what they really love. Look for ways you can make experiences easier and more personalised. And be sure to take into consideration the varying preferences and needs of your whole customer base – get insights from both the carefree dad of one young child and the sleep-deprived parent of two-under-two!

If you’re local to Canary Wharf and want to discuss customising your CX with conversational AI, I’d be happy to meet you at Waitrose for a glass of wine and a chat. You can also arrange a session with one of Creative Virtual’s experts around the world by contacting us here.

A great resource if you’re evaluating different conversational AI solutions is the 2023 Chatbot Buyer’s Guide. It includes a technology comparison chart that can help you determine the specific functionality you’ll need to design the right experience for your customers.

A More Personal Personalized CX

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

The start of a new year always comes with a slew of business predictions from experts, and 2023 has certainly been no different. I think we have learned to take these predictions with a grain of salt, considering them as we plan for the future but not necessarily fully embracing all of them. This is particularly true after the upheaval and uncertainty the world has experienced over the past few years.

Sometimes though we come across a prediction that feels very on the money. This year, one of the customer experience (CX) predictions for 2023 falling into that category is that ‘Personalization will get More Personal’. When you consider recent CX research indicates a personalized experience is important for customers in their purchasing decisions, it makes sense that businesses will work towards this in order to improve customer satisfaction. But what does it mean to make personalization more personal?

I like customer service expert Shep Hyken’s take on this in his blog post, Don’t Just Personalize the Customer’s Experience – Individualize It. In a nutshell, individualizing the experience is taking standard personalization one step further in order to create a unique – but not creepy! – engagement with the customer. This can be applied to marketing, sales, and customer support.

Personalizing the customer’s experience can mean a lot of different things to different companies and in different scenarios. I was reminded of this last week when I received an email from Amazon with a product recommendation. The recommendation was based on a recent product search and comparison I had done while logged into my account, so in that way it was personalized. However, I had ended my search by making a purchase, so it didn’t feel very personalized to have Amazon suggesting I buy a product I had just purchased a day or two before.

Sometimes those of us in marketing and sales are guilty of spinning the truth a little bit. Would I market that Amazon experience as personalized? Absolutely!

But was it really individualized to the true customer journey? Maybe not so much. . .

Back in 2013, V-Person™ technology became the first virtual agent offering to implement personalization – a recognition acknowledged both by the Patricia Seybold Group in their 2014 technology review and by the analysts at Gartner when they named Creative Virtual a 2015 Cool Vendor in Smart Machines.

For nearly a decade now, we’ve talked about our virtual agents and chatbots delivering a personalized self-service experience – with no marketing spin required! In this context, a personalized experience has always also been an individualized experience. It’s not just personalized because the user is greeted by name or is presented with relevant information based on the webpage from which the chatbot was launched. Users are given responses that are specific for them based on their account, subscriptions, invoices, member status, purchase history, location – the list goes on and on.

Over the years both our conversational AI platform and the technology that enables this type of personalization have improved, opening up additional possibilities and creating more seamless user experiences. The key to delivering a truly individualized experience through a conversational AI tool is integration. Without flexible integration options, you’ll never be able to make your personalization more personal.

Today personalized virtual agents are delivering more value to organizations than non-personalized solutions. They increase digital containment and improve user satisfaction by delivering comprehensive, tailored self-service experiences. They can also help individualize human-supported channels when deployed internally as agent assist tools.

It’s clear that technology is an important tool in creating more personalized customer experiences, whether that be on digital channels or in-person. When it comes to using technology to take those experiences from simple personalization to being individualized, the solution and vendor you choose is vitally important.

A great resource for any organization looking to purchase a conversational AI solution that will make personalized engagements more personal for customers or employees in 2023 is the new Chatbot Buyer’s Guide. It includes some important insights into the types of personalization you may want to consider implementing and what features and functionality the conversational AI platform you select needs to deliver that personalization successfully.

And if you’re interested in learning about how V-Person delivers a more personal and individualized experience, arrange your own customized demo with an expert member of our team.

Will 2023 end up being the year that personalization gets more personal? Only time will tell. But with the technology available today and the clear business benefits individualized experiences deliver, it would be foolish not to make this a strategic initiative this year.

Not All Chatbots are Conversational AI Solutions

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

Over the past several years businesses around the world have faced significant hardships and uncertainty. As these difficulties continue and new challenges arise, the IT sector will play a critical role in keeping companies connected and enabling them to adapt. SME News Magazine is recognising this with their newly established IT Awards programme.

The new IT Awards honour companies that are driving forward innovation and focusing on client-centricity while remaining true experts in their industry. I’m excited to share that Creative Virtual has been awarded Best Conversational AI Solutions 2022!

Creative Virtual has built our reputation as a conversational AI leader by consistently delivering successful and innovative solutions to our customers and partners for nearly two decades. It’s an honour to be recognised by the SME News IT Awards as the best in the industry – especially since this award comes on the heels of us being named the Conversational AI Innovation Excellence Leader by AIxOutlook.

Having worked in the virtual agent and chatbot field since 2000, I’ve experienced first-hand how these solutions and technologies have changed. It’s been exciting to lead one of the companies that has helped drive innovation forward in the industry. The virtual agents of today are certainly not the same as those I was working on 20 years ago.

What has also changed over this time is the variety of names used for these solutions. In fact, there have been so many names, and such little agreement amongst industry experts and analysts on how these names are used, that there is a lingering confusion in the market. Virtual agents, chatbots, virtual assistants, virtual customer assistants, intelligent virtual agents – the list goes on. In general, all these names can be, and often are, regularly used interchangeably to describe solutions.

Most recently, the industry has adopted the name of ‘conversational AI’. However, conversational AI is more than just another name for these solutions. It is more specifically describing the technology behind them. While a virtual agent, chatbot, or virtual assistant can be a conversational AI solution, not all of them currently deployed today are.

This raises an important question: What makes a virtual agent or chatbot a true conversational AI solution?

There’s lots of discussions about how successful conversational AI tools use artificial intelligence, both in the initial development stage and to continuously improve as part of the ongoing maintenance. This is vitally important for identifying real conversational AI solutions, of course. It isn’t the only identifier though. Too often overlooked is the need for integration and personalisation.

True conversational AI virtual agents and chatbots are backed by a platform that enables flexible integration with a variety of other technologies and systems. This includes knowledge management platforms, ticketing systems, live chat technologies, contact centre platforms, voice systems, real-time information feeds, multiple intent engines, CRMs, messaging platforms – to name a few.

These integrations help create conversational and personalised engagements. Personalisation goes beyond just knowing a logged-in user’s name and account or order details. It’s also about personalising the experience based on the user’s engagement channel, location, language, job title or member status, saved preferences – to name a few.

True conversational AI goes beyond a basic FAQ chatbot to deliver solutions that are customised for the business and for the individual users. As we’ve developed and improved our V-Person™ technology over the years, we’ve always maintained a focus on integration and personalisation. In fact, V-Person is recognised as the first virtual agent solution to successfully deliver personalisation by both Gartner and Patricia Seybold Group. We are continuing that focus with our upcoming Gluon Release which will make it quicker and easier to build, deploy, and maintain integrated, personalised conversational AI solutions.

If you’d like to learn more about Creative Virtual’s true conversational AI solutions and get an early look at our next big V-Person release, arrange a personalised demo session with one of our experts.

My thanks to SME News and their research team for our Best Conversational AI Solutions recognition! Congratulations to the Creative Virtual team for another well-deserved award!