Customer Service beyond the Chatbot Hype
2016 has been predicted to be the year of conversational commerce, and I’d say that this prediction largely held true. Conversational interfaces have become more and more mainstream, and their support by AI and bots has become all the rage. While people more and more turn to their smartphones and Google to find service and get answers to their questions, companies are increasingly looking at bot support to increase the efficiency of their call centers. But where is reality? In their 2016 hype cycle on emerging technologies Gartner places Conversational UIs in the innovation trigger phase with a predicted time of 5 – 10 years to mainstream adoptions Machine Learning on the peak of inflated expectations with a period of 2 – 5 years to mainstream adoption Forrester Research in their recent AI tech radar places virtual agents and machine learning into their growth phases of their respective life cycles, giving them 5 – 10 years to mainstream, while acknowledging a successful trajectory. So, clearly, AI and conversational systems are strategic. At the same time Abinash Tripathy, CEO of helpshift, a leading helpdesk company providing users with instant, proactive, and personalized in-app support, feels that “we are closer to IoT than to having really helpful bots”. Some bots are actually harming the customer experience. And he is right. Why? Several reasons. Essentially artificial intelligence, driven by machine learning or deep learning, is not yet intelligent enough. Too many bots are still driven by decision trees, which severely limit the possible conversations that the bot can serve. Second, bots’ ability to understand natural language is still lacking, albeit improving, and...
Mass Distraction – The Case for a Consolidated Marketing Platform
These days, customer experiences increasingly need to be delivered with the help of technology. This does not mean that direct interactions and people are no more important in marketing, sales, or service; on the contrary, but that an increasing number of customers is using the web, social media, chat, or an app to identify suitable products or services or to resolve an issue, when needed. The Customer Executive Board found that 57 per cent of the buying process is already completed before sales personnel get engaged. A Cisco retail study confirms the American Express findings and states that around 60 per cent of all in-store purchases start their journey electronically. The American Express Global Barometer claims that 60 per cent of all customers abandoned a purchase because of poor service experiences. Over the past 20 or so years the way products and services get sold and customer service as well as marketing get delivered to customers changed dramatically. Gone are the times where a potential customer was addressed via a radio- or TV-spot or an ad printed in a newspaper, or a letter in the mailbox … – well, it still happens, but the focus shifted. We started off from one single, unidirectional marketing ‘channel’ – the customer comes into my store and interacts with me, a person. From there on we added an ever increasing number of additional channels, like the ones mentioned, plus many more. In today’s omni-channel world we also have telephone, e-mail, web-delivered ads, mobile apps, branded and white-label communities, social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., chat, messenger applications like WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Snapchat,...
Trust in Crisis – Customer Experience is the Way Out
Trust is eroding. Not only in governments and media as we could clearly observe but also in independent organizations like NGOs and businesses. And in business leaders, experts, even into the famed ‘people like me’. According to the recently published 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer NGOs and businesses are barely not distrusted. Especially businesses are now on the brink of distrust. They are often seen as part of the problem: While Automation may be good on a society level there are vital job concerns for individuals. Wealth distribution becomes increasingly unequal. While societies improve economically this is not felt on an individual level. In fact, amongst those who think that the current social-economic system is failing only NGOs are not actively distrusted. On the other hand amongst those who are uncertain about the current system businesses are the most trusted entities. So there is a way! Source: Edelman Trust Barometer 2017 A Focus on Customer Experience Guides on the Way The trust barometer lists as the 5 most important actions that businesses can take: Treat your employees well Offer high-quality products/services Listen to your customers Pay your fair share of taxes Engage into ethical business best practices Although one doesn’t need to fully agree with these findings, which are partly overlapping, the points have two things in common: They are key ingredients of a positive brand image and of good customer experience. These five points are also about company values and the culture lived by the company – as opposed to the one that is written down. A positive brand image is a result of good customer experience. And here...
Gartner MQ BI and Analytics Platforms – Lots of Movement
Last week Gartner published the updated version of its Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, and I need to say that there has been a lot of movement in both directions, up as well as down. There has been a lot of reshuffling especially in the Visionaries quadrant. This can partly be attributed to a changing market that caused Gartner to combine a few of last year’s assessment criteria as well as adding two more critical criteria as below: Critical Capabilities Dropped or Changed: Combined BI Platform Administration with Security and User Administration Modified Data Source Connectivity to Data Source Connectivity and Ingestion Combined Publish Analytics Content and Collaboration and Social BI to Publish, Share and Collaborate on Analytic Content Added Visual Appeal to Ease of Use Capabilities Added: Smart Data Discovery Platform Capabilities Workflow Integration Smart Data Discovery emphasizes the increasing importance of AI and machine learning as part of analytics systems. Gartner defines it around the automatically “finding, visualizing and narrating of important findings such as correlations, exceptions, clusters, links and predictions in data that are relevant to users without requiring them to build models or write algorithms. Users explore data via visualizations, natural-language-generated narration, search and natural-language query technologies”. Workflow Integration acknowledges that there is no actionable insight if there is a standalone analytics system. It is defined around the number of products “needed to deliver the critical capabilities and the degree of seamless integration and workflow between capabilities/components”. This has been true for a long time, but hey, better late than never. Gartner itself states that the changes have been major and that...