Customer Service in a World of Ambient Computing

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jul 11, 2017 | Blog |

Soon there will be an additional in-app customer service channel. So far we have a bunch of service channels, most of them requiring the user to leave the app to Pick up the phone for a call Browse for self support Open up an additional chat window Take on the social media channels Move on to messenger applications How about getting into your car to get to a store? … And then a customer may be moving back and forth between these channels with all the potential of losing track of the incident status and the friction that cross channel customer service still causes. There is no doubt that providing in-app support is the best possibility to offer fast issue resolution. It can provide telemetry information from within the app, identify the user and therefore provides a lot of relevant context that makes it easier for a service agent to help the customer without unnecessary delays. The customers’ shift to emphasize on the “Now” is also seen by Google research. Not Every Device is a Smartphone But what if the customer cannot pick up the phone to engage in a typed conversation? The customer might be engaged in a VR game, or driving a car, or in any number of situations without having a free hand. Maybe the customer simply doesn’t want to pick up a phone? What if the app doesn’t offer a user interface at all beyond a little light that indicates ‘I am available’? This would e.g. be the situation in an ambient environment that senses the presence of a person and acts accordingly. An environment...

Zendesk – A Mobile CustServ Native?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jul 4, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |

Mid of April I published an article about the mobile in-app support landscape that, amongst other players, touched on Zendesk. In this article I stated: “Zendesk is not a mobile native. Their chat widget integrates into web pages and the company does not offer in-app chat. Instead the company offers solutions that hook into existing messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp.” This statement was based upon research that I did in the first half of the month with Zendesk publishing their Fabric based in-app support kit on April 19 of the same month. So, maybe I should have posted this article a little later, but good on Zendesk for getting on with mobile in app support. They had, as well as many other bigger vendors in the customer service and call center arena still have, a wide open flank here that gets covered by specialist vendors like Helpshift, Intercom, or LivePerson, or suite vendors like Freshworks. Zendesk, a Mobile Native or Not? I say that, although I maybe did them wrong by stating that they don’t do in-app FAQs – although I do not believe so, as the help center content seems to be delivered from the server and needs an online connection. Still I maintain that they are not a native player. I will explain my reasoning a little later, after summarizing what I got out of talks with Douglas Hanna and, more recently, Greg Dreyfus from Zendesk. As per now Zendesk offers two different SDKs for mobile. The support SDK and the Chat SDK (both links go to the iOS version, there are Android versions, too)....

Agent.AI – Customer Service with the AI Bot

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 29, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |

Earlier in June I had the opportunity to talk to Barry Coleman, CTO of Agent.ai, an about 2-year-old company at the time of writing this. The company spun off of manage.com, a very different business that enable the delivery of in-app advertisements. In order to support this mission more and more, first internal, then external support capabilities were needed. At first they built chat functionality for internal and for support purposes. Then there was the question of how to efficiently provide 24/7 support. This resulted in giving birth to a bot structure that can help customer service agents in an assisting mode, called co-pilot mode, and an autonomous mode, called autopilot. And it gave birth to Agent.ai. Agent.ai’s mission is to enable “exceptional customer service for all”. While this mission is not particularly unique, their approach is. First, Agent.ai has built its customer service software around a machine-learning platform. Second, the company provides their solution without asking their clients for a huge upfront investment or the need to have of AI-proficient developers in house. Third, they wanted to avoid the pitfall of inflated expectations. With AI and machine learning being very hyped topics at the moment, this is a very valid concern. Going backwards through the objectives, Agent.ai opted for offering very specialized bots first. As there is no general AI yet, this is pretty straightforward. Specific, tightly framed topics are far easier to support with AI and exposed by bots than broader bodies of knowledge. For example, specializations include the handling of order inquiries or of support call closure surveys. The second objective was achieved by doing all...

SAS Customer Intelligence 360 – Turn Data into Experience

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 20, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |

A while ago Angela Lipscomb from SAS got in touch with me to get me introduced to SAS’s concept of a Customer Decision Hub. Their Customer Decision Hub is a solution concept that shall allow organizations to derive insights and to trigger actions from interactions with external parties, like customers based upon rules and the derived insights. A Customer Decision Hub e.g. orchestrates the determination of Next Best Actions, and allows responding to an incoming request in real time using analysis and decision logic. At the same time standard communications can get suppressed based upon the same set of rules. In other words, the Customer Decision Hub fosters customer engagement based upon inbound signals that get analyzed and processed through the organization. Why is this remarkable, I hear you asking? It is remarkable because SAS Software first of all is an analytics company with a strong reputation for enterprise analytics at the higher end of performance and price point. SAS describes itself on LinkedIn as “the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions, SAS helps customers at more than 70,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world the power to know®.” SAS is not a company that is widely known for being actively engaged in the customer engagement market (pun intended). So I was intrigued. And so should you be. Finally, a few days ago my somewhat erratic schedule allowed me to have a follow-up with Troy Kusabs of SAS Software in...

Customer Service – How to Turn a Poor Experience into a Positive One

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 17, 2017 | Blog |

With mobile phones taking over our lives and conversational interfaces becoming ubiquitous there is certainly a new level of demand arriving at customer service centers. Customers do not accept a mediocre service experience anymore. With their smartphones they have the means to get to customer service with nearly no delay and they are certainly willing to use it. And they do it. In this situation customers are often already feeling some frustration or disappointment because they couldn’t achieve what they wanted to achieve in the first instance. They already had their taste of a suboptimal customer experience. Frustration, disappointment – customers’ negative emotions towards a brand have a corresponding negative impact on the business. Customers just might go buy somewhere else. After all, in times of smartphones this has become simpler than ever. The support center now has best chances to add the feeling of being disrespected and outright anger into the mix. Or it can create a feeling of relief, of being respected, valued, even some satisfaction; this in spite of having come into the need of asking for support. Here the service agents have the opportunity to create a positive customer experience out of a poor one – one that will overlay the negative one. Use Customer Service To Create Positive Emotions Which one is better for the company – and the company’s bottom line? The answer to this question is pretty obvious. Inmoment Research recently released a study that clearly established links between positive experiences and positive outcomes for a company. And this was not the first study finding that investing into positive customer experiences results...