CustServ Solutions – Why Choose one Over the Other?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jul 28, 2017 | Blog |

For a while now I am contemplating about why companies choose one custserv solution over another. After all the market is pretty crowded. Vendors have a hard time to differentiate themselves. Just looking at G2Crowd one finds 88 Help Desk Solutions. Larger organizations are likely to be influenced by Gartner’s Magic Quadrant on Customer Engagement Centers or the Forrester Wave on Customer Service Solutions. Smaller organizations are probably looking more at the new breed of peer-to-peer review sites, like the aforementioned G2Crowd or GetApp, TrustRadius, Capterra and others. Many companies conduct research and establish an RFP process to determine the best fit; some see a bottom-up approach from team level to corporation. A kind of ‘shadow IT’ emerges to solve a team’s particular problem. This solution over time could get corporate blessing and may even become the main solution. A clear and reliable roadmap is mandatory for all vendors, so no difference here. Same for share of mind – this has become table stakes. But what is it that makes one vendor win over another? Are there patterns? To get more insight I asked some smart people who stay unnamed here – but you know who you are! So What Are Contributing Factors? The good news is that there seem to be only a few factors. Based on the discussions I can roughly group them into six categories. Here they are, in no particular order: A particular feature is needed or desired Suite- vs. Best-of-Breed thinking Size of the customer organization Relationship building Referrals Departmental adoption Of course they are not mutually exclusive. Let me briefly dive into each...

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...

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...

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...