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...

Freshdesk becomes Freshworks – A Snap Analysis from Down Under

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 8, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |

On June 6, 2017 Freshdesk announced its rebranding to Freshworks. Freshworks is a new umbrella brand for the suite of applications that Freshdesk built and acquired since its founding in 2010. The core statement by Girish Mathrubootham, CEO and founder of Freshworks is: ”Today, I’m happy to announce that we are rebranding the company as Freshworks. We’re not in this just to change the way businesses do customer support, but to refresh the way they do business.” Let’s have a look at select paragraphs of the press release. Following breakout growth of the company’s customer support software, and the introduction of new products for IT Service Management (“ITSM”), customer relationship management (“CRM”) and cloud-based call centers, Freshworks products are designed to help companies better engage and communicate with their customers and employees. The company surely had a significant impact on parts of the CRM market, also as evidenced by being named a CRM Watchlist Winner 2017 by industry luminary Paul Greenberg. They, in my eyes, however, do not yet have a CRM. A CRM encompasses marketing, sales, and service, supporting multiple channels/being channel agnostic and based upon analytics. Freshsales, what is referred to as their CRM, is a sales tool. “Today, the Freshworks suite of products includes: Freshdesk: a multichannel customer support helpdesk which allows organizations to collaborate and support their customers through email, phone, websites, forums and social media Freshservice: a cloud-based service desk and IT Service Management solution to address the growing complexity of teams’ IT support needs through a simple but powerful interface Freshsales: a full-featured CRM solution for sales teams handling high-velocity leads Freshcaller: a...

Call Center and Soccer: Two of a kind

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 2, 2017 | Blog |

One of the eternal problems in a call center is getting an enquiry routed to the right agent. This is doubly true in a mobile world that demands conversational support in near real time. Add to this the fact that most customers seeking support already failed to find an answer to their inquiry using an FAQ, a community, or other self-services. In this situation customers expect an answer within few minutes, if not seconds. On top of this, the ability to make engagements with the company easy, efficient, and ideally joyful, is becoming more and more a distinguishing factor for companies. Customer experience is the result of engagements, and for humans the experience gained from the most recent engagement tends to have a higher influence than older ones. Consequently, a positive customer experience matters, not only during marketing- and sales, but even more so in situations that require active help of the company that sold the product or service. So, getting a solution to an issue must be as easy and as human as possible. The challenge is that every support organization needs to live and work with limited resources – human as well as technical ones. It is Like a Good Game of Soccer 11 players and a ball. There is a goal keeper, are defenders, midfielders and attackers who play as a team against their opposition, trained by their coach and guided by the captain. There is a core team, and some players may be assigned to different roles, even within one game. Depending on the opposition team, the coach and the captain change player assignments, tactics...

Helpshift to Salesforce Integration – Where Peanut Butter meets the Jelly

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 26, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |

The leading in-app support company Helpshift just released a seamless integration with the Salesforce Service Cloud. This integration is now available on AppExchange. Here a copy of the press release for your convenience, followed by my analysis:     Helpshift Announces New Integration Capabilities for Its Customers on the Salesforce AppExchange, the World’s Leading Enterprise Apps Marketplace SAN FRANCISCO – (BUSINESS WIRE) – MAY 25, 2017 – Helpshift today announced an integration with new capabilities available on the Salesforce AppExchange. This integration is meant to improve the mobile user experience by enabling service agents to deliver support to app users directly from within their Salesforce Service Cloud Dashboard – In-app! When a customer contacts support from inside the Helpshift-enabled app, a Salesforce case is created that the agent responds to, creating an in-app conversation. Customers get notified via banners, notifications and badges, enabling them to continue at their pace. “Organizations are seeing an explosion in demand for mobile solutions from their customers,” said Esteban Kolsky, president of thinkJar, a customer strategies advisory firm, “and they quickly realize they can’t offer outdated and incomplete solutions without real time data. Direct integration with systems of record are at the core of their strategies to support this trend.” Built on the Salesforce Platform, the Helpshift integration is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange. Enterprises can benefit in the following ways: In-app Messaging: Helpshift’s new integration capabilities allow existing Salesforce customers to provide support to mobile customers, which extends their ability to reach mobile customers where it matters: Directly in the app, and supported by the smartphones’ powerful notification mechanisms. Enhanced Knowledge Capabilities:...

Experience requires Engagement – Are Companies Prepared?

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 4, 2017 | Blog |

Today’s businesses are in a difficult situation. Their customers demand more experience and contextually relevant engagements than they are equipped to deliver. This places them on a difficult trail that they need to navigate in order to be and stay successful. Their challenge is that technology does help everyone, especially their customers, because, also thanks to the consumerization of technology, it is far easier and cheaper for customers to implement and use technologies. Good technology examples of the past decade include the meteoric rise of messaging services and, before that, social media. As a consequence of this today’s customer is less depending on company marketing- or sales organizations and has a far higher reach when it comes to satisfying an information need. Consequently, Google finds that a whopping 99.8 per cent of all online ads are simply … ignored. Sales representatives are on the verge of becoming irrelevant. An increasing number of studies find that customers contact a sales representative only after a product decision has been made. This was a topic that was already discussed during CRM evolution 2016. Other studies determine that customers are abandoning shopping carts already following a single poor service experience. While these studies often are commissioned by vendors there still are too many of them to not indicate that there is a problem. After all there is bound to be a fire where there is smoke. The 1990’s customer was happily working with and believing in corporate messaging that got delivered via unidirectional channels like TV, radio, or the newspaper. Today’s customer uses available technologies and is always online, digitally connected and socially...