Putting the Cart in front of the Horse – Chatbots in Support
My recent rant on chatbots having the potential to kill user experience got some nice reactions. It brought me into some interesting discussions on support, mobile, the role, strengths and deficiencies of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and so forth. Most of these discussions dealt with mobile support but also with the question where AI could benefit most. Particularly good one were with Abinash Tripathy, CEO of mobile support platform Helpshift and Srikrishnan Ganesan, founder of Konotor, now hotline.io after being acquired by Freshdesk at the end of 2015. Both companies have a focus on in-app support, a solution category that basically got introduced by Helpshift, after Abinash identified a lack of good options or delivering support directly to and via mobile phones. One of the premises is that a lot of the technically necessary and relevant information can get collected directly and sent to the service back end transparently. They have some big customers, including Microsoft and a raft of gaming companies, including Zynga and Supercell. He, of course, has an opinion on bots in support, which he recently also expressed on Venturebeat. Hotline.io has a customer base that is mainly made of transactional companies, which, too, leads to a high message load but also leads to different approaches, as the user context is often about past transactions. This means that regularly not that much information gets sent together with the support request. Sri, too, has a vision on how to incorporate AIs and bots into support. Hotline.io is offering a browsing style of offering help using a shallow tree with icon-supported categories on top of...
Customer Experience Management and Customer Expectations
In the past weeks I found more and more articles like this one that talk about the importance of continually exceeding customer expectations to be able to deliver a positive customer experience. Only this way, companies get advised, will they achieve customer loyalty and advocacy. I, frankly, find this more than a bit disconcerting. To me this seems to be a very wrong objective to put the sole focus of customer experience management on. Minimally it is a very short sighted objective. Not to be misunderstood. As a customer I like my expectations exceeded, too. Why is the objective wrong, then? Where we are at … For a starter, and that may be true for many other customers, consumers as well as business customers, we have grown to expect very little. This is probably following many disappointing encounters where already the basics go very wrong. I am talking about basics customer experience failures like: Being ‘targeted’ by and served with irrelevant marketing e-mails, or plainly with too many of them Complicated onboarding processes Unavailable, uninterested, or plainly overly busy in-store personnel, or the personnel not having information at their hands Long wait times in the customer service lines, even in chats Inadequate solutions to problems Different experiences when using different channels, like the necessity to repeat information Delivery windows that span a whole day Information about delays not being provided Confirmations that differ from the agreement Privacy policies that almost need a law degree, are very long and that put the customer on the back foot Loyalty programs that clearly rather serve the company than offering value to the...
Concur and Uber Partnership – Four Winners and one Loser?
Yesterday the controversial ride share/taxi company Uber and the leading travel- and expense management company Concur announced an expansion of their relationship. With their “first-of-its-kind partnership and technology integration” Concur-connected businesses “will gain visibility into [their] Uber usage while increasing traveler productivity and satisfaction”. As part of the deal Uber will exclusively (for the moment, I guess) make its business features available to Concur customers available for free. This includes automated employee onboarding, policy controls, savings performance, and trip summary dashboards only available by the combination of data collected in the systems of the two companies. My Take – a Quadruple Win There are five involved parties. Concur Uber Concur customers Traveling employees It is conceivable that this partnership does good to all of them. On the fifth one – later … Concur wins The exclusivity of this partnership gives concur a nice edge over its competition. The travel management market is pretty contested. As you can see in the G2Crowd Grid for Expense Management Concur is not an uncontested leader. There is some scope left in both directions. Which leads us to the next two possible winners Concur Customers win Companies using Concur win by improved efficiencies, better overview and lower cost for taxi expenses – assuming that Concur doesn’t cream off the benefits – as the announcement states. There are basically five areas in which companies benefit: Companies can expect savings on taxi cost due to Uber instantly becoming a preferred provider A centralized account management connects employees to an account; this gives visibility into rides taken, including pick up, drop off, time of day, and route. Employees can use a central payment account or request reimbursement for...