Customers at odds with your voice assistant? Channel transfer is here.
Watson Assistant can seamlessly move customers from the phone to other channels to solve more complex problems without involving your call center.
Let’s face it, phone support is table stakes when it comes to customer support. While we all look forward to the day when the phone is no longer the primary way customers resolve complex issues, it is still one of the most common ways they contact a company. In many cases, the phone may be the only channel a customer has enough confidence in to use consistently, even when they realize it will likely be a very frustrating experience.
When a company deploys a self-service assistant, the ultimate goal is to help their customers get to information or complete a task in the most efficient manner possible. This may be as simple as answering a very directed question but assistants are evolving to handle more and more complex tasks, such as completing an application process or on-boarding a new digital service.
Watson Assistant provides a way to provision self-service assistants that can be reached over different channels including the phone, web chat, text messaging and many others. These channels are not always created equally when it comes to handling all the questions being raised by your customers.
Take phone for example. While Watson Assistant provides a state of the art platform for building highly effective voice assistants, it is still very challenging for modern day speech to text engines to transcribe utterances that include alpha-numeric speech with the degree of accuracy required to completely eliminate humans from the interaction. That means when a conversation flow requires the collection of utterances like street names, email addresses or last names, the assistant typically needs to transfer the call to a human agent. This is when things can go south for both the customer and the company.
Running large contact centers filled with well trained human agents is by far the most expensive aspect of a company’s customer care yearly budget. There is also a fairly large turnover in most contact centers. That along with understaffing due to the pandemic has caused call hold times to increase dramatically over the last couple of years as customers wait for a human agent to become available. While companies are deploying effective strategies like call-back queues to improve the situation, why not first try to move callers to a more effective self-service channel to help them work through their issues?
Watson Assistant comes with an easy to deploy web chat which is incredibly rich with features that make it easy for customers to quickly complete a task or get their questions answered. Everything from the ability to use buttons to select a reply from a list of suggestions to interacting with rich media. The problem is customers only interact with assistants through web chat when they land on a company’s website or mobile application, but this isn’t always the first place a customer goes for support.
To solve this problem Watson Assistant recently released a new feature called channel transfer, with the sole purpose of giving assistant creators a way to offer their customers an alternative channel (namely web chat) to complete their tasks. This not only helps customers get to the channel that best suits their needs but has the added benefit of moving customers off potentially expensive channels like phone, ultimately driving down the overall cost of their contact centers.
What will my customers see?
Let’s use the phone channel to explain how this works from an end-user perspective. The assumption here is that most people calling your company are using some type of smart phone to call your help desk. That call is initially routed to a self-service assistant, which will attempt to determine the intent of the call. In this scenario, let’s say the caller is trying to complete a credit card transaction, on the website, this is something customers do every day, but on the phone, this action would typically require help from a live agent because of the complexities of collecting caller information like names and addresses.
A perfectly reasonable thing to do at this point in the conversation flow would be to ask the caller if they would be willing to transfer from the phone to a web chat session where they can easily complete the application process and take as much time as they need. If the caller agrees, the assistant simply sends an SMS message to the caller that includes a URL that, when clicked, loads the Watson Assistant web chat widget into the smart phone’s browser and starts the process of collecting the information needed to complete the transaction. At this point the caller can simply hang up the phone and complete their task using the web chat.
Now, we don’t want to just transfer them for all requests. There are plenty of things that are perfectly reasonable to do on the phone or outside of the web site. In these cases, Watson Assistant can respond with the same information across all channels and satisfy the customer without needing to switch channels. Self-service assistants should do whatever is most efficient to get the job done.
How does this work?
When a caller (or end user) asks a question, a transcription of that message is sent to the assistant handling the interaction and the response contains the reply to that question. In addition to the reply message, a message response can also include one or more response types that direct the channel to perform additional functions. For instance, the end_session response type can be used to hangup a phone call after the final reply is sent by Watson Assistant to the caller. For more details on how to program response types using the JSON editor in Watson Assistant go here. Also, here is a good Medium article that explains how to use some of the response types supported by Watson Assistant with web chat.
The response type that tells a channel to transfer to web chat is called channel_transfer. The details on this response type, including the related syntax, can be found here. This response type provides a way to specify a URL that points to the associated web page which can be loaded by the browser on a smart device such as an iPhone or an Android.
Continuing with the transfer from phone example, when the backend receives a channel_transfer response type, it looks to see if the SMS with Twilio channel integration is configured on the assistant. If so, it will automatically forward the URL along with a session token query parameter to the caller over the SMS channel. When the caller receives this URL via SMS, they can simply click on the URL to start the web chat session.
The really cool thing about this response type is that, when used, you pick up a lot of powerful Watson Assistant features for little to no development effort including:
- Support for automatically providing the web chat link to a phone user over SMS (if SMS is configured).
- Support for programming this feature in a Watson Assistant skill with only a few lines of JSON code.
A channel transfer to web chat is supported from all the built in channel integrations including phone, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and even sessions that are started directly on an SMS channel. One important benefit of using the channel transfer response type is that it allows you to funnel your customers to a single web chat channel to handle their most complex queries. Remember that every channel type has its own unique way of rendering the conversational flow. Of all the available channels, the Watson Assistant web chat channel is by far the most flexible way of rendering a conversation with your customers. This allows the developers of your Watson Assistant skills to focus their attention on one channel when developing these complex conversational flows.
So what are you waiting for?
The channel_transfer response type described in this article is available now in Watson Assistant. Using it is one of the best ways to help your customers quickly solve some of their most complex issues by guiding them to a channel that is both inexpensive and highly effective, without the need for live agent intervention. Your development team will also thank you because they can now focus on solving your customer’s most difficult use cases on a single self-service channel that supports all the bells and whistles needed to create a great user experience.
