Virtual Conversations: The Future of Customer Service is Here… Now
The average consumer interacts with customer service 65 times in a year. That adds up to over 270 billion service calls made on an annual basis. Multiply that by an average cost of about $1.00 a call, and you’ve got very big problem for global businesses. In addition to costs, tedious processes and arduous technology mean the annual turnover rate of customer service agents is extremely high, and call duration — long. And what are the customers of tomorrow saying about customer service calls? 33% of Millennials are only willing to wait 1 to 3 minutes to get a desired response, 52% have hung up on a customer service call, and 56% of Millennials have switched from one company to another because of underwhelming customer service.
But what if the science of customer service could be transformed into a low cost, enjoyable, personalized experience? What if customer service calls could become an avenue for loyalty and trust and move beyond service into sales, unleashing an ingenious environment in which to find new revenue streams going forward. Statistics show that customers want to be able to communicate with their providers and actually, taking an inbound call currently happens to be the most cost effective means of interacting with customers. With a fairly high first rate of contact resolution, customer service calls, or chats, could be key drivers of growth. How can firms transform the customer service call experience, and turn crippling costs into colossal opportunities? Is the answer virtual conversations with cognitive computing systems?
Engaging Customers through Virtual Conversations
The fact is that after years of development, we are finally reaching the point where intelligent digital agents can discourse with humans, using natural language — in a very human way — and that reality is poised to fundamentally transform customer engagement. Yousef Hashimi, Cognitive lead for Financial Services at IBM says this, “Voice response units have the ability to understand what we say in order to get us to the right service representative, and chatbots do a fairly decent job of answering one question at a time. What’s changed now is that cognitive systems like IBM Watson can now engage in full conversations with the ability to handle multiple related topics. As a result, we can construct virtual conversations that fully meet the needs of customers without them ever having to speak to a human, because in fact, we have trained the system to have a conversation like a human would.”
These virtual agents are pro-active solutionists, conscientious workers and are dedicated to putting customer needs first so that they’re truly satisfied with the experience and the outcome. By providing these virtual agents, businesses can transform haphazard service interactions into empathetic, understanding, personalized experiences with a best in class representative — every time. The fact that the ‘person’ is a cognitive agent obviously has tremendous positive ramifications for businesses, if done right.
The fact is that after years of development, we are finally reaching the point where intelligent digital agents can discourse with humans, using natural language — in a very human way — and that reality is poised to fundamentally transform customer engagement.
Hashimi says, “When you deploy a virtual agent, what you are really doing is creating a digital persona to mimic your best employee — be that a service representative, a sales agent, a financial advisor, a hotel concierge, a technician, or any other customer-facing employee in your business. Just like humans, these digital personas must be able to personalize every interaction in a conversational style that ultimately resolves the customer’s uncertainty or fulfills their needs — because otherwise the customer will walk away from the experience dissatisfied.”
These virtual agents are pro-active solutionists, conscientious workers and are dedicated to putting customer needs first so that they’re truly satisfied with the experience and the outcome.
Despite the advances we have made, cognitive agents are never going to be able to address everything we throw at them and, in some cases, they won’t even be allowed to. Hashimi says, “Often licensing, regulation, or a serious life situation, demands the attention of a trusted, compassionate, and educated advisor.” In the case of an emergency for instance, people want to deal with other people, not a computer. Thankfully, cognitive agents can sense when an individual is nervous or frustrated and quickly put that customer in the care of a helpful, informed human advisor. Hashimi continues, “This is not about replacing humans because there is always going to be the need and desire for human interaction. That said, there are plenty of situations where smart, thoughtful and well-constructed virtual conversations can deliver amazing customer service.”
Not Your Grandmother’s Siri
The importance of Siri cannot be underestimated in that she conditioned people to start talking to their mobile devices, and expecting something helpful in return. There have been many fast followers in this space and now both Amazon and Google have introduced virtual concierge into our homes as well. The age of “conversational commerce” is upon us — and it is not going away.
Now the question becomes how do we take things to the next level and, according to Hashimi, that is where systems like Watson come into play. Hashimi says, “We are not taking a Siri-approach. Siri-like technologies attempt to be concierges, personal assistants trying to fill an endless assortment of needs that would be difficult even for a human to handle, often ending with limited and even frustrating results. This first round of digital assistants have conditioned us to interact with them one question or command at a time, but that is simply not how people interact with one another when trying to resolve a customer service issue.” Hashimi continues, “With IBM Watson, we are building virtual agents that have the expertise and domain knowledge required to adeptly handle moderate-to-complex customer service interactions in a back and forth conversational style with the goal of fully resolving the customer’s specific service need.”
Chatbots have also made a valiant attempt to satisfy customer service inquiries through the use of natural language understanding that maps to a set of domain-specific answers to a pre-determined set of questions. The challenge with those systems, according to Hashimi, is that “Chatbots don’t give businesses the flexibility to develop expert virtual assistants across multiple domains. Instead they also only operate in the realm of one question, one answer. Not to mention, chatbots limit you to interacting with customers only via text on a computer, and consumers are going to demand and expect virtual assistants to follow them wherever they are — be it in their car, at work, in the grocery store, at the mall, on vacation, or at home. And they are going to want to interact with their virtual assistants either by text or voice — whichever mode of communication suits them best at that time.”
Service is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
It took two to three decades for businesses to refine and improve their call center experiences and they continue to seek ways to deliver a delightful experience for customers. So, we all need to be aware that this nascent ability to conduct virtual conversations will take time to develop fully. But make no doubt about it, this is no longer about the art of the possible. With systems like Watson, we can now build cognitive agents that are truly engaging on a human level, allowing consumers to have intelligent conversations eloquently with a machine, using natural language. And according to Hashimi, “That is going to change the world. Once we perfect the art of cognitive customer service, consumers will develop trust in these virtual agents. When that happens, businesses will be able to pivot them into selling more complex products and services that require counseling and advice before a consumer will purchase them.”
We all have rapidly become accustomed to the notion that we can order flowers by talking to a digital device. In the future, when cognitive agents get good enough to venture into more complex sales transactions, the results are going to be a massive windfall for leading providers who invest and adopt this technology early. As Hashimi puts it, “The era of conversational commerce is going to progress from buying simple things to buying more complex things faster than we think. Those enterprises who have the cognitive agents in place today providing amazing customer service are going to be in a much better position to pivot into guiding and advising customers through more complex buying experiences, without the need to speak to a human every time. This is going to give those enterprises a distinct competitive advantage in the marketplace.”
Never Forget: It Doesn’t Just Know — It Has to Learn
The cognitive era then could give providers opportunities to interact — and transact — with customers at an increased rate, of which they’ve never dreamed. The cost savings could be immense and the opportunity to uncover new revenue streams exponential, but only if they get intelligent virtual conversation right. When is the last time you went back to an interface that didn’t work? Exactly. Although the possibilities for, and potential in, intelligent agents is immense, the technology behind the delivery requires a completely different way of building systems — because they are trained, not programmed. So yes, while cognitive agents are poised to change our world, deploying them is not an investment to be taken lightly.
Think of the cognitive agent as a new inexperienced employee that needs to be taught by human experts to recognize different situations, and possess the domain expertise required to respond accordingly. It also has to learn to pick up on nuances, such as customer tone and sentiment. And so, a firm’s journey into the world of virtual conversations will require it to draw upon the experiences of its best and brightest employees, which means that quite often firms are faced with having to pull some of their most valuable employees and subject matter experts from the front lines in order to train their cognitive agents.
As Hashimi says, “If the professor doesn’t show up to class, the student doesn’t learn. And so, I advise my customers to think carefully about how they roll out this capability. By starting with service, they can draw upon non-revenue generating personnel to build out the system, while attacking business results that are easier to track and measure. Then when they see the return on investment and have figured out how to really build these systems, they can venture into the more complex realm of providing advice. If providing more complex advice is essential to your company, just realize it is going to require you to pull people who really know how to provide that advice away from their day jobs to make sure you get the virtual conversations right.”
Conclusion: The Future is Here — Grab It
Cognitive agents are at work today and IBM Watson is already helping companies across multiple industries improve first contact resolution as well as deflect customer interactions from higher cost channels. Nevertheless, Hashimi sees a lot of reticence by businesses to embrace this technology. Hashimi says, “Look, by no means have we perfected the best way to conduct virtual conversations with consumers. But, even with our first attempts, we are seeing significant results. We know we will only get better as we analyze the interactions that consumers have with our cognitive agents, and figure out how to teach our agents how to handle more, situations better.”
The era of cognitive computing has arrived and it has the potential to transform our lives. Cognitive agents will allow providers to streamline business execution, but also deliver a compassionate, confidence building, personalized customer experience. With an emerging class of customers who are more ‘experience-loyal’ than ‘brand-loyal,’ consumer engagement is becoming a far more influential factor for success. With that, Hashimi concludes, “Not investing in cognitive agents that can converse with consumers virtually will be a tremendous missed opportunity for companies looking to streamline costs and secure customer loyalty.” Cognitive virtual assistants are set to change customer service as we know it. Welcome to the future.
The era of cognitive computing has arrived and it has the potential to transform our lives.
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