Enterprises enter the next phase of AI

The jour­ney to deploy­ing chat­bots hasn’t been an easy one for enter­pris­es. Ten to fif­teen years ago, when com­pa­nies first start­ed exper­i­ment­ing with them, con­sumers were exposed to sev­er­al bad imple­men­ta­tions due to the imma­tu­ri­ty and poor imple­men­ta­tion of the tech­nol­o­gy.

The nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing that pow­ers con­ver­sa­tion­al arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) expe­ri­ences has devel­oped con­sid­er­ably since then, and is now capa­ble of pow­er­ing seam­less and authen­tic inter­ac­tions that reflect human con­ver­sa­tions. While there are still things AI can­not do, its abil­i­ty to under­stand intent and match it to exist­ing con­tent has enabled com­pa­nies to trans­form how they engage with cus­tomers across the entire jour­ney.

In retail, for exam­ple, AI chat­bots are being used to help cus­tomers eas­i­ly find answers to fre­quent­ly asked pre-order ques­tions, such as what types of deliv­ery options are avail­able, active order ques­tions like where an item is or how it can be returned, as well as for post-order onboard­ing and trou­bleshoot­ing.

“The tech­nol­o­gy behind chat­bots and the qual­i­ty of con­ver­sa­tion is so much bet­ter than it used to be,” says San­dra Schroeter, inter­na­tion­al head of cus­tomer engage­ment tech­nolo­gies at Log­MeIn, which pro­vides AI-pow­ered cus­tomer engage­ment solu­tions for com­pa­nies of all sizes. “AI won’t answer 100 per cent of ques­tions, but it does remove the sim­ple repeat­able queries from the live agents’ plate so they can spend more time with the cus­tomers who need them most.

“With Bold360, LogMeIn’s first prod­uct to lever­age con­ver­sa­tion­al AI for cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, if the chat­bot does­n’t know the answer or iden­ti­fies a high-val­ue trans­ac­tion that requires a human touch, the tech­nol­o­gy can seam­less­ly tran­si­tion the cus­tomer to a human agent, includ­ing the full con­text of the inter­ac­tion. Fur­ther, the bot stays as an active par­tic­i­pant in the con­ver­sa­tion, help­ing both the cus­tomer and agent along the way.”

Cre­at­ing a good har­mo­ny between bots and humans will allow com­pa­nies to lever­age the full poten­tial of their human work­force, and will result in hap­pi­er and more pro­duc­tive employ­ees

Beyond customer service

With con­tact cen­tre deploy­ments of chat­bots becom­ing more mature every day, use-cas­es are now expand­ing as enter­pris­es become more accept­ing of AI and are increas­ing­ly inspired by the val­ue it brings to the busi­ness. Sales and mar­ket­ing func­tions are lever­ag­ing the capa­bil­i­ties to tran­si­tion chat­bots from being a sim­ple hub of knowl­edge for cus­tomers to using them to help proac­tive­ly assist in the buy­ing process by pro­vid­ing cus­tomers con­tent and sug­ges­tions as they
are shop­ping.

With­in the same exam­ple of retail, com­pa­nies are begin­ning to use chat­bots not only to help cus­tomers make the right pur­chas­ing deci­sion, but also active­ly encour­ag­ing them to do so. AI tech­nol­o­gy can recog­nise when users are brows­ing an item and offer help in find­ing what they want, while guid­ing them through to the trans­ac­tion stage. By pro­vid­ing auto­mat­ed assis­tance, retail­ers can reduce the cost­ly issue of returns.

Fur­ther use-cas­es are emerg­ing to assist human staff in cus­tomer ser­vice or to enable all employ­ees to find answers quick­er for ques­tions relat­ing to core busi­ness func­tions such as human resources and IT. Inter­nal chat­bots enable com­pa­nies to keep infor­ma­tion con­sis­tent dur­ing onboard­ing and reg­u­lar train­ing, for exam­ple, or to help employ­ees eas­i­ly reset pass­words if they for­get them. This reduces the vol­ume of inquiries com­ing into help desks and keeps employ­ees pro­duc­tive.

Organisational culture shifts

As these new cus­tomer and employ­ee engage­ment tech­nolo­gies con­tin­ue to increase in momen­tum, more and more organ­i­sa­tions are cre­at­ing exec­u­tive-lev­el roles to help nav­i­gate this new way of doing busi­ness.

“As Bold360 con­tin­ues to evolve in both tech­nol­o­gy and use-cas­es, the deci­sion-mak­ers with­in our cus­tomer organ­i­sa­tions have var­ied quite a bit,” says Ms Schroeter.  “Where a deploy­ment like ours might have been an IT deci­sion a few years ago, today the dri­ving force behind these types of new tech­nolo­gies is com­ing from posi­tions like chief dig­i­tal offi­cer or chief inno­va­tion offi­cer.”

Hir­ing some­body into such a role helps to lay down a strong foun­da­tion for busi­ness­es that want to move to this next phase of AI, posi­tion­ing them as inter­nal cham­pi­ons for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. Accord­ing to ana­lyst firm For­rester¹, com­pa­nies that fail to dif­fer­en­ti­ate their cus­tomer expe­ri­ence will engage in price wars that may reap short-term gains, but will lead to a destruc­tive race to the bot­tom in the long term.

These hires can also lead the cru­cial task of over­com­ing the cul­tur­al bar­ri­ers that may stand in the way of expand­ing the influ­ence of AI with­in organ­i­sa­tions. Some peo­ple nat­u­ral­ly feel threat­ened by the prospect of tasks and process­es being auto­mat­ed, so it’s impor­tant to edu­cate them on how AI deploy­ments will ben­e­fit them.

“Like any dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion project, bring­ing your peo­ple along the jour­ney with you is cru­cial for adop­tion, espe­cial­ly when it comes to AI,” says Ms Schroeter. “Employ­ees need to estab­lish trust in the tech­nol­o­gy and be giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to see it as a col­league, rather than some­thing that will threat­en their jobs. There is no deny­ing that AI will like­ly impact our work­force in a sim­i­lar way to oth­er tech­nol­o­gy advance­ments, but it will more like­ly evolve job roles, not elim­i­nate them. In fact, many of the jobs that our chil­dren will have don’t even exist yet. AI brings change and with it a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ties.

“From a cul­tur­al and organ­i­sa­tion­al per­spec­tive, edu­cat­ing the work­force on these oppor­tu­ni­ties will be an impor­tant first step. AI has the pow­er to make all our jobs eas­i­er by allow­ing us to step away from monot­o­nous tasks and focus on what we do best: being human. Cre­at­ing a good har­mo­ny between bots and humans, where humans can focus their days on being strate­gic, empa­thet­ic and cre­ative, will allow com­pa­nies to lever­age the full poten­tial of their human work­force, and will result in hap­pi­er and more pro­duc­tive employ­ees.”

And it’s this har­mo­ny where LogMeIn’s Bold360 shines. As a cus­tomer expe­ri­ence plat­form that deliv­ers both AI and agent tech­nolo­gies, Bold360 is the foun­da­tion for the tri­an­gu­lar col­lab­o­ra­tion between agents, cus­tomers and AI. Cus­tomers can com­mu­ni­cate both with AI-pow­ered chat­bots as well as with live agents. Agents can com­mu­ni­cate direct­ly with cus­tomers while receiv­ing help from AI on the back­end. And the AI learns from both the cus­tomers’ and agents’ inter­ac­tions to ensure it is always improv­ing.

“While AI is becom­ing a crit­i­cal piece of an over­all cus­tomer expe­ri­ence strat­e­gy, the human com­po­nent is equal­ly cru­cial,” says Ms Schroeter. “As com­pa­nies start down their AI jour­ney, it’s a good idea to iden­ti­fy an area where AI can have the biggest imme­di­ate impact, test the tech­nol­o­gy, edu­cate and bring employ­ees and cus­tomers along with you, learn, adjust and expand from there. AI is hav­ing an unde­ni­able impact on busi­ness suc­cess, if imple­ment­ed the right way. Those that are get­ting on board now are in a posi­tion to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves from com­peti­tors; those that don’t are get­ting left behind.”

Agents work hand-in-hand with AI

See Tick­ets turned to Bold360 when its call cen­tre and live chat soft­ware could no longer cope with the demand of answer­ing ques­tions from mil­lions of event­go­ers.

Glob­al tick­et­ing ser­vices firm See Tick­ets sells and dis­trib­utes mil­lions of tick­ets for music, the­atre, fes­ti­val, sport, com­e­dy and lifestyle events each year. As a result, it must deal with a huge vol­ume of incom­ing cus­tomer inquiries every day.

In 2015, it sold all 150,000 tick­ets for that year’s Glas­ton­bury Fes­ti­val in just 29 min­utes, but the sub­se­quent ques­tions it had to field from cus­tomers placed enor­mous pres­sure on staff. Work­ing with more than 5,000 clients glob­al­ly and with over 40,000 events on sale, the onus always was on the cus­tomer ser­vice team to answer queries on each one.

“It was labour inten­sive, cost­ly and almost impos­si­ble for staff to know every detail about every event from a cus­tomer ser­vice per­spec­tive,” says Rob Wilmshurst, chief exec­u­tive at See Tick­ets. “We need­ed to move away from call cen­tre activ­i­ty and live chat soft­ware.”

Though the nature of the chal­lenge made automa­tion a strong fit, See Tick­ets had nev­er imple­ment­ed arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) before and it didn’t seek a spe­cif­ic tech­nol­o­gy. “We’re com­mit­ted to the best in client and cus­tomer ser­vice and any tool, AI or not, that helps us achieve that in a cost-effec­tive man­ner would be con­sid­ered,” says Mr Wilmshurst.

We are com­mit­ted to the best in cus­tomer ser­vice. With Bold360 our cus­tomers get accu­rate and con­sis­tent infor­ma­tion, that has been pre-qual­i­fied by our team. 95 per cent of the enquiries are now dealt with with­out any human inter­ac­tion

Fol­low­ing a live demon­stra­tion of LogMeIn’s Bold360, an AI-pow­ered cus­tomer engage­ment solu­tion, See Tick­ets could instant­ly see the soft­ware would be able to pro­vide accu­rate and fast infor­ma­tion to its cus­tomers, as well as dri­ve large cost sav­ings. Bold360 empow­ers busi­ness­es to cre­ate bet­ter expe­ri­ences in their cur­rent and future engage­ments in a scal­able way.

“Inside min­utes, we set up a few fre­quent­ly asked ques­tions and chal­lenged the plat­form with a range of some­times delib­er­ate­ly stu­pid ques­tions to see how it respond­ed,” says Mr Wilmshurst. “It respond­ed accu­rate­ly and we were imme­di­ate­ly impressed. The inter­face is very sim­ple to under­stand and gave us con­fi­dence this was a tool the exist­ing call cen­tre and cus­tomer ser­vice staff could work with.”

Thanks to Bold360’s sim­ple and intu­itive set-up process, See Tick­ets was able to deploy the tech­nol­o­gy imme­di­ate­ly to its cus­tomer ser­vice team with min­i­mal effort from the tech­ni­cal parts of its busi­ness.

Since using the AI chat­bot, See Tick­ets con­tact cen­tre vol­ume decreased con­sid­er­ably. Pre­vi­ous­ly, every sin­gle inquiry required human inter­ac­tion, but the new tech­nol­o­gy means 95 per cent of inquiries are now han­dled with­out any human inter­ac­tion at all.

The soft­ware has also pro­vid­ed new insights for See Tick­ets. It analy­ses cus­tomer intents across chan­nels, dis­play­ing the voice of the cus­tomer in real time and enabling busi­ness­es imme­di­ate­ly to resolve fric­tion points in the cus­tomer jour­ney.

Insights from AI-dri­ven engage­ments con­stant­ly fuel cus­tomer expe­ri­ence strate­gies, enabling busi­ness­es to lever­age the voice of the cus­tomer to improve strate­gic deci­sion-mak­ing across the busi­ness. In addi­tion, Bold360 gives man­agers the flex­i­bil­i­ty to view an overview of trends and to dis­sect data by con­text, geo-loca­tion and cus­tomer pro­files. With a com­plete view of the cus­tomer, it enables users to improve strate­gic deci­sion-mak­ing across the busi­ness.

The real-time sta­tis­tics inter­face enables the See Tick­ets cus­tomer ser­vice team to see what issues are impact­ing the busi­ness at any giv­en time. Through those insights, they can alert man­age­ment or clients and quick­ly find a res­o­lu­tion, act­ing as an ear­ly-warn­ing sys­tem that steers the com­pa­ny away from poten­tial prob­lems.

This means See Tick­ets human agents are now able to focus on high­er-val­ue and more com­plex con­ver­sa­tions and tasks, includ­ing mak­ing sure the infor­ma­tion on Bold360 is as good as it can be. Cus­tomers get accu­rate and con­sis­tent infor­ma­tion that has been pre-qual­i­fied by the cus­tomer ser­vices team and tuned by the plat­form, while See Tick­ets gets more pro­duc­tive agents.

“Review­ing the sta­tis­tics in real time allows staff to see how the answers are being received and rat­ed by the cus­tomers,” says Mr Wilmshurst. “Where nec­es­sary, staff can adjust the answers or cre­ate new or sup­ple­men­tary ones know­ing the plat­form will assim­i­late these into its knowl­edge base and start to rely on
these imme­di­ate­ly.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it bold360.com