How to make customer conversations more human

Imag­ine a com­pa­ny that treats you like a val­ued friend. Instead of putting you on hold, they use the same mes­sag­ing chan­nels that you use every day. And instead of deper­son­al­ized inter­ac­tions, they offer mean­ing­ful, emo­tion­al­ly rich con­ver­sa­tions. Wouldn’t that be a more human way of engag­ing?

The answer, of course, is ‘yes’. But it’s hard for busi­ness­es to inter­act in a more human way when they’re depen­dent on call queue­ing sys­tems, gener­ic web­sites and robot­ic-sound­ing emails.

“Human beings are inher­ent­ly social and share a need to con­nect, but the expe­ri­ences we have with brands are becom­ing more and more face­less,” says Rob LoCas­cio, founder and CEO of LivePer­son. “Con­sumers are look­ing for deep­er, more mean­ing­ful con­nec­tions, so any brand that can pro­vide them will dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves.”

Some­what sur­pris­ing­ly, the best way to do that at scale – and shift from clicks and cook­ies to more nat­ur­al-feel­ing con­ver­sa­tions – is to intro­duce some automa­tion. LivePerson’s AI-pow­ered chat­bots, for instance, work togeth­er with human experts to ful­fil con­sumer inten­tions at scale. This helps cre­ate a direct link between com­pa­nies and their cus­tomers, and results in a more human approach to doing busi­ness.

Thou­sands of com­pa­nies around the world now use LivePerson’s tech­nol­o­gy to cre­ate these con­ver­sa­tion­al rela­tion­ships with con­sumers. It gives them the abil­i­ty to tap into the con­ve­nience and com­fort of the mes­sag­ing chan­nels con­sumers use to chat to their friends and fam­i­ly, such as SMS and What­sApp. This quick, intu­itive way of inter­act­ing can also be cus­tomised to suit the over­all tone of the brand, or deployed through their own app or web­site.

What’s more, LivePerson’s tools allow com­pa­nies to har­ness the asyn­chro­nous mes­sag­ing we take for grant­ed when we’re con­vers­ing with our friends and fam­i­ly. Put sim­ply, this means you can eas­i­ly start a con­ver­sa­tion with a brand, put your phone down, and con­tin­ue it lat­er on right where you left off.

As LoCas­cio says, this means “putting con­sumers, not com­pa­nies, in charge of con­ver­sa­tions.” In fact, LivePerson’s Con­ver­sa­tion­al AI is pur­pose-built for these kinds of cus­tomer inter­ac­tions. “We’ve been laser-focused on under­stand­ing con­sumer intent and behav­iours in the nat­ur­al flow of con­ver­sa­tions, and we have decades of con­ver­sa­tion­al data under­pin­ning our tech­nol­o­gy,” adds Joe Bradley, chief sci­en­tist at LivePer­son.

Creating community

BELLA, a mes­sag­ing-based chal­lenger bank, exem­pli­fies this approach to cus­tomer engage­ment. LivePer­son, which works with some of the largest banks in the world, designed it to demon­strate a new kind of finan­cial ser­vice – one built around the human qual­i­ties of love and empa­thy, and the imme­di­a­cy and per­son­al­i­sa­tion of cut­ting-edge AI.
The user-inter­face sys­tem is ful­ly con­ver­sa­tion­al, so there are no menus to nav­i­gate. Instead, users sim­ply type in what they want to do and BELLA car­ries it out.

As with any bank, BELLA accounts check all of the stan­dard box­es for safe and secure bank­ing. But they also offer some unique expe­ri­ences that aim to build a com­mu­ni­ty, and then take care of that community’s finan­cial well­be­ing.

“For exam­ple, BELLA includes Kar­ma accounts for ran­dom acts of kind­ness,” says LoCas­cio. “These ’pay-it-for­ward’ accounts let mem­bers set aside any amount at any giv­en time to cov­er oth­er mem­bers’ expens­es, rang­ing from spring­ing for a sur­prise treat when a mem­ber buys cof­fee, to a dona­tion to some­one you’ve nev­er met who hap­pens to be in need.”

BELLA also includes 24-hour mes­sag­ing sup­port with real peo­ple that get to know and care for the com­mu­ni­ty. Mem­bers can mes­sage with the BELLA team any­time, any­where, about every­thing from TV show rec­om­men­da­tions to com­plet­ing every­day tasks, or help plan­ning for long-term goals.

Last but by no means least, BELLA fea­tures an algo­rithm that rewards mem­bers with ran­dom sur­prise cash­back of between 5% to 200% when they use their BELLA deb­it card. It’s an impor­tant offer­ing, as “reward­ing mem­bers is at the heart of the BELLA DNA and cre­ates the advo­ca­cy to build a com­mu­ni­ty of mem­bers,” says LoCas­cio.

Building conversations

Con­ver­sa­tion­al AI doesn’t only change things for con­sumers – it changes them for con­tact cen­tre agents too. “Just a few years ago, every­one thought that bot builders need­ed to be high­ly tech­ni­cal, or even data sci­en­tists,” says Joe Bradley. “The real­i­ty is far dif­fer­ent: con­tact cen­tre agents, the peo­ple who know how to have pro­duc­tive, empa­thet­ic con­ver­sa­tions, are the best peo­ple to design bots.”

The trick is to make it easy for them to do so through tools like LivePerson’s Con­ver­sa­tion Builder. “When you take a low-to-no code approach and com­bine it with a point-and-click inter­face, you can help any con­tact cen­tre agent become a bot man­ag­er or con­ver­sa­tion­al design­er,” LoCas­cio explains.

In oth­er words, con­ver­sa­tion­al AI isn’t remov­ing jobs – it’s mak­ing them more reward­ing. “It’s true that tra­di­tion­al con­tact cen­tre jobs, where peo­ple pick up the phone or type respons­es to cus­tomers, will go away as automa­tions increas­ing­ly take over these func­tions,” says LoCas­cio, “but the world is going to need many, many more bot builders and con­ver­sa­tion design­ers.”

He points to the inter­net of things, or even the much-tout­ed meta­verse, as poten­tial dri­vers of these new jobs. “Every brand with a prod­uct you inter­act with via a con­ver­sa­tion, or a pres­ence in the meta­verse you talk to, will need peo­ple to design and opti­mise those inter­ac­tions,” he says. “They will need to under­stand your lan­guage, your emo­tion, and even your per­son­al lan­guage quirks to inter­act with you. That’s where con­tact cen­tre agents come in, and being able to build these high-empa­thy, high-sat­is­fac­tion expe­ri­ences will be invalu­able to their future careers.”

Ulti­mate­ly, the com­bi­na­tion of con­ver­sa­tion­al AI and peo­ple pow­er opens up new expe­ri­ences for both con­sumers and call cen­tre agents. It makes the for­mer hap­pi­er, as they’re no longer left on hold or forced to wait days for a response to an email; while the lat­ter are able to devel­op more var­ied and ful­fill­ing careers that align with the future of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy. In short, con­ver­sa­tion­al AI sim­ply makes life more human.

For more infor­ma­tion, please vis­it liveperson.com/blog/the-customer-engagement-people-prefer

Pro­mot­ed by LivePer­son