Augmented Human Service – Next Generation Automated Service

The ability to deliver answers to our customers and prospects that are efficient, effective and convenient to both parties is the goal – balancing service with cost.

Too much is said about channel, multi-channel, or omnichannel – although this is relevant as customers need choice for situational convenience. However, more bias must be given to:

• the bearer of delivery (human, automated or self-service)
• the science of how answers to questions are derived
• how we identify the caller/texter/person on chat/person on video so that a frictionless, yet secure, entry to every customer conversation can be achieved.

We can explore this through looking at:

1. Channels
2. Bearers
3. Answers
4. Identity

We are at an incredibly primitive life-stage in all of these areas. The future of customer communication will see a significant leap in neural network and advanced logic capabilities. Conversational intelligence will extract meaning, intent, questions, topics (known and unknown) and combine this information with internal and external data sources, from workflow, policy and knowledge to weather, traffic reports and the daily news.

The key to customer communication, irrespective of whether the bearer is human or a machine, is the art of building context from the question or request to known internal factors (what did they buy, return, complain about, inquire about etc?), policy (the standard operating procedure) and external factors depending on the case and question in point.

In short, we are only just entering the digital world, but humans are not digital and our ability to listen, understand and relate to multiple historical transactions, as well as current and future influencing factors, in real time, is precisely zero! We were not designed for the big-data world.

Let us start with channels
Channels are the roads to answers or actions, getting you to the port where another service takes over that can give you the answer or action you seek. Channels are important for several reasons. They can act as the gatekeeper of cost control but be aware they can also be the driving factor behind significant customer frustration.

For the supplier:
Channel-to-service availability can be used by the supplier to ensure certain services or products

only land with low-cost bearers (we will get to this next). For example, we can deliver lots of content and potential answers in a website FAQ page, or perhaps deploy a chatbot for specific queries.

Furthermore, channels can be defined dynamically, such as by customer profile, by time of day, by location and, of course, availability of other bearers (typically human agents). This ensures high-value or late-sales-stage customers get the best service, which may cost more but is more appropriate.

For the customer:
Channels can also be used to suit the customer. Where there is no need for a conversation and the service is highly productised, customers may find it more convenient to select an app channel to transact a policy change, move money or request an upgrade.

Next, the bearer
Once the customer has selected a channel, or has had the channel selected for them, they are delivered to your choice of bearer. This may be human, automated or self-service, i.e. an agent, IVR, IVA, chatbot, auto-email, FAQ page or app.

These services are positioned to deliver the answers or actions needed, so they are all connected to, or have inbuilt, knowledge, skills, process and governance. For humans, these can be augmented with technology to help support them through any format of customer request. For automated and self-service channels, the art is to ensure the questions or actions are quickly recognised and logical answers or actions are quickly actioned.

In most cases they work well where highly defined processes or product services are required, for example when listening for or presenting options to which they have a “canned answer” – (is this a credit card, mortgage or loan question?) But the automated and self-service bearers are also a significant cause of customer frustration and complaint. We have all been there. I JUST WANT TO TALK TO A HUMAN BEING!

How we derive answers and transact actions is key
To deliver rapid, accurate and appropriate answers or actions requires knowledge, skill, process, context and policy. Whether automated or manual, the same elements are leveraged. This is becoming the most important area of focus for all customer management departments, as mundane and highly productised processes or product offers are increasingly automated or self-service centric, and the agents are left to deal with more complex, valuable or failure-based issues.

Furthermore, as our world becomes more digital, competitive, complex (both in product/service and compliance), fickle and prone to churn, the context element is becoming increasingly difficult for humans to compute. There is just too much data to process at the time of a conversation to be able to decode what has happened, when, why, to whom and how many other interactions have taken place before the call. Augmentation systems are growing apace to help support the agents who are dealing with complex initial transactions or sales, or complex failures where process and, perhaps, system audits are required to ensure the root cause of failure is fixed.

Gaining identity
Automating identity management through low-friction biometric techniques is going to gain traction, as it is a major cause of frustration and failure, whether this is done to streamline the process and to remove friction, or to fully identify for security and privacy reasons. Voice biometrics and in-app biometrics are already allowing the customer to gain instant access to services in a frictionless way. They allow the systems to pre-compute the context of the call based on historical interaction, whether that be human, automated or self-service, so that the service callers receive is accurate, acknowledges the history and context, and is dealt with rapidly.

Summary
We are about to witness a significant leap forward in capabilities in the areas of next generation augmented agent support and the next generation of automated agent.

Both of these technologies will go way beyond today’s very crude AI and automation techniques that typically scan for known questions or actions with predefined response paths. The future will be natural, conducive, emotionally intelligent, will understand context of internal and external factors, and will be available in any format and channel, accessible at any time from anywhere.

If you would like to get in touch, please contact Contexta360

It’s a déjà vu moment for C360’s CEO Andrew White. There are so many similarities and so many relevant takeaways and strategies from yesteryear that are so valuable today.

Circa 20 years ago, I worked in the IT service management space. It was a great time, and I was at the epicentre of some significant changes. Y2K was front and centre, so too was the convergence of the IT asset management world with the IT service management world. In parallel, we had new devices entering the workplace – mobile device management was born along with shadow IT.

It was a dynamic, fast and relatively new tech/market. At the time I was with a company called Numara Software and ended up moving from Europe to the US to head up marketing. This was a great company with a great leadership team. Ultimately, we built this business up and it was sold to another great company, BMC Software, for whom I worked for several years thereafter.

During the last two years of Numara and the first few at BMC, I was fortunate enough to work really closely with global luminaries from analyst firms Gartner, Forrester, 451Research, Ovum and more. These guys were guiding our strategies for growth, productisation, differentiation, go-to-market, and much more. One of the topics we covered at length back then was called the IT Maturity Model. They all had similar models, but in essence it was a well-structured analysis to help the customer realise where they were at that time. This always started with them thinking they were mid-mature but, after a few simple questions and checks, recalibrated them down to immature. It also gave them an understanding of what mature looked like, the cost of mature and the likely returns of being mature. This translated to models such as Total Economic Impact and the like.

As the sector was young and immature itself, with lots of mergers and acquisitions and with convergence and product innovation being launched every quarter, it was a good time to leverage these models and guide customers to realise the value of investing in maturing their capabilities. Time moves on and these models are probably less valuable in the IT management space today as it is significantly more mature and solutions are more commoditised and readily available.

They have value at market infection points:

• Where tech and market are moving towards mainstream, but not quite there yet.
• Where tech has been complex and expensive, and just not available to all.

This was the situation 20 years ago where there were very few ITSM, ITAM, MDM vendors and the ones that did exist were complicated with high professional services and integration requirements.

Déjà vu. The speech analytics, conversational intelligence and wider CX market is exactly in this place. In 2019, just 9 per cent of companies were using speech analytics. In 2020, this rose to 21 per cent, which is a significant increase but still low. Of this 21 per cent, I wager that the majority are only using speech analytics for very basic sentiment, compliance, next best action, or insights.

Several forces are at work now. The technology is radically better than it was just five years ago. Its foundation comes from two technologies that used to be expensive, those being recording (or livestream) and voice-to-text transcription. These are, to all intents and purposes, free (or they should be). The value comes from processing the transcriptions with advanced AI and NL technologies, and this is the new maturity battleground. New solutions are now available that are transforming the capabilities, the insight and, indeed, the number of companies that can now access this supertanker of big data and intelligence. It is no longer solely the preserve of big business, but open to all.

Most companies have a good handle on their transactional data and, indeed, the conversational data that they enter manually into the CRM tracking records from the chatbot or IVR. But this is just capturing 5 per cent at best. The insights from the new generation of speech analytics are mind-blowing. So, whether you are a stalwart of this technology, or have a desire to start using it to transform sales, CX, compliance and business process, ask yourself these questions: Where are we today? Where do we want to be? Why? And what is the economic impact?

I think have heard that before somewhere.

If you would like to get in touch, please contact  Contexta360

Yes, but there are many invisible factors that organisations are not aware of, and they therefore do not consider when planning the journey.

It is generally viewed as positive and progressive for organisations to contemplate the move from one state to the next. It is not a linearly complex move, but it should be considered extremely carefully to ensure the return on investment is realised.

Of course, the rewards are there if it is executed well, but many organisations fall into traps that become costly to them, not only in technology and integrations, but more importantly in service, CX, and sales revenues.

In reality, we can simplify the equation by removing the ‘single channel’ permutation. Today, most organisations have websites, email, phone and, more recently, video. It is safe to say that multichannel has become the norm. The question is, do we go full omnichannel?

The equation then becomes quite simple:

1. What does this cost?
2. What does this deliver?

This is an exciting subject and one that has been with us for many years, but the vast majority have not made the leap. The sad fact is that that those who have, have either knowingly or unknowingly failed in its execution.

Why is this? Simple mathematics. The permutations and complexities increase exponentially. To explain this more, let’s start at the beginning of the customer journey.

Why is your customer or prospect contacting you? There are a billion reasons why. If we simplify it, we could say: to enquire, to buy, to action, i.e. move money or return a product, or to complain. There are more, but these cover the main bases.

Next, how do we connect to the service to solve the customers need, i.e. the channels of communication, the connection? There’s no great surprise here either, with those being web, app, phone, email, chat, video and social.

At the end of this connection is the actual service, but first we need to decide if the service should be automated, self-service or human. This may be dynamic and based on many internal and external elements, including time, availability of resources, skills, product, customer type and sales stage.

Now, this is where things start to get interesting and where the invisible infrastructure comes into play. Many organisations plan extensively around the physical cloud or hybrid or on-prem technologies. They select a box of call control and a cloud of IVR and a crate of web with a pallet of chatbot and a side order of FAQs, for example. The invisible infrastructure contains elements such as policies, process, brand, EQ, knowledge and content. Furthermore, how is this structured? Are these distributed in each sub system, federated, integrated and so on?

The final step is the scenario in which a customer journey starts with one channel and in one service format, for example voice channel and automated IVR, but moves to either another channel or a different service delivery.

When we do the maths, we may say the complexity is now not just 5X channels, but, 5X channels x 3X service delivery x 3X types per service delivery x 100 policies x 10,000 knowledge paths x any quality standards. Plus, the products, services and policies may all change tomorrow.

The bottom line is that this is a massively complex equation, not so much from a technology perspective but for the organisation. To adapt the words of Sun Tsu in The Art of War: “If you are going to battle, ensure you know your customer and yourself well.”

We regularly find organisations know their customer better than they know themselves. More than 80 per cent of customer frustration doesn’t come from the agent or individual, but from a broken process, missing knowledge or just the sheer friction and pain of answering one of the four reasons for the call, chat, email – I want to buy, I want to ask a question, I want to return, I want to complain.

Knowing why your customer is calling is key. Having conversational intelligence along the customer journey is more important than the metadata of which channel they used. Conversational intelligence captures what was said – the topics, the intent, the actions – and this can be fully analysed. Monitoring chat, voice, video through IVR, chat servers and call centre agents is critical if you are embarking on an omnichannel strategy. It is a path towards exceptional CX, C-sat, sales and cost-reduction prizes, but it is also a path that is littered with traps and dead ends, some of which are visible and some invisible.

Frost & Sullivan define omnichannel as: “Seamless and effortless, high-quality customer experiences that occur within and between contact centre channels.”

Adding conversational intelligence to the omnichannel stack will bring the invisible aspects of the customer journey to the surface and make the customer experience seamless and effortless.

Every organisation is at a different maturity stage in their digital transformation strategy but, one thing is for sure, even some of the most-mature organisations are just scratching the surface.

The days of adding more one-off, independent or silo-based technologies and software to your business are becoming increasingly rare. Data is not just valuable, it is critical to the whole business. The interaction, coordination, federation and leverage of any investment is key.

Data is clearly a way to gain competitive advantage, but we are all standing under a waterfall of data holding an old colander and catching only 1 per cent, with most of that leaking away.

Ultimately, most businesses and organisations are striving for some or all the following:

• Improved service
• Increased revenue/growth
• Optimised cost

This is ultimately achieved by building a digital and data strategy that leverages nearly every sub system in your arsenal: including call centres, chatbots, websites, apps, IVAs, service management tools, field service tools, CRM, ERP and more. But digital strategies are not exclusively about kit or clouds, as these are the tools that facilitate the strategy. Before this we must look higher in the stack to ensure everything we do is aligned to a corporate-wide digital strategy.

The customer (and potential customer/market) must be at the centre of your digital strategy. You need to understand how you influence or at least recognise a need that your service or solution can solve. This means communication is key, however this is regularly misunderstood. Today, we hear so much about multi-channel or omnichannel, but this is just the connection or the ability to transition from one channel to another, for example from chat to voice. While channel is important to give choice to the customer and cost alignment to the vendor, it is not strategically important as it is passive, being merely the connector to the service bearer.

Service bearers fall into three categories, namely:

• Human
• Self-service
• Automated

These service bearers can handle one or many services. For example, humans may have a one-to-one phone call or video call, send an email, or hold a live human-to-human chat session. Self-service service bearers include web, apps, FAQs and knowledge bases. Automated service bearers include IVR, IVA, chatbots auto-email and the like.

These service bearers need three ingredients to be successful, namely:

• Content and knowledge
• Process and policy
• Understanding

Let’s map out what we have discussed so far:

The customer, or potential customer, may be interacting with you to buy, enquire or process (return, move money, pay or complain). They have a range of channels available that connect to service bearers, namely peer-to-peer self-service, automated service-bearers, or human service bearers.

To get things done transactionally, all service bearers will have to connect to your system of record/s and:

1. understand the question/action
2. know the answer
3. know the policy or process and whether this individual customer or prospect is allowed to make this transaction.

This is where your digital strategy comes into play. We typically find our human service bearers are good. We are intelligent beings and if we don’t know something we can ask, take action and remediate. The self-service and the automated channels are not that intelligent. They are typically static, having been built to do a job that rapidly dates. How often do you add products, services, changes to pricing or packaging, policy changes and so on?

Keeping everything in harmony is extremely complex and very few have cracked it. This is amplified when the service bearers have their own silo digital strategy, each with its own knowledge, CRM, process, procedure and interpretation of understanding.

Ultimately, the self-service and, in particular, automated service become outdated, do not understand the customer and, metaphorically, become the next generation of music on hold, merely delaying the inevitable demand “Let me speak to a human being”. This is amplified when things go wrong outside of productization or service policy. The automated channel may work when there are simple tasks, but when things go “off book” they are frankly damaging to your ultimate digital strategy to make money, save money, and improve service and experience.

There are two sides of frustration:

• The customer frustration and inefficiency
• The vendor frustration and inefficiency

It is not only about making it easier for the customer, it is also about making it easier for you.

The customer side of frustration is probably self-evident to you, although there is a lot missing. Organisations a pretty good at tracking and managing known issues, but are poor at detecting and therefore tracking, managing and remediating unknown issues. This is. because many of the reasons are just not known or reported. Two big areas of focus must be centred on whether the automated service bearer (IVR, IVA, chatbot) is motivated to declare to you how badly they are serving your customer? Or worse, do they have the ability to understand the question or request when it is outside of the norm? Also, your human resources, whether sales, service or support, are a proxy to the system of record. They all must key-in data relating to the request and action. This is prone to error, abuse, fatigue and a non-uniform approach to data capture. It is widely recognised that only a very small percentage of the conversation is captured, not only the obvious request but also underlying issues.

Speech analytics is now being used to tune your digital engine. You can remove workload from your human service bearers, check and challenge your automated service bearers and find hidden gems of improvement – from spotting sales opportunities, broken processes and missing policies or knowledge, to ensuring the true voice of the customer is heard.

Want to learn more?

Download our Guide to Speech Analytics & Conversational Intelligence Maturity

Andrew White tackles the obstacles along an automated digital assault course.

I don’t know who I feel more sorry for, the customer or the supplier. Both are faced with the same challenge, but from different ends of the digital assault course – the series of technologies, integrations and ultimate services that are designed to ‘help’ (BIG INVERTED COMMAS HERE!) the customer, the supplier or both.

It may have been easy to buy whatever product, service or widget you wanted, but how the tables turn when you need help, returns, credits, or, worse still, to upgrade and expand. The announcement says: “Please press one for this…did you know you can visit our website… and…” In essence, it is saying: “NO YOU CAN’T!!!”

This automated digital assault course feels like you need SAS survival training to complete it.

While the poor customer must navigate it, I feel equally sorry for the supplier, who must build, optimise and maintain it. The modern digital business (all businesses) is becoming a web of data and logic constantly trying to keep its AI head above water by ensuring that channel one knows what channel two did three seconds ago, while meshing and understanding all the transactional data and, oh, the Product Manager has changed a policy or SKU yesterday and the courier firm’s IT platform has just crashed.

One thing is constant, and that is change. New competitors, products, policies and correlating knowledge and processes are required to keep the CX, NPS, C-SAT, revenue, cost-equation balanced.

It used to be simple, one channel, limited competition and, if you wanted anything done, a human did it for you. The new market landscape comes with competitive pressure, multiple communications channels and an ever-increasing need for higher sales, lower cost, but higher customer experience and satisfaction. The challenge is not linear, it is exponential and analogous to the old ‘Moores law’, where computer power doubles every 18 months. This is a thousand times harder. We operate in a hyper-connected environment, with multiple channels that are managed by humans, automation or self-service. We have a hundred times more policies, governance and best practice to follow, and the speed of product or service evolution is getting shorter and shorter.

So, what did we do to solve this mega problem? We bought a load of clouds.

OK, this may be oversimplifying things. Let’s take a step back.

Not all companies or organisations are the same, but let’s consider a few of the variables:

Product: Expensive – Cheap
Sale process: Complex – Simple
Legislation: High – Low
Segment Leadership: First – Last

Lifetime value: High interest – Low interest
Ad infinitum.
And, of course, all these dynamics define:

1. How we sell
2. How we expand
3. How we serve
4. How we support

These decisions are not static, they are dynamic and are influenced by many other external factors.

The bottom line is that business and business systems are becoming a digital nervous system – a web of super-complex permutations of product or service order, CRM data, process, policy, knowledge and marketing data.

This is a monumental task and, in nearly all cases, the ‘body’ that owns the digital nervous system is just plain unfit for purpose. Even though it has its own team of personal trainers (data scientists, integration specialists and customer interaction gurus), the complexity of the task is daunting and only Olympic athletes need apply.

One of the problems modern businesses face is that their intelligence predominantly comes from transactional data: from the front end of the marketing click stream of email and social; through to the engagement into forms, apps, contact centre, IVR, IVA, chatbot or, God forbid, a human being; into back-office CRM, ERP, OSS systems of record. Keeping these systems, the knowledge and the process in sync is a full-time job.

The second problem (and as personally witnessed in a recent call to a water utility company that shall remain nameless) the digital assault course did nothing for me. I merely delayed the inevitable – the need to talk to a real human. But also, what frustrated the hell out of me was the realisation that the automated options were identical to those offered to me on the website, which, by the way, did not solve any of my issues in the first place.

The so-called intelligence is not intelligent.

When was the last time you encountered an IVR or IVA and thought “Oh thank goodness, I can finally get something done?” – in particular in a post-sale scenario.

There are so many broken processes in a modern business. I personally believe the split is equal. Half of them frustrate the customer, the other half are costing the supplier due to inefficiency (and may also have adverse customer impact).

Solving the digital nervous system problem and ensuring that the digital assault course is not overly arduous, is easy to follow, actually works and adds value, is the holy grail. No one has cracked it. Some pretend they have, but they haven’t. It is unicorn poo. We do need automation. We do need self-service. We do need apps. We most definitely need human beings. Ultimately, we need to listen to the customer at the moment that matters. Even if the conversation is between them and your bot or IVA. We need to understand, and we need to learn so that the root causes are identified and rectified, and so the customer is delivered a service that adds value and doesn’t delay, queue or replicate other more obvious channels of knowledge.

So, you need to ask yourself: “What shape is your digital nervous system in?”

…but it can help agents to connect with customers in a more effective and efficient way.

2020 has been tough. The Coronavirus pandemic has completely blown apart businesses’ expectations and plans for the year and perhaps the next few years ahead. Despite lockdown measures across the globe easing, and a call for workers in many European countries to return to the office, there are still huge challenges to be faced. During April to June, the UK economy shrank 20.4 per cent compared with the first three months of the year. The International Monetary Fund predicts that, for the year as a whole, GDP in the UK will shrink by 10.2 per cent. The IMF also estimates that the world economy will shrink by 4.9 per cent this year, making it the worst recession since the Great Depression in the 1930s.¹

Automation is one way that businesses can help to keep down costs. But, when it comes to keeping your customers happy, this has not always been the most successful option. Chatbots and self-service customer care options can often result in a greater number of dissatisfied customers. Research has shown that some 68 per cent of customers abandon chat or self-service to call a human instead. And a recent survey in the US found that 86 per cent of consumers prefer to interact with a human agent and some 71 per cent said they would be less likely to use a brand if it didn’t have human customer service representatives.²

One of the reasons for this is the automated channels are not learning or reacting. In many cases they offer predefined decision trees that are proven to frustrate customers.

Having human agents answering customer calls does not have to be time-consuming or onerous, and automation can help. Speech Analytics can benefit your customers, your staff and your business. Contexta360’s Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing work in conjunction with each other to evaluate what is being said by whom (the agent or the customer) and to automate the identification of issues, intent and actionable insights. What is more, C360 AI will automatically convert a full version of the conversation into text, then utilise NLP to create a summarised version that connects to and updates your system of record, removing millions of minutes of work (and associated costs) in some contact centres. And it learns from every interaction, creating an ever-growing, constantly improving, knowledge base for your automated systems. C360 delivers real change and dramatically shortens in-call and post-call interactions, while improving and expanding automated processes.

So, Contexta360 can help you to have a greater number of satisfied customers and it can free up your staff time for other areas of priority in the business. During this time of consolidation and recovery, surely every step you take, every gain you make, will help to secure the future of your business, whatever lies ahead.

1 https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2020/06/24/WEOUpdateJune2020
2 https://www.cgsinc.com/en/resources/2019-CGS-Customer-Service-Chatbots-Channels-Survey