On April 25, 2019, I attended the inaugural Interactions Analyst Summit. The event contained solid insights regarding company history, current and upcoming products, an insightful solution demo, and market messaging updates. Below is a summary of key takeaways from this event:
Discussions at the event emphasized the company’s product and market strategy, which is focused on helping brands minimize customer effort through Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs), a platform that uses conversational AI technologies such as automated speech recognition (ASR), natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning. Interactions blends AI technologies such as these with human understanding to helps its clients automate phone calls and messaging conversations. The platform also maintains the context of the conversation across channels, so that the end customer doesn’t repeat themselves when they traverse through channels.
IVAs differ from chatbot technology. Chatbots are tools with tailored algorithms designed to execute very specific activities. For example, a chatbot can respond to a customer inquiry about the check-out time at a certain hotel or check a recent credit card balance. These questions can easily be categorized, and an algorithm applied to determine the context of the customer issue. This algorithm can then analyze the customer voice or text input and look for relevant data across enterprise systems, enabling it to appropriately respond to the customer. While this approach is very useful for firms to enrich their self-service activities, it is best applied to simple tasks.
But there are scenarios where use of chatbot technology is not ideal, such as if the customer is asking a complex question, or even if they just have a heavy accent. These and similar conditions can cause a voice-based chatbot to misunderstand queries. In these cases, customers need to contact the company through another channel – often the phone – and interact with a live agent.
Using conversational AI technology (including machine learning) to uncover potential ways customers state their questions enables IVAs to more accurately determine the context needed to address customer issues. The AI-enabled speech and text analytics capabilities of an IVA platform can help organizations incorporate greater intelligence when detecting customer intent, reducing the need for customers to contact live agents by increasing the ability to address issues through an IVA.
While using AI capabilities helps to improve the likelihood that technology can determine context within a customer conversation, there are times when the software may struggle to determine the context. This can be due to poor audio quality, speech impediments, utterance, or any number of other factors. In such instances, we learned that Interactions routes a mini snippet of the call, in real-time, to an intent analyst to determine the context of the customer issue masked by these factors.
During the event, we learned that when the IVA solution identifies that it will not be able to determine the context of the customer issue with a high confidence score, data on that part of the interaction is routed to an intent analyst who will listen to the audio and determine the context. The intent analysts help the IVA determine the intent and context at real time and train the software for similar future interactions by completing the machine learning loop. If an issue is not predefined on the analyst screen, the analyst can also mark the context as ‘unknown,’ enabling the company to update its library of defined customer issues.
Throughout the summit, the company executives emphasized that their goal is to minimize customer effort. They also noted that companies can use this technology to augment their agents by utilizing the IVAs to address simple inquires while routing callers with more complex issues to live agents. This is important, as some contact center leaders are confused about how AI can help their business activities. Existing technologies help contact centers improve abilities to efficiently manage activities, but technologies such as IVAs cannot fully replace live agents. It’s important for CX leaders to keep customer effort in mind when routing customer calls — a customer-centric approach helps contact centers get the most from technology investments while driving greater agent productivity and customer satisfaction.
It’s important to note that for IVAs to efficiently handle customer needs, they must also seamlessly integrate with all of an organization’s relevant enterprise systems. If an IVA isn’t integrated with a billing system, it can’t answer customer queries on billing balances or payment due dates; If an IVA isn’t integrated with an order management platform, retailers using this technology can’t respond to consumer requests for order delivery status. Interactions recognizes the importance of such functionalities and has shared an overview of several integrations with systems such as CRM, billing platforms, and both case management and knowledge management programs.
Interactions executives also shared new voice biometrics and AI for Social platforms. The former enables contact centers to authenticate callers through the unique characteristics of a caller’s voice, which helps with fraud prevention. The latter is used to distill the vast volume of social media insights including likes, retweets, and comments to determine which customer-generated social media content requires response from the business. Once the system determines content requires a corporate response, it automatically creates a support ticket for customer service or an opportunity for a sales representative to interact with the customer.
Aberdeen’s research shows that contact centers plan to increase their adoption of AI capabilities by 84% by the end of 2019. The primary reason companies invest in AI capabilities is to drive increasingly intelligent customer conversations. If you struggle with transforming your CX activities to be more data-driven, we highly recommend considering how AI capabilities may help reach this goal.
Are you using IVA as part of your CX activities or do you plan to incorporate it within your CX technology toolbox? If so, please share your takeaways on how this technology has impacted your business.
