The significant causes of dissatisfaction raised by unhappy consumers in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore were failure to address enquiries from the first interaction (62%), long wait/response times (54%), and not achieving the expected outcome from the interaction (52%). The more developed markets tended to be disappointed by their experience due to higher expectations.

It’s a whole new ball game now that online-only and bricks-and-clicks are becoming the standard for shopping. In a previous article, we touched on how retailers can up their game to serve changing realities and customer expectations. Tech Wire Asia recently talked to Patsy Wong, chief strategy officer at CINNOX – a 100% Asia-born innovative customer engagement and analytics platform.

Wong said that while more businesses are aware of shifting consumer sentiments, they don’t necessarily know how to address it. There also tends to be a narrow view of what goes into crafting an exceptional customer experience.

“Most people come to us with a particular pain point, not a comprehensive view [of CX]. Many of them will come in and say, ‘I want to talk to my customer on the robot app [via chatbots]; I want to talk to a customer on WeChat’,” Wong said. “The customer experience conversation is relatively new in the Asia Pacific market. Some businesses are more mature, but some are still pretty early.”

Many companies were not prepared for the pandemic’s impact on everyday life and customer behavior, and simply reacted; but will now have to map out their way forward.

“They’re not thinking long-term yet, but once they get past the initial stage of addressing some key pain points, our approach is to show them the workflow so they can see the entire customer journey end-to-end,” she said. Many companies are not aware, she added, of what tools are already available that can be easily implemented.

“Once they see the whole picture, they can appreciate the platform more. It’s not just a live chat, you can have multiple channels and integrate with other systems. You can also do analytics.”

The CINNOX platform allows all communications and CRM data to be seamlessly sync-ed and automatically updated, without affecting existing workflows. It can also integrate with customer relationship management platform Salesforce, as multinational healthcare company Roche has done.

There are three essential things to consider to boost the quality of CX, according to Wong. “First off, what are the expectations? A lot of times, if the company is either not aware of or not establishing the right customer expectations, then a positive resolution is going to be tough to achieve. The second is the intent. Why are people coming to you in the first place?” she said. “The third layer is preferences. People will have different preferences, depending on the type of communication they want, and what they are familiar or comfortable with.”

According to the Forrester report, five key consumer personas have emerged post-pandemic. The largest segment at 44% is the omnishoppers – working adults aged between 20 and 49 who feel safe with digital interactions, consider both human and digital touchpoints important, and want an omnichannel experience. Then come the multichannel enthusiasts (15%) who differ from the omnishoppers in that they prefer not to switch communication channels during interactions.

Those aged 50 and older made up the other two personas. The reserved digital immigrants (15%) feel less safe with digital interactions and prefer human touchpoints. Meanwhile, the affluent high-touch seekers (14%) also prefer human touchpoints, even though they are comfortable going digital. They want a personal touch from in-person interactions.

Adults below 30 years old are the last group, referred to as the low-touch digital natives (12%). They consider digital touchpoints more important than humans, and prefer to keep communications digital without switching channels.

With offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, the team at CINNOX sees their distinct advantage in serving APAC businesses directly, with a keen regional understanding. “For us, we are 100% Asia-focused, whereas global platforms may dedicate 20% of their attention to the region. Unlike the larger players, we can partner closely with our customers to get a lot of the features that we have, like the one we especially created for financial services clients,” Wong explained.

CINNOX is cloud-based, but with a module to enable banks, insurance companies and others in highly-regulated industries to securely store data on-premises, as required for data compliance. The platform is also multilingual, with more local languages added regularly to better serve the diverse communities in the region.

Another standout feature of the platform is its unique and seamless integration of telephony and digital channels. As noted in the Forrester report, around 50% of APAC consumers still want to call companies directly – which means that phone lines are still a critical customer service tool.

While CINNOX started as a telecoms company, its integration of traditional telephony with digital channels offers both the old and new communication channels in a single convenient interface, and at a competitive cost. “Technically speaking, this is not an easy thing to accomplish,” Wong said. “Many people in the industry were pretty amazed that we could pull it off.”

The data analytics available from the platform also provides insights into customers and their personas. Interaction data from all channels can be aggregated to develop a 360-degree view of each customer, enabling the business to build a more contextual and flexible CX strategy – which is imperative in an age of hyper-personalization.

To find out how CINNOX works and what it can do for your business, request a demo via the CINNOX website.

The post Nurture sustainable competitive advantage through CX appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

A Forrester report commissioned by CINNOX, which surveyed 1,200 customers across Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, found that only 16% of customers experienced interactions that exceeded their expectations. Customer experience sentiments were lowest in Hong Kong and Singapore, with only 7% and 9% experiencing interactions that exceeded their expectations, respectively.

The study found three top attributes that customers expect for a great experience when interacting with a brand: First-time resolution (50%), a fast response time (36%), and knowledgeable representatives (35%). This is the first study to identify customer behavioral changes and trends in the post-pandemic Asia Pacific. However, with more than four in five customers saying their experience did not meet their expectations, brands in the region still have a lot of improvement to do.

At a recent virtual media briefing, Forrester consultant Teo Yi Qin said: “62% of the customers surveyed said their inquiries or issues were not resolve within the first interaction.”

Teo added that 54% felt that the waiting or turnaround time was too long, and 27% shared that the sales or customer service representatives they interacted with were not knowledgeable enough in helping them address the issues at hand.

“Simply saying, the brands are just not meeting customers’ needs, regardless of whether there have been customer experience (CX) initiatives implemented or not.”

Patsy Wong, chief strategy officer at CINNOX, believes a significant experience gap is at the root of the brands’ lackluster performance. She said, “This gap is caused by a lack of understanding of customer expectations, needs, and preferences. It doesn’t matter what you put in; if you don’t have a good understanding of these things, your CX strategy is not going to give you the benefit.”

The report also revealed five unique customer personas that emerged post-pandemic, requiring different approaches when planning a CX strategy. There are the omni-shoppers, the multi-channel enthusiasts, the reserved digital immigrants, the affluent high-touch seekers, and the low-touch digital natives.

Teo outlined three actionable steps to craft superior customer experiences:

1. First, map out customer experience initiatives around consumer personas (see above) to provide more tailor-made and contextual customer experiences. In today’s world, a one-size-fits-all approach does not work. Hence, organisations should identify ways to deliver a more personalised experience tailored to each persona type.
2. Aim to support CX initiatives with better CX data collection and measurement mechanisms. In addition, organisations should aggregate and collect data across the customer journey to help provide a more holistic and comprehensive understanding of customers.
3. Organisations ought to ensure that data collection is done from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Organisations are often too focused on collecting quantitative metrics that sacrifices the emotional aspects of the customer experience. The latter can be better understood and derived from the collection of qualitative feedback.

“The study shows organisations lack the methodologies and insights to truly curate delightful customer experiences for different, newly emerged personas, based on their preferences and intents,” Wong said. “At CINNOX, we can solve this and improve both customer and employee experiences alike with one customer engagement and analytics platform.”

CINNOX is a total experience SaaS platform dedicated and committed to driving innovation within CX, which is reflected in its name (C-INNO-X). The 100% Asia-born company has its sights on serving the Asia Pacific region. Currently, it has over 150 employees and operates from Hong Kong and Singapore, with an R&D center in Taipei. “We are 100% self-funded and independent. What’s good about that is, it affords us the freedom and the flexibility to focus on what our customers and our partners need,” Wong said.

The CINNOX platform is built on three key pillars of customer service: CONNECT, ORCHESTRATE, and EVALUATE. It connects by unifying all telephony and digital channels with full customer context and seamless transition between each of these, to focus responses. For example, a customer can begin by chatting with an agent on WhatsApp, then switch to talking with the agent on the phone or even a video conference to resolve a more complex enquiry.

It orchestrates by using automated workflows and flexible intelligent routing to match customers with expertise. Gary Ma, director of product management at CINNOX, explained, “After the connection is established, CINNOX starts to orchestrate the relationship between the business and the customer. We do that by humanising the connections. We built the process and tools to unify the identification of the customer, the journey, and the conversation.

“Within a single interface, the organisation should be able to access any single data of the customer and serve any of them as a VIP. We also provide rich communication capabilities right inside the dashboard, so the agent can handle [issues] no matter what the situation is, such as customer experiences, technical troubleshooting, and even sales presentation.”

Finally, CINNOX evaluates by providing interaction analysis and sentiment data to improve experiences, track improvements, and monitor staff performance. Extensive Customer 360 helps brands to have an insight on what went right and wrong during customer interactions to reduce wait times further and resolve enquiries at first touchpoint with knowledgeable call center agents.

More details and insights on the post-pandemic Asia Pacific customer experience and expectations are found in the Forrester Opportunity Snapshot report “Infuse Digital Experiences with the Right Dose of Human Touch”

Click here for more information on a total experience platform that elevates customer and staff experiences with innovative omnichannel engagement and actionable insights.

The post Asia Pacific consumers expect a ‘human touch’ in customer experience appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

However, despite the advancements in technology to perfect conversational AI, businesses in Southeast Asia are still struggling with implementing the software in their business. The biggest problem for conversational AI in APAC is the language itself.

Conversational AI refers to the use of artificial intelligence on chatbots or voice assistants. Using large volumes of data, machine learning, and natural language processing, the AI helps imitate human interaction by recognizing speech or text inputs and replying to them based on a set of predetermined replies.

The tech is expected to help businesses speed up their customer service processes and also reduce the reliance on human customer service agents, especially for simple and mundane requests. Some conversational AI can be embedded into intelligent workflows, helping businesses scale operations and improve their employee productivity.

A robot from the Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems (AIIS) laboratory of Italy’s National Interuniversity Consortium for Computer Science (CINI) is displayed at the 7th edition of the Maker Faire 2019 (Photo by Andreas SOLARO / AFP)

Integrating AI in business 

Some of the industries that have implemented conversational AI in their workloads include banking and financial services, government agencies, retail, and eCommerce, as well as healthcare. For example, eCommerce websites in Southeast Asia are already using bots to reply to customer queries.

In banking, AI is being used to push out solutions designed for certain demographics, like Singapore’s UOB Banks’s TMRW, an AI-powered mobile-only bank offering a full suite of solutions for the millennial market.

Developing conversational AI can be challenging. Tech leaders like IBM’s Watson Assistant and NVIDIA’s Jarvis are some of the biggest AI providers around the world. While these services are also used by businesses in APAC, the challenge is getting the natural language processing to understand the local dialect of certain regions and locales.

For example, a conversational AI bot can be trained to understand the English of a native American speaker. However, applied in the Asian market, the AI solution may not be able to comprehend the localized dialect or slang of the same language.

An APAC survey by Forrester showed that 32% of chatbots were most effective in resolving customer queries. However, the survey also showed that 80% of chatbots produced more negative than positive experiences, while 75% of virtual assistants and 85% of speech-enabled virtual assistants also led to poor customer experience.

Conversational AI in APAC

To solve this, regional conversational AI providers are now developing conversational AI models that can support and understand local languages, slangs, and pronunciations.

Yellow.ai provides AI-powered voice virtual assistants across markets in Southeast Asia. The human-like voice AI bots can understand sentiments, intent, and past behavior. It can modify pitch, tone, excitement, and more, to suit customer sentiment and intent. The bots can natively converse naturally in more than 100 languages across text and voice, such as Bahasa Malay, Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog, Mandarin, English, Tamil, and more.

Another provider, Uniphore, has developed next-generation capabilities in advanced AI, machine learning, automation, and voice and video technologies to drive the transformation of contact centers and enterprises in APAC.

Ai-Chat is a Singaporean AI-powered conversational platform. The service provides online visitors automated instant responses to commonly asked questions, educating them about products and services, and also enhances the chat experience.

Chatbot Malaysia is a simple chatbot integration software-as-a-service (SaaS) that helps small and medium enterprises scale and grow their business through automation and digital marketing. Similar to conversational AI, Chatbot Malaysia leverages omnichannel messaging automation platform and WhatsApp Chatbot Builder to keep businesses in touch with their customers.

While the use cases of conversational AI continue to grow and improve the interaction with customers, businesses need to understand the technology is not meant to replace their workers. Instead, customer service agents should collaborate and leverage the technology to better improve their productivity.

As chatbots deal with mundane queries and help customers with simpler tasks, employees are still needed to deal with more sophisticated queries. Eventually, the tech may catch up but for now, it needs to be able to respond to customers and ease the workflows of employees.

The post Can conversational AI make your customers happier? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

In times of need, if customers can’t open a chatbot or pick up a phone to quickly get resolution to their issues, they’ll start shopping around – customer experience is now part of the package.

Meeting these real-time demands, then, is a deal-breaker, but there are also rewards. According to McKinsey, 70 percent of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated, and if you do it right, they will stick around. It also costs 6-7 times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one, so investing here just makes good business sense. 

The customer service ‘war room’

All this makes the customer support function a vital chunk of the business, one that’s generally housed in a designated contact center – a central hub where often vast volumes of omnichannel customer communications are managed. 

It is a full-scale operation focused on collective efficiency – a ‘war room’ with banks of desks, phones and screens, where supervisors roam the aisles and “control the floor”. Large screens adorn the walls, showing real-time data such as customers’ average hold or handle time. These contact centers may still use old-premise systems and physical phones to take calls.

Contact centers are round-the-clock, performance-based operations; support staff may circulate on shift patterns, using the same desk and equipment as one another throughout the course of the day. Centers may also be based offshore, in different time zones, to accommodate 24-7 availability. 

When social distancing measures took hold across the world, then, the airtight, machine-like concept of the ‘traditional’ contact center was swiftly thrown to the wind. Physical call centers – where support staff’s work is essentially tethered to their desks – had to shutdown. To make matters yet more complex, businesses across industries received never-before-seen spikes in support requests, as panicked customers scrambled to cancel travel plans, file for unemployment or renegotiate payments – among a thousands of other complexities the current circumstances brought with them. 

In an update to customers, the CEO of UK telecom firm TalkTalk, Tristia Harrison, said the sudden and unexpected 30 percent surge in network usage caused by remote working and subsequent connectivity issues meant “240 head office colleagues” had to be retrained as customer service agents, with staff having to be reduced at designated contact centers because of social distancing requirements. 

And while some call centers were able to shift to work from home themselves, most could not due to technology limitations, regulations, or the fact that agents lack a private space to take phone calls from home. Those businesses with offshore call centers were also mired by the complexity of local lockdown laws and guidelines. 

Under more strain than ever

The upshot of all this is that many companies, in a time where their customers need support the most, are not able to meet demand, putting their business in further jeopardy at a time of significant market uncertainty. 

“I talked with travel related companies that will only deal with travel related calls within 72 hours from the trip, and food delivery companies that shut down part of their business since they could no longer serve it,” said Gadia Shamia, the co-founder and CEO of Replicant a conversational AI platform for customer service.

With the pandemic leading us to question the normal way of doing things across broad plains of business, the current situation is highlighting new approaches to customer service, and how technologies like AI can assist in ensuring that – for both today and future disruptions – the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service operations can continue unaffected. 

To underscore that statement, just weeks ago tech giant Google tweaked its own Contact Center AI – built for customers fielding thousands of customer enquiries each day – to specifically answer questions around the COVID-19 pandemic, and associated disruptions to users’ operations.

As government agencies, healthcare services and other sectors such as travel, financial services and retail, faced a deluge of requests for clarity over the impact of the outbreak, the AI-powered Rapid Response Virtual Agent allows organizations to deploy chatbots to answer questions across voice, social and chat around the clock.  

The release was aimed at those needing to adapt to the situation quickly; Google said the tool could be set up within a couple of weeks, or more quickly if using curated templates of FAQs and up-to-date guidance from health authorities. At a basic level, the Contact Center AI can provide answers to sector-specific questions like ‘should I wear a facemask’ for healthcare & life sciences groups, or ‘have your refund policies changed?’ in the travel industry. 

But more advanced integrations and conversational flows added over time, can allow ‘virtual agents’ to handle advanced interactions related to the business – customers can ask their bank about changing their individual credit limit, for example, or checking where their order is with a retailer. 

If users add complex conversational flows and backend integrations over time, the virtual agent can handle advanced interactions related to the specific company – those could be related to changing an individual’s credit limit with a bank, for example, or checking where an order is with a retailer.

On Friday (May 1), AI call center software firm ASAPP announced US$185 million amid a boom for such solutions owed to the combination of the pandemic pushing up call center volume at a time when companies must also streamline the function. 

The software doesn’t replace humans. It analyzes the most efficient member of the team, and provides other agents recommendations for responses in real-time based on those insights. Investors in the firm – which claims to employ 55 AI and machine learning engineers with PhDs – included the former CEO of CISCO, John Chambers, and the deal brought ASAPP’s value to $800 million, according to a Reuters’ source. 

Shamia told TechHQ that AI in the contact center is well-suited to handling many customer service requests due to their transactional nature. They can be automated without compromising on quality. “When a customer calls to cancel a flight, there is a very clear conversion funnel – the customer has a ticket and they want to come out of this call with a refund,” he explained. 

“The steps the agent takes are predefined and there is no room for judgment. This is a great call for conversational AI as it can answer the call with no wait time, run a shorter and more effective call than a human agent, and do it 10,000 times a day without getting fatigued.” 

But that’s not to say humans should be removed from contact centers. Support staff remain vital to handling certain requests which require more skillful navigation, but automation can alleviate them to provide a better-quality interaction. 

“By letting AI take on flight cancellations, agents can focus on more complex and emotional calls,” Shamia said. “The result of this partnership is lower wait time, less exhausted agents who can really focus on the caller, lower total cost and higher customer satisfaction. 

“It also allows companies to run 24/7, without forcing employees to work undesirable graveyard shifts.”

Contact center technology may gather pace during this period, as organizations realize how these platforms can transform preconceived ideas of the contact center, shifting from one where rows of headset-adorned support agents are benchmarked on call volumes and average call times, to a slightly ‘airier’ one where the focus is on the quality of customer interaction more than anything else. That said, the COVID-19 outbreak may only accelerate a trend that’s been in motion for years. 

IS THE FUTURE OF CUSTOMER SERVICE FULLY AUTOMATED?

Tech Wire Asia | 19 January, 2018

“Companies have been automating parts of customer service for years using applications and web pages,” said Shamia. “Now they have another channel they can use, without changing their customer’s habits […]”

“This will create long term elasticity both in spending and availability, as AI voice agents can answer one call or 10,000 without planning or complex staffing.”

The post How contact center AI is taking the customer service strain appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant can set a timer, play a song, or check the weather with ease, but for a real conversation, you may as well try talking to a wall.

Of course, speaking as naturally as a person requires common sense, general knowledge, and the ability to read emotions and character. Humans are social creatures. We thrive on empathy, although we would like to think that we are logical creatures. 

In truth, our emotions govern a large part of our intelligence. But have we reached a point where conversation with a digital assistant is indistinguishable from one with a person?

Maya Angelou once said — “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

So, since emotions are our most human quality, what if we could teach artificial intelligence (AI) to understand our feelings?

In recent years, AI and machine learning algorithms have held the world spellbound with the rapid pace of development and integration in various industries and verticals. 

The goal of AI research has shifted over the years; to compute what humans could not, to beat us in specific tasks, and most recently to create an algorithm that can show how it’s working. 

To put how rapidly AI is growing in context, a Pew Research Center study reports that by 2025, AI and robotics will permeate most segments of daily life, while another an Oxford University Study projects that within the next 25 years, developed nations will experience job loss rates of up to 47%. AI is displacing the roles of both white and blue-collar workers, from travel agents to bank tellers, gas station attendants to factory workers. This has tremendous implications for industries such as home maintenance, transport and logistics, healthcare, and most significantly, customer service.

However, for some time now, many have been working on the alchemic pursuit of making algorithms more human, mainly to improve the customer experience.

What is empathy? How it can be inculcated in your chatbot environment?

By definition, empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It can be categorized into cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and compassionate (affective) empathy.

All of which basically means understanding the emotions and taking relevant actions to assist them. In short, while chatbots can elicit social and emotional responses on the part of the human interlocutor, an empathic chatbot can serve as a buffer against the adverse effects of social ostracism.

Truth be told, chatbots have been around for years, but they’ve only surged to popularity recently with various industries making use of these virtual assistants to improve their customer service and interactivity. 

This intelligence can only be implemented by training machines through the development and implementation of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models and Sentiment Analytics.

Both can determine users’ intent, gauge their sentiments, and also understand humor.

To put it broadly, NLP is a branch of AI that allows computer programs to comprehend the natural speech of a human. NLP seamlessly bridges the communication gap between complex human language and coded machines.

WANT REAL VALUE FROM CHATBOTS? USE THE ’80/20 RULE’

Mark Jones | 5 June, 2020

In the context of bots, NLP can be used to know the subtext of what the user is actually trying to tell or ask. This way, brands can engage with their customers in a personal, more empathetic manner, which can ultimately make them stand unique among their competitors.

The chatbot market is expected to grow from US$703.3 million in 2016 to a whopping US$3,172.0 million by 2021, according to research by MarketsandMarkets. It’s essential, then, to understand and analyze business requirements and implement emotionally intelligent chatbots that can create a significant impact on customer engagement right now.

The post Emotional AI — can chatbots convey empathy? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Instant messaging has changed the way we communicate between one another – it’s quick and easy, it’s now natural for us, and it can be done from any device, from wherever we might be.

Businesses have been quick to realize the benefits of this simplicity within the overburdened arms of their customer service divisions: why continue to invest in call center staff when some of the most common queries can be quickly tackled over IM?

But couple this channel with automation, and businesses have a winning customer service formula: the now ubiquitous chatbot.

Chatbots now a customer service staple

Chatbot technology has become a customer service staple. Customers want to reach businesses on channels that they are already on, and chatbots help bridge that gap on websites, messaging apps and social media.

According to estimates by Invesp, two-thirds of customers worldwide used a chatbot for customer support in the past year. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the technology has seen further uptake; as customers actively avoid crowded places like shopping malls, supermarkets and even workplaces, many businesses have turned to digital self-service solutions to help support agents work remotely.

Easily accessible and quick to deploy, organizations both large and small have embraced these tools for customer service, as well as for generating leads and supplementing sales process.

As a result, businesses enjoy cost savings, improved customer satisfaction, and increased conversions. These tools have become so popular, that 85% of all customer interactions could be handled without a human agent this year.

Mimicking human conversation

Aside from the convenience, one of the key draws of chatbots is that the conversation flow and style mimics those they’d have in ‘real life’.

In many cases, the customer won’t even realize they’re not speaking to a human agent, especially when they’re paired with a live chat function, making them a powerful 24/7 extension of the customer support team.

Good chatbots will be fully personalized to the company using them and, being plugged into the business’s knowledge base, will use the necessary context in their conversations, such as past enquiries, purchases and other customer records.

“Advancement in AI and machine learning capabilities have made it easy for businesses to integrate chatbots for efficient, real-time customer engagement,” Abhishek Deshmukh, VP of Engineering & MD Singapore at Zendesk, told Tech Wire Asia.

“This means they can learn from any past mistakes and provide more accurate, in-context recommendations in the future, while factoring in colloquialisms.”

The 80/20 rule of chatbots

This technology has undoubtably changed customer service for the better, adding efficiency and new value for both the business and its customers, and the tools will continue to advance in their capability rapidly. But for all these benefits, we shouldn’t expect them to replace human agents – yet.

“[Chatbots] can handle the dull, the dirty, and the data – such as addressing common inquiries, tracking packages or directing visitors to FAQs – but predictions should not be confused with decisions,” explained Deshmukh.

For chatbots to be really effective, they need to be ‘intelligent’ enough to know their limitations and know when to escalate them to a human agent with the necessary context.

Deshmukh recommends applying the “80/20 rule” which, for many businesses, has shown to be a good gauge to ensure a “healthy balance” between chatbot and human support.

This is because roughly 80% of customer tickets are repetitive, high frequency questions, while the remaining 20% typically require human intervention. By taking on this menial workload, those enquiries that must be elevated can receive a more attentive response from agents, whose jobs have been made a lot more interesting.

“For example, chatbots empower customers to self-serve, reducing wait time for simple inquiries like tax policies,” said Deshmukh. “This then frees support agents from having to explain the same question 20 times a day, allowing them to focus on higher level work.”

Deshmukh continued: “Humans will always have a part to play in customer support. Moving forward, I expect to see chatbots becoming better at intelligently handling complex customer interactions over to support agents.

“While chatbots will improve in function with more breakthroughs in AI and machine learning, many situations in customer service still call for empathy and the human touch.

“In fact, our research shows that while 35% of people prefer an instant response from a chatbot to a delayed reply from a person, 60% want to be able to speak to a human at any given point during an engagement with AI.”

AVIATION GIANT AIRBUS TURNS TO CHATBOTS TO ENGAGE TOP TALENT

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The future of chatbots

So what’s next for chatbots? Deshmukh hazards that businesses will start to realize that the rise of conversational business in “less about the channel and more about the conversation.”

Chatbots will be one component of a broader omnichannel customer experience strategy, where customer data can be collected in order to create more personalized conversations over time. This will be a boon for the customer service consumers receive, but it also become a necessary evolution and customers’ expectations continue to rise.

“Customers don’t care which department is behind the chat window – in fact, [most customers] expect companies to collaborate internally so they don’t have to repeat themselves regardless of the channel they use,” said Deshmukh.

The post Want real value from chatbots? Use the ’80/20 rule’ appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Available to download on Android, the app is aimed at small businesses who want a seamless way to connect to their digitally-savvy customers. And with 1.3 billion users, the app is the perfect platform for consumers to chat with businesses who matter to them.

IS THE FUTURE OF CUSTOMER SERVICE FULLY AUTOMATED?

Tech Wire Asia | 19 January, 2018

Small businesses can set up a WhatsApp Business profile by filling out information such as its business description, company email, address and website.

Users will know they’re talking with a business account as these will be listed as “Business accounts”, which will then become “Confirmed Accounts” once WhatsApp verifies it.

After being established on the network, businesses are free to use a variety of tools provided on the app, including smart messaging tools.

Using these tools, businesses are able to send quick replies to consumers to commonly asked questions, greeting messages that welcome and introduce customers to your business, as well as the ability to alert your customers with ‘away messages’ if you’re busy.

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Users will also have access to messaging statistics, including simple metrics such as the number of messages read. This will come in handy for businesses who want to see what messaging content seems to engage customers most successfully.

Users of the app are also able to send and receive messages from the desktop via WhatsApp Web.

Though businesses must download the new app to communicate with customers, the everyday WhatsApp user can continue using the general version.

But will this result in businesses spamming users with endless promotions?

Luckily for them, the everyday user can control this by reporting any experience of spam and will be able to block numbers and businesses.

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Furthermore, businesses will only be able to connect with consumers who have provided their phone number and agreed to receive messages from the business.

Though WhatsApp Business seems to be initially aimed at smaller businesses, according to Tech Crunch, the app will in the future be joined by larger businesses – such as e-commerce sites and banks – with a global customer base.

This business move from the company is not surprising considering the masses of people who use the platform today. According to research by Morning Consult, over 80 percent of small businesses in India and Brazil reported the usefulness of WhatsApp in communicating with customers and growing their businesses.

Though not mentioned in the company’s announcement of the rollout, the digital communication giant has previously said it would charge for these enterprise tools. It is assumed these tools will be added to the current WhatsApp for Business product.

Though the company has prioritized Android after finding this is where businesses use WhatsApp more prominently, it plans to support other platforms such as iOS in the future.

The post WhatsApp Business finally launches in select markets – and it’s free for now appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

And by 2020, experts believe more than 85 percent of all customer interactions the world over will be fully automated, a recent report on IBM’s blog says.

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According to pioneering AI firm Zumata CEO Josh Ziegler, the power of artificial intelligence in customer service is mass personalization and contextual intelligence at scale.

A study by Kayako found that 73 percent of customer service professionals feel that managing time and workload is the greatest challenge. Typically, these professionals face a proliferation of queries to solve and heated customers to pacify.

But AI has the potential to solve this issue, perhaps even removing the need for a customer service officer altogether. Picking up your phone to call a customer service hotline has become something of a chore. Often it involves having to endure harrowing hold music and having to answer an array of automated questions before finally being put through to someone who may or may not provide a helpful answer.

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With the introduction of AI-powered chatbots, businesses of all kinds can not only improve their customer experience but also cut costs within their support-providing departments.

Customer service professionals spend the majority of their time answering frequently asked questions. A separate report on IBM says businesses spend around US$1.3 trillion on 265 billion customer service calls each year.

Chatbots can help businesses save on customer service costs by answering up to 80 percent of routine questions, freeing up agents to focus on more pressing and perhaps complex issues instead.

Zumata is an example of a company leveraging the potential of AI in customer service, and was named one of the top 10 disruptive travel companies to watch in 2017.

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The company partnered with NTUC Income to develop Singapore’s first unguided conversational travel insurance chatbot – under the alias “Jiffy Jane”. Functioning on Facebook Messenger, the “personal travel insurance concierge” provides 24/7 support to customers, offering advice regarding what insurance would best suit the customer given their situation, among other things.

In another example, Autodesk, a global leader in 3D computer-aided design, reportedly found that their customer service chatbot “AVA” led to:

• A 99 percent improvement in response times, cutting resolution from 38 hours to just 5.4 minutes.
• A drop in per-query cost from US$15 – US$200 of the costs of human agents to US$1 (virtual agents).
• They found that their virtual agent was able to answer and resolve an average of 30,000 customer support queries per month.

It is not hard to see that the potential of chatbots in creating a seamless, personalized, intelligent and immediate customer journey is sure to benefit businesses across all industries.

“AI is changing the business landscape and demonstrating effectiveness even in industries like insurance that have been traditionally based on human interaction. The benefits of bots are impossible to ignore,” says Ziegler.

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With many today communicating through digital mobile platforms such as Whatsapp and Facebook messenger, the shift in customer service advice from humans to chatbots only seems natural.

“With consumers being more ‘connected’ every day, companies need to include bots as part of their communications strategy,” he adds.

However, though chatbots are delivering a more personalized and immediate experience for consumers, the need for human qualities such as true empathy and experiential experience does not go unnoticed.

“Certainly humans and machines can co-exist, just as they have since the very first machine was created. Machines are used to augment and supplement our lives.”

“AI enables our workforce to do better through auto-piloting (handling high volume repetitive tasks so focus can be put onto more challenging ones) and co-piloting (recommending the best choices available to us),” says Ziegler.

The post Is the future of customer service fully automated? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

A study by The McKinsey Global Institute revealed 50 percent of today’s work activities could be automated by 2055. This proliferation in automation is not welcomed by everyone. In fact, according to Pew research, 70 percent of Americans express wariness or concern about a world where machines perform many of the tasks done by humans, reports The Guardian.

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But according to Hootsuite’s chief marketing officer Penny Wilson, automation and artificial intelligence will actually allow us to become more human. As reported by CampaignAsia, Wilson believes marketers must leverage the opportunities that can arise from AI – such as taking over time-consuming tasks – instead of fearing it.

“We’re going to get overwhelmed in data, and that’s where AI will play a big role,” she told Campaign Asia-Pacific in Singapore. “It will allow you to become more human. Everybody says chatbots and AI are the same thing, and therefore everything will become talking to a robot.

“But the key is to use AI so you get your customer to whatever they’re looking for faster, and when they can’t get there, they get to a person, who can spend more quality time with them. So AI will only heighten the value of social.”

AI can allow humans to become better at ‘being human’. Source: Shutterstock.com

Instead of taking our jobs, AI can allow humans to become better at ‘being human’. For instance, take the sales industry. In the daily life of a salesperson, a lot of their time is spent carrying out tasks which could be automated, such as finding leads, sending follow-up emails and building reports.

The automation of these tasks can free up the salesperson, allowing them to focus on more ‘human’ aspects such as building meaningful relationships with clients.

According to Wilson, AI can also help marketers with social listening; one of the most important aspects of social media strategy, she says.

Social listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations to best understand what customers are saying about a brand and industry online. From this, marketers can analyze this information in order to gain actionable insights.

According to a blogpost by Hootsuite, if you don’t care about social listening then you really don’t care about your customers. Social listening can provide you with a mountain of actionable insights from real people who are actively talking about you or your industry. It can allow you to partake in customer engagement and research, identify wins or pain points in real time and identify potential influencers and advocates.

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“I often say, having been an over three-decade marketer, marketing has gone from send mode – doing a big campaign and putting it out there – to receive mode, where listening is a really important way to establish that relationship with the individual consumer,” she said. “Listening puts your customer at the centre, and helps you create something relevant.”

So, while automation and AI appear to be disrupting many industries, perhaps the most important aspect of this transformation is the opportunity to increase the time humans can spend on providing emotional, humanistic qualities to customers.

The post How automation can lead to better consumer relationships appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Although it can be hard sometimes to separate hype from value on social media, providing consistent customer support and having a comprehensive media strategy are absolute musts for businesses.

Up until recently, a customer’s social media activity was treated as personal mediums of communication; it hasn’t been trackable, measurable, plannable or improvable.

But with social CRM, all that has changed.

Why does social CRM matter?

Social CRM doesn’t ask you to unlearn everything you know about customer experience, you simply need to integrate it into your already established system.

This incorporation is never too soon, as the experts over at WebsiteBuilder.org.uk reveal in recent research on the rise of “social media customer care”. According to their study, 54 percent of millennials (22-34) and 52 percent of baby boomers (52-74) say they have previously abandoned a brand because of poor customer service.

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There seems to be little point in avoiding using social CRM, as an estimated 2.4 billion people use social media, with a projected growth of 3.2 billion by 2021. The APAC region has the world’s highest social media penetration rate. Platforms such as QQ, WeChat and Qzone top the most used charts, with over 600 million active users.

Worldwide, Facebook still dominates the social media landscape, and Facebook Messenger has collected 1.2 billion downloads since the stand-alone app launched in 2014.

One third of all customer complaints online are ignored Source: WebsiteBuilder.org.uk

So why get involved?

Consumers are heavily utilizing social media as platforms to complain, compliment and suggest improvements to brands; WebsiteBuilder.org.uk’s data says 90 percent of social media users have used social media to communicate with a brand.

Likewise, 63 percent of users expect companies to offer customer service (CS) on social media platforms.

Meanwhile, some 34.5 percent of users say they prefer social media for customer care over any other channels, and one in four say they have made complaints to companies via social media.

One in 4 social media users in the UK used twitter to complain in 2015 Source: Websitebuilder.org

Social media is a fast, convenient and most importantly, public platform, that works in real time. About 81 percent of companies polled in the study have used social media within customer experience management. This eliminates the wasted time of passing emails to correct departments and receiving unnerving computer generated responses.

But don’t assume it’s a one-way street, social media CRM also works to benefit the enterprise.

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Brand benefits

By employing a social CRM system or strategy, brands can quickly respond to complaints, which in turn increases customer advocacy by as much as 25 percent. About 65 percent of users say they would stay loyal to a brand if the company makes the effort to reach out to them on social media.

Social CRM will help businesses gain new customers, as 71 percent of consumers who received positive social customer care experience are likely to recommend the brand to others.

People are 30 percent more likely to recommend a brand when they get a response Source: websitebuilder.org

How different platforms can be used

Twitter and Facebook are 48 percent more accurate at delivering responses than email, and 44 percent faster as well. These two platforms are the most popular among users, with an estimated 79 percent of adult netizens on Facebook, while 80 percent of customer service requests come in from Twitter.

Facebook is the most used social media platform for customer care. Source: WebsiteBuilder.org.uk

For brands to reap the most benefit from these platforms, they must avoid customer churn and ensure they address all queries and complaints, or at least as many as they possibly can.

Unfortunately, consumer use of artificial technology has not yet been implemented in Twitter and Facebook, although both use sophisticated algorithms. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the personalized responses coming from actual humans on brand websites are what makes all the difference to customer satisfaction.

According to WebsiteBuilder.org.uk, the current overall response rate on Twitter is 40.6 percent and on Facebook slightly higher at 59.4 percent. Of course, the platforms aren’t the ones doing the leg work, as this has to come from the brand.

80 percent of customer service requests come from Twitter. Source: WebsiteBuilder.org.uk

Risks and challenges

Good social media customer care can improve customer satisfaction rate by 26.6 percent. Yet, ensuring you know what good social media customer care is, is the first hurdle.

Try to respond to as quickly as possible. About 11 percent of consumers will expect a response straight away, but the average time stands at five hours. Poor response time and unanswered questions can lead to an increase of customer churn and decrease in revenue.

24 precent of customers said the most important aspect is first contant resolution Source: websitebuilder.org

However, integrating a strong and dedicated social media CRM system could see an 81 percent increase in annual revenue from customer referrals. It will also holt customer churn, as companies with the best social customer care experience could see 92 percent customer retention.

By using social CRM, you can track social interaction with customer and deliver faster, more complete resolutions, and that makes for happy customers who stick around and grow your revenue.

The post The rise of social CRM and why your business needs it appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.