10. The 5 Minutes of Brilliance Presentations

These bite-sized presentations were so beloved, many attendees asked for more at future events (we’re working on it!).

Andy Yasutake of LinkedIn and Mark Killick of Grubhub did an excellent job of breaking down their respective topics—Andy spoke about how LinkedIn worked on customer service request surges, and Mark spoke about using business intelligence to improve operations. We’re still thinking about their talks.

9. The Case Studies

One thing we’ve heard again and again is that our community craves presentations on what real companies do to move the customer service needle. At CRS Charleston, there were many breakout sessions to choose from. The topics represented leaned to digital and AI concerns, but they were varied enough to make the sessions useful to everyone:

• -BOTs, Speech, and Humans – Seamlessly Balanced
• -CX Measurement for the Ever-Connected Customer
• -Are You Ready? This is the Year of Consumer Messaging & Bots
• -Scaling True to Yourself
• -The Future of Customer Service is Here. Are you Ready?
• -Expanding Customer Conversations Over Digital Channels
• -University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Health Plan Delivers A High Touch, High Tech Customer Experience

8. The “Networking” Event

There’s no better way to make new connections than at our social events. The evening at Prohibition combined a 1920s-themed party with networking. Friendships and business relationships were formed—or cemented—by the night’s end.

7. The CXMB 2017 Corporate Edition Results

Every CRS Charleston attendee received a copy of the full report in their welcome packet, and COPC Inc.’s Judi Brenstein, Balsam Brands’ Caroline Tuan, Sweetwater Sound’s Salena Scardina, and Grubhub’s Mark Killick explored the real-world implications of the CXMB 2017 Corporate Edition.

Here are some highlights:

• -82% of corporate leaders feel their organization meets the customer service needs of its customers, while only 40% of consumers do
• -Just 61% of executives believe their company offers support in all the channels their customers want to use
• -Metrics CX senior leaders are using to measure success include CSAT (77%). NPS (67%), Customer Effort (28%), and Other (10%)

These kinds of benchmarking results let our community know where they’re ahead, on pace, or falling behind as compared to their peers. Hearing from other executives is one of the hallmarks of EITK events, and this report is one of the most valuable pieces of content we (in partnership with COPC) create and distribute.

From left: Judi Brenstein, Caroline Tuan, Salena Scardina, Mark Killick

6. The Keynotes

The list of keynotes was an all-star roster of corporate America’s best:

• -Scott Emmons, Head of the Innovation Lab – Neiman Marcus
• -Doug Woodard, SVP of Customer Channels for US Card Customer Experience – Capital One
• -Michele Watson, Senior Vice President of Client Success – Indeed
• -Wanny Manasse, VP of Customer Care – T-Mobile

Every one was packed full of imaginative strategies and tactics from companies that have customer experience at their core. The speakers brought us back to what we’re all passionate about: serving our customers better.

5. The Tour

Not everyone was able to make the tour of T-Mobile’s Charleston facility, but those who did will likely never forget it. The operation itself was impressive—1,300 seats—and the welcome was incredible. The employees we met serenaded us with songs they wrote just for us! The T-Mobile center was built with employee engagement in mind. The culture and heart of the center was undeniable. There were many areas where employees could relax and enjoy their workplace and build community. Hats off to T-Mobile for a tour that will be hard to top.

4. The Focus on Employees

It’s one of the bedrock principles of CX that employee engagement drives customer satisfaction. It’s also one of the hardest areas to get right. Airbnb’s presentation (not pictured) and the panel with (from left) Beth Linthicum of Aetna, Christopher Swisher of Bayer, and Jackie Craver of Nintendo gave new life to this topic, covering the challenges and presenting clever solutions.

3. The Food

The South has a reputation for providing good food, and CRS Charleston delivered on that promise. Savory options like the oyster shucking embraced local cuisine, but it was the dessert options that really shone. From the Italy-inspired lunch, to the ice cream sundae buffet, to the special cookies in a breakout session, there were enough options to satisfy every sweet tooth.

2. The Innovations Lab

Some of the most enlightening conversations at CRS Charleston took place in the Innovations Lab, where service partners and corporate brands mingled. Having knowledgeable providers available to demonstrate their products and talk about use cases was a big win for corporate leaders in search of solutions.

1. The Real-World Examples

Our pick for the most enlightening, inspiring, and thought-provoking aspect of CRS Charleston? The many real-world illustrations of customer service concepts. These examples in the presentations and breakouts spoke to how the most innovative companies demonstrate their passion for CX, every single day. We were particularly energized by:

• -Neiman Marcus’ memory mirror
• -T-Mobile’s smart approach to customers switching channels
• -Airbnb’s customer care centers tailored to their locations
• -Indeed’s orange chair to represent the customer at meetings
• -Capital One’s empathetic response to missed payments

More Highlights to Come in Fall 2018

CRS Charleston had too many highlights to name them all, but CRS Marina del Rey (Sept. 10-12, 2018) will up the stakes even more. We hope you’ll join us!

The post Top 10 Best Things About CRS Charleston appeared first on Execs In The Know.

For those of you that were unable to join us last week in Charleston, we hope that you enjoy the recap of one of our 5 Minutes of Brilliance sessions below.

The following is a guest blog by Joey Greenwald, Director, Demand Gen & Operations at Directly. 

At the bi-annual Execs In The Know Customer Response Summit,  March 12-14, 2018, Andy Yasutake, Senior Director of Global Technology and Solutions & Operations at LinkedIn, spoke about using Directly’s unique customer care model to manage customer service surges. Here are the key takeaways:

How does LinkedIn leverage the gig economy?

“There is this marketplace of people out there . . . very engaged members who are already active on LinkedIn hosting and helping other members. What if we could tap into that in some way? We partnered with Directly. Directly offers an expert-based solution. We already had a significant amount of members engaging in our community forums, in our help centers . . . What if we picked a few members and offered them a monetary reward?”

How did Directly help with a significant surge in customer service requests?

“Surge protection was built in. In 2012 when we had an issue . . .  it took us 16 weeks to recover. We had to hire a bunch of people that didn’t know how to use our tools. [In 2016]  it was [re] exposed, but a lot of members started contacting us. We had a 1300% increase. [This time] we engaged experts . . . and leveraging the power of the Directly platform with our tools and our brand of LinkedIn, we were able to improve performance.”

What has Directly done for LinkedIn overall?

“We were getting incredible response times. An email that would take twenty four, seventeen hours . . . we were getting response times in six minutes, so the customer satisfaction went through the roof. They’re going, ‘This is like a real time channel, except it’s email.’ Directly’s solution helped us identify members . . . offer them a Directly/LinkedIn co-branded message . . . but it offers [the service request] up first to [Directly] experts before it goes to an internal [representative].”

“It was an incredible solution that was just offering general support. The impact has been significant cost savings. . . . [and] we’re averaging 3 to 5 minutes on response times for emails that would have taken 24 hours. . . . Our internal employees . . . are actually working on higher value channels.”

If you want to watch Andy’s entire presentation (it’s not long, we promise), click here.

Join the CX conversation with Directly on Twitter @Directly, and if you want to find out how Directly can transform your customer service, visit their website or schedule a demo today.

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It was mid-July 2017 when I got an email from a sales colleague about a potential chatbot opportunity with a short window to respond. The prospective customer was the UK branch of supermarket chain Lidl. The Lidl digital marketing director and his team had already looked at a variety of vendors and were ready to make a selection, but they were still open to listening to us. It was a long shot, we thought, but we still wanted to give it our best effort.

Fast forward 5 months, and we’re seeing tweets like this from the Daily Mail and The Sun:

Wow, what had happened? Well, a fantastic team effort is what had happened.

Winning Team Lidl Over

Lidl saw value in:

– our expertise around all things Customer Experience

– our unique approach to Natural Language Understanding with support for many languages

– our “cloud clout” and the resulting time-to-market

– our design-once-deploy-anywhere framework that allows taking one bot and deploying it on channels like FB Messenger, SMS, Amazon Echo, IVR, etc. with minimal additional effort

– our experience in building and hosting enterprise-grade, transactional customer self-service solutions that integrate into the larger marketing and contact center ecosystem of a multi-national corporation, including the ability to expand into eCommerce

From our Press Release: https://www.aspect.com/company/news/press-releases/lidl-uk-launches-ai-wine-chatbot-to-uk-customers-with-aspect-software

How does a conversation with Margot look like? Have a look here:

When implementing the application, we decided to work with one of our long-time application development partners, 2-steps-ahead, who has been building voicebots on our IVR and chatbot platform, Aspect CXP, for over a decade. Internally, we had all of the right people in place and ready to take on this project: Aspect Professional Services provided the project management and architectural support, R&D provided support by our on-staff linguists. With the combined forces of our team and 2-steps-ahead we were ready to embark on the buildout of the solution.

A Dream Customer

The project kicked off with a workshop in Lidl’s Wimbledon England HQ at the end of August 2017. The Lidl digital marketing team came with a thorough understanding of how a chatbot experience should look and even a high-level concept of the functionality it should provide.

One of the main drivers for this project was the realization that, while Lidl was successful with their wine selection, winning awards and increasing sales, they didn’t have anyone in their 800+ stores or their contact center that knew much – if anything – about wines. The knowledge was sitting with their full-time on-staff sommelier! The Lidl team wasn’t interested in sharing that knowledge through static content on a website like an FAQ; instead, they wanted to create a much more interactive and engaging way through which they could impart their wine knowledge on their customers.  Artificial Intelligence allowed them to accomplish that by creating a chatbot accessible via Facebook Messenger that could answer questions from customers directly, on the spot. They clearly understood the power of a Conversational UI (CUI) for an engaging customer experience!

A name for the chatbot was quickly found by the Lidl team: Margot – chosen to remind the wine connoisseur of the French wine-making region (Margaux), while generally being a popular first name in the UK.

What Can You Do, Margot?

On a high level, Margot is trained to help customers with 4 different types of inquiries, as the chart shows. In addition, it can direct users to the existing Store Finder, which will pop up as a webview within the Facebook Messenger app.

One of the key decisions we made together with the Lidl team was to put Margot on the main Facebook page of Lidl UK: www.facebook.com/LidlUK. Previous experiences have shown that if you create a separate page just for a chatbot, discovery and retention suffer severely. By adding her to Lidl’s main Facebook presence we were sure that Margot had her home in the heart of the social Lidl experience online.

Lidl UK has several full-time staff members that help with answering questions from social networks. Margot thus “collaborates” with live staff in the sense that they are monitoring the incoming messages for mentions of the desire to speak to customer service, and the user always has the option to involve live staff when needed.

From a CUI design perspective, we decided to go with a mix of natural language dialog and menu-based flows. The initial menus introduce the scope of the solution and provide basic guidance; from our 15+ years of experience of building these kinds of applications, we know that people can be overwhelmed if they know they’re chatting with a computer and feel they can’t interact with it like they would with a human when presented with an open-ended question such as “how can I help you” – they simply expectsome guidance in the form of menus. Over time, as these chatbot experiences establish themselves across brands, these hesitations should go away.

In the middle of the project, we came up with the idea to teach Margot to understand emojis. What if people asked her about ? or ?? We didn’t want to pass on the opportunity to add that element of fun to the mix.

Generally speaking, the Margot persona was designed to be light-hearted and informal; a true wine enthusiast but definitely not snooty, someone who loves food and good company. Margot is truly conversational in her style, answering questions as such as “which red wines from Chile under £6 do you sell”, “what goes well with grilled salmon”, or “how do I get that stain out of my tablecloth??” She has additional features, such as an interactive wine quiz to encourage further brand engagement and to interact with customers in a fun, intuitive, and light-hearted manner.

From a linguistic perspective, Margot was a welcome challenge for our linguists. Not only was Margot designed to allow for plain English inquiries such as “I’m making roast beef for my friends tonight, what should I get with that”, or questions including multiple items of information as in “looking for a red wine from Italy under 6 pounds”, or those staccato communicators that send a single word such as “rose”; but Margot was also to benefit from the food ontologies built into Aspect NLU, the natural language understanding engine embedded in Aspect CXP, so that she could easily subsume inquiries about ziti, farfalle, macaroni, spaghetti, tagliatelle, rigatoni, vermicelli, fettucine, pappardelle, penne, fusilli, … under pasta, or roquefort, gorgonzola, stilton under blue cheese, or … you get the idea. With the built-in ontology, Margot can now easily help with thousands of food items, offering over different 200 individual recommendations.

Some more impressive numbers:

Time to get serious

8 weeks after our initial project meeting we were ready to get serious… Margot was ready for friendly user testing from Lidl brand advocates. Lidl announced Margot on the Lidl Community, and first testers signed up. Testing chatbots early is critical to their success, and needless to say, we quickly found areas for improvement and gaps that we had to close, whether it was missing Mexican cuisine examples in our food ontology, or the ability to parse out money amounts expressed as diversely as “£5”, “5£”, “5 quid”, “a fiver”, or even “around five-ish”. Through a QA phase of intense collaboration between the teams, we were able to squash the bugs in record time and approach deployment readiness.

When we did go live, we decided for a soft rollout, before announcing Margot to the press. However, when the press embargo was finally lifted on January 31st, the feedback we got from the media, our partners, the analysts, but also Lidl customers expressing their joy of interacting with Margot on Twitter, was overwhelming positive, getting coverage in Contact Center World, Daily Mail Online, Telegraph, Food and Wine,  and our favorite was this video from the Huffington Post, who invited a real sommelier, Janet Harrison from Cracking Wine, to “compete” against Margot. Who won?

Itching to chat with Margot yourself? Go to www.facebook.com/LidlUK and hit “Send Message”. Or jump right into the conversation by going to m.me/LidlUK.

Stay tuned for more updates on the coming to life and the adoption of Margot over the coming weeks and months. Many new features are being added as we speak, and both teams aren’t running out of ideas what else automation, artificial intelligence-style, can do to support Lidl on their journey to the top of the UK and international grocery retail space. And this journey has just begun.

Interested in finding out more about the topics in this blog or Aspect? Aspect is one of the subject matter experts that will be sharing their insights and expertise at Customer Response Summit Charleston, March 12-14, 2018. CR Summit Charleston will feature speakers from Neiman Marcus, Indeed, Capital One, T-Mobile, and more. For more information about our leading event for CX professionals, visit our event website.

The post How We Built the Wine Bot Margot for Lidl appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Many brands ask us about the differences between using live chat versus digital messaging (ie. Messenger, WeChat, in-app/in-web messaging, etc.) for customer support. That’s right, chat and messaging are NOT the same. Although chat was loved by brands in the past, we believe its final days, as it currently exists, are near. To explain why it’s important to first clearly distinguish how the two are different.

Take a look at the examples below to see the difference between a messaging interaction versus that of a chat interaction.

 The example above is one of messaging.

In this interaction, I had reached out to one of my favorite brands, Nordstrom, to get some help finding a jacket.  Here is what was great about using messaging for customer support:

– This conversation was asynchronous, meaning the agent and I could communicate without being available at the same time.

– It was extremely convenient – I received a push notification on my phone’s home screen when the agent responded (rather than staring at my phone waiting for a response).

– It was contextual, so if I ever forgot which jacket I was looking at, I could just open up the app and go directly to the link the agent had sent me. Also, if I ever reached out again, the agent would know exactly what that previous interaction looked like.

– It felt personal and human. I was able to share just how genuinely excited I was by simply adding emoji to the message. With messaging, agents and customers can share and express emotions via emoji and gifs.

My experience with chat was very different…

In the chat interaction above, I needed help from customer support regarding a slightly more complex issue than my first example. This conversation was also much more frustrating for me due to the limitations in chat. Let’s break those down:

– The conversation was synchronous (as are all chat interactions), so I had to be actively available to receive the agent’s response and vice versa.

– It was session-based – so once I closed out of the chat, the entire conversation thread was lost. I was essentially held hostage in the chat and if I were to leave, I’d have to start all over again (which, of course, happened).

– Since chat lacks context, I had to re-explain my problem to a new agent when I reached back out for more help.

– When I had trouble explaining my issues and wanted to share a screenshot of my problem, I was deflected to email (since chat is text-based).

– There was no use of emojis or gifs and the entire interaction felt impersonal and lacked the human element.

Messaging costs less than chat

If the examples above don’t convince you that messaging is a preferable way to interact with a company, let’s look at the numbers. According to a research study by Mckinsey, a single chat interaction costs a company between 3 to 5 dollars per interaction. A messaging communication is less than $1, which is up to 1/5th the cost.

Not only are messaging interactions less expensive for brands than live chat interactions, but with the proper technology in place, agents can handle as many as ten messaging conversations at one time. That’s 5x what most contact centers report for concurrent conversation handling on chat.

People prefer messaging

Regardless of the cost savings, here’s a pretty powerful fact: 9 out of 10 customers actually prefer to message a business. Why? Because messaging is a HUGE part of our daily lives. Here’s another fact: 1.4 billion people around the world send over 50 billion messages each day to communicate with one another. In addition, WhatsApp and Messenger have around 1 billion monthly active users each and WeChat around 900 million. Messaging as a conversation and interaction interface has fundamentally shifted how we communicate with one another, and it is about to shift how people communicate with your company.

To learn more about how messaging helps improve customer satisfaction, enhances employee engagement, and drives real financial results, download the latest (and totally free) Aberdeen report: Customer Messaging: Happy Customers, Productive Employees & Better Financials.

Interested in finding out more about the topics in this blog or Sparkcentral? Sparkcentral is one of the subject matter experts that will be sharing their insights and expertise at Customer Response Summit Charleston, March 12-14, 2018. CR Summit Charleston will feature speakers from Neiman Marcus, Indeed, Capital One, T-Mobile, and more. For more information about our leading event for CX professionals, visit our event website.

The post Chat vs. Messaging for Customer Support: Why Messaging Wins appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Some things never go out of style, like The Beatles, evenings by the fireplace and homemade apple pie.

Unfortunately, your contact center isn’t one of them, and if you haven’t replaced or upgraded your solutions recently, there’s a good chance your customers have noticed. In that case, it’s probably time for a little contact center modernization.

A good contact center makes an impact for three important stakeholders:

1) Your customers
2) Your agents
3) And your business

Contact center modernization can make your solution better for them all. Customer care has made huge advances over the last several years. Texting is now a common communication track for businesses, and AI and chatbots continue to forge new ground.

Amid all this change, customer expectations have responded. Today’s customers demand the flexibility to communicate in their preferred channel, at their preferred time. And they no longer accept long wait times and impersonal service as the norm.

You need to keep up in order to keep your customers.

In the past, updating or replacing your system to provide a higher level of service was cost-prohibitive. But today, that’s not necessarily the case. With a cloud-based system and an experienced partner, you can take your customer experience to new heights without doing the same for your expenditures. If you haven’t done so yet, going to the cloud is the number one step in contact center modernization.

But even if you do have a cloud-based solution, there are a few best practices to find even more value. So with that in mind, here are the top three benefits and best practices to guide you through your contact center modernization.

Save big money over time

Obviously, one massive incentive of contact center modernization is cost savings. So as you begin this process, consider future adaptations for even greater efficiency and customer experience.

As new technology develops, you need to have a process to incorporate it into your contact center plan. Customers may want to connect through traditional voice channels, but the preference is quickly changing to other channels, including email, chat, mobile and social.

That means your contact center needs expanded capabilities around these channels. On the one hand, you’ll have a few more expenses up front to ensure all those channels are supported, even if you’re not currently using them. But these channels are also easily automated, which can drastically cut customer service costs and agent workload.

Best Practice #1: Update the systems you need today and prepare for the growing customer service channels of the future.

Of course, upgrading your premise-based system to accommodate all of these channels can get very expensive very fast. But by moving to the cloud, you can cut many up-front costs and prepare for quick changes down the road.

These solutions could completely replace your current technology, but they’re more likely to run alongside existing systems. Cloud-based solutions let you pick upgrades you need without the expense of replacing all your current equipment right away. Plus, your customers can start using the channels they love, giving an instant boost to loyalty and retention.

Create better experiences for customers and agents

Cloud-based contact center solutions not only create enjoyable experiences for customers. They also give you tools to raise agents’ and managers’ productivity and job satisfaction while lowering attrition and training costs.

Customer service used to be black and white. A customer called and waited for an agent to answer. But call volume rises every year, even as people reach out via text, email, web chat and social media.

They want to interact with you at a time that’s convenient for them. Waiting on hold is not convenient, and it causes stress for your agents. Integrating automated solutions, like an IVR or one-way and two-way proactive text messages, is option to increase self-service and answer questions before someone calls. Other tools, like SMS Assistant, help agents interact more efficiently, creating exceptional experiences for everyone involved.

Best Practice #2: Support popular channels customers want with solutions that make agents’ jobs easier.

Modern contact centers are gaining momentum as the best option for responding to customer needs — regardless of channel or device. Good cloud-based solutions integrate customer data across all channels, letting employees see someone’s interaction history to relieve frustration for both your customers and your agents.

Focus on strategy, not just software

One of these tips already told you to keep an eye to the future, but this goes one step further. Not only does your contact center technology need to be ready to adapt, you must put a strategy in place to incorporate new channels as they develop. Crafting that strategy can be a major challenge, but your communication technology provider may be able to help.

When it comes to contact center providers, you have two options. Some providers sell a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, in which you’re on your own to implement, strategize and upgrade your solution down the road.

Managed service providers, on the other hand, take that responsibility and emphasize service in addition to software. A partner with managed services supplies experienced contact center professionals who work with you throughout the life of a contract to ensure you’re providing the best customer experience possible.

These are the partners who go beyond software and employ professional services expertise to help you devise the right strategy.

Best Practice #3: Don’t hire a software provider. Work with a partner who will keep your contact center ahead of the curve.

With the right partner, you can leave strategy in the hands of experts, so you can focus on present-day operations of your business.

Learn more about contact center modernization

Before simply buying the newest headsets or routing system, go through these three best practices to discover what you really need in a cloud contact center solution. You can read even more about this process by downloading our ebook, The Many Benefits of Modernizing Your Contact Center.

If it’s time to upgrade your contact center, don’t worry. Follow these few best practices to get the updates you need and prepare for new changes to create the most benefit for your customers, your agents and your business. With the right partner and strategy, contact center modernization can ensure your customer service never goes out of style.

Interested in finding out more about the topics in this blog or West? West is one of the subject matter experts that will be sharing their insights and expertise at Customer Response Summit Charleston, March 12-14, 2018. CR Summit Charleston will feature speakers from Neiman Marcus, Indeed, Capital One, T-Mobile, and more. For more information about our leading event for CX professionals, visit our event website. 

The post Top 3 Benefits and Best Practices of Contact Center Modernization appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The customer service industry will experience the biggest digital shift yet in 2018, as customer experience (CX) brand leaders seek to expand channels, leverage analytics, adopt automation, and integrate the front office with back office operations. CX pioneers should prepare for a surge in the adoption of disrupter technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), digital self-service, and bot tools, as well as the need to hire data scientists to improve business intelligence and better enable consumers to get the right answer fast. These digital capabilities will help some businesses, with the right unified engagement strategy and delivery expertise, to unlock a treasure trove of transformational potential for optimizing customer experience—balancing the cost of service with frictionless engagement. In this report, we will cover those digital innovation and customer engagement operational trends that will assist CX leaders in planning their transformation projects in 2018-19. (Click here to view a webinar from January 10 on this same topic.)

1. Digital channels finally overtake voice.

We will finally witness the tipping point where digital channels—email, chat, social, text, messaging—overtake voice in the contact center. Mobile driven interaction management —in-app messaging, chat, SMS, and social—have become foundational components of an omnichannel strategy. According to Dimension Data’s global contact center benchmarking report, digital interactions accounted for over 42% of all interactions taking place inside the contact center in the beginning of 2017. At that current rate, digital was expected to overtake voice in 2018. It’s already happening with some of our clients. One consumer packaged goods client being serviced out of the UK receives 71% of all customer interactions from digital channels, and only 29% from voice. Included in these statistics are messaging via WhatsApp, which currently accounts for approximately 10% of the client’s volume. Instant communication will become the standard for exceptional customer service in 2018. Messaging is the new channel of choice, according to Twilio research, which states 89% of consumers want to use messaging to communicate with a business. There are multiple benefits to messaging such as the ability to send photos or videos between agents and customers, faster and more timely communications, and the ability to stop, start, and continue with the conversation at the customer’s convenience.

2. Investments in advanced analytics tools drive customer experience transformation.

Advanced data analytics tools can help businesses uncover business-critical insights and gain a competitive edge. According to Gartner, “By 2018 50% of agent interactions will be influenced by real-time analytics.” As customer experience analytics matures, it is becoming increasingly predictive and focused on personalization. A sophisticated data analytics tool can make predictions, or generate recommendations based on information gathered, thus giving contact center agents and bots more background and context on each individual customer they are servicing. In addition, analytics plays a significant role in increasing productivity. As one case in point, speech analytics can detect non-value adds, such as long conversational pauses or points in the conversation when the customer has to repeat responses.

3. Smartphone video camera support changes the game for customer support.

Gone are the days of customers struggling to explain technical product issues to an agent by phone. With smartphone video camera support, 3-4 minutes of triage can be accomplished in seconds. By texting customers a simple link, brands can now activate the video camera on a customer’s mobile device to see what they are looking at. It’s that simple. Smartphone video camera support, in combination with messaging or voice support, can accelerate time-to-resolution while boosting customer satisfaction.

If customers are uncomfortable leveraging video, the alternative option is to send a simple picture via SMS so that companies are able to get a better view and understanding of a product issue and communicate more effectively with customers—for example, annotating photos to indicate product issues. Real outcomes are cost-containment, better average handle time (AHT), lower product return rates, and improved CSAT.

4. Emojis make digital conversations measurably more emotional and expressive.

As digital conversations overtake voice in 2018 and tone of voice becomes absent from interactions, the customer care industry will need to find new ways to gauge and measure emotion and sentiment. The answer lies in technology. The emoji became accepted and praised as part of the customer care communication mainstream in 2017 and this will expand in 2018—as a means to add lightheartedness or a personal touch and show humor and happiness. Another way to measure and gauge emotion is by embedding text analytics in digital channels, such as text or chat. Analytical dashboards can run behind the scenes as agents engage with customers to detect the level of sentiment in conversations. If the analysis detects a high negative sentiment score, the conversation can be flagged for a supervisor to review. Lastly, the same text analytics approach should be applied when using bots. Today, talking to a bot can be more and more akin to connecting with a human. However, there should always be an option for a customer to escalate to a human agent when necessary.

5. Artificial intelligence (AI) revolutionizes the customer service industry.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing industries across the globe, including customer service. Thanks to the rise of digital channels and the advancement of AI and machine learning technology, we now have the ability to predict (with a high level of confidence) the right answer to a customer’s inquiry in any digital channel — email, SMS, chat, or social. This advancement in technology will make our agents much more efficient. No more looking up answers, spell checking, tagging or categorizing conversations. The only action agents will have to take is to hit “approve” or “personalize” on the predicted responses. These new customer care solutions will bring together the empathy of agents with the efficiency of bots, for AI-assisted conversations that present the facts of a product or brand while adding the personalization of a human touch. AI technology will even be able to automatically tag and categorize posts, saving agents more time.

6. The customer care industry seeks outside expertise to build and optimize chatbot experiences.

As the hottest topic in 2017, customer service professionals had some high expectations chatbots were going to be a game changer. But apparently, chatbots still have a lot to learn. Early in 2017, Facebook announced it was “refocusing” its use of AI after its bots hit a failure rate of 70%, meaning bots could only get to 30% of requests without some sort of human intervention. There are a few reasons most chatbots fail. One, organizations fail to clearly define the bots’ purpose. Two, most organizations launch well before they are ready and fail to do the necessary amount of testing. Lastly, organizations did not have the in-house expertise to optimize and train a machine learning, natural language processing AI model. Chatbots are only as good as the data that feeds them. If chatbots start to learn something inaccurately or are fed false data to start, they will produce false results and humans will need to reset and intervene.

7. Smart Bots&Brains strategy is at the heart of CX transformation.

In 2018, the winning customer service formula will be a strategic “bots-brains” approach, leaning on intelligent automation to create optimized CX, intelligently integrating people at key moments of truth.

Whether front-end bot or bot-assisted agent, tomorrow’s businesses will employ automation where it adds value through reduced customer effort (improving CSAT by guiding customers to the right answer fast), cost-containment, or revenue generation. Bot deployment frees up human labor for higher-minded, more emotional, and complex decision making. According to a recent report by Horses for Sources, automation is making way for strong growth of high- and medium-skilled personnel—with highly skilled positions in the service provider industry increasing by 56%, and medium-skilled by 8%. However, low-skilled, routine jobs drop 30% as many of these roles get phased out over the next five years.

8. More customer care professionals budget for and hire data scientists/analysts and invest in text and speech analytics.

Delivering voice of the customer data is undoubtedly both art and science. Customer service teams live in a world of “unstructured” data including phone calls, chat transcripts, social transcripts, text transcripts, etc. Teams need analytics tools and data scientists to help make sense of the data and ultimately learn what customers are saying, requesting, complaining about, praising, and questioning. With the rise in digital conversations, hiring the right data professionals is going to become critical in 2018 if they want to execute their digital strategies flawlessly and remain competitive.

9. Robotic process automation (RPA), transforms both the back office and front office.

In the next two years, RPA will be recognized for its front-office potential as well. Automation will provide agents assistance to enhance productivity, by allowing team members to focus on helping customers and less time on navigating systems or post-contact wrap up. Additionally, automation at the desktop, will also improve quality by decreasing errors of manual data entry, reducing rework, and decreasing complaints. Reducing manual tasks allows for a better focus on listening to the customer, empathizing, and providing a frictionless experience. In 2018, we’ll see better collaboration between the front- and back office, for ROI that covers the advantages of both RPA types.

10. Work-at-home solutions grow and provide millennials the flexible jobs they seek.

Over the past decade, telecommuting has increased by 115%—that’s almost 3% of the U.S. workforce, as reported by Global Workforce Analytics and FlexJobs. With hiring, staffing, and attrition being some of the biggest obstacles in the customer care industry, this is one trend that will continue to grow in the next couple of years. There are many advantages to having a remote, at-home workforce. For one, many work-at-home teams will have much lower attrition and absenteeism rates. Two, it expands the talent pool significantly making it much easier to hire for seasonal work. Three, the need to overstaff for the “just-in-case” is greatly reduced, thus saving cost.

Interested in finding out more about the topics in this blog or HGS? HGS is one of the subject matter experts that will be sharing their insights and expertise at Customer Response Summit Charleston, March 12-14, 2018. CR Summit Charleston will feature speakers from Neiman Marcus, Indeed, Capital One, T-Mobile, and more. For more information about our leading event for CX professionals, visit our event website. 

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PHOENIX, AZ. – (February 15, 2018) – Community of customer experience professionals, Execs In The Know, have released the agenda for their next executive gathering – Customer Response Summit (CRS) Charleston. CRS Charleston will be held March 12^th-14^th, 2018, at the Belmond Charleston Place, in Charleston, SC. AI for service, employee engagement, outsourcing, quality, personalization, and more will be featured topics of discussion. The customer experience conference will include keynotes from Neiman Marcus, Indeed, Capital One, and T-Mobile.

CRS is a gathering of customer service leaders, across many verticals, focused on working together to improve the customer care industry, and create innovative experiences for their brands. Highlights of the CX leadership event include an Innovation Lab, evening networking opportunities, and an exclusive tour of the T-Mobile Charleston facility. The newest version of the CXMB Series – 2017 Corporate Edition – will also be released (a joint effort between Execs In The Know and COPC Inc.).

“Between our stellar line-up of speakers and our historic host city of Charleston, we are thrilled to bring CRS to the East Coast, in March,” said Chad McDaniel, President and CEO of Execs In The Know. “Our community is constantly inspiring us through the stories and innovative experiences they offer in their own brands. I can’t tell you how special it is to be able to meet face-to-face with these amazing leaders and watch the sharing that takes place amongst peers.”

Other leading corporate brands that will be speaking at the customer care event include Grubhub, Sweetwater Sound, Aetna, USA TODAY NETWORK, Balsam Hill and more.

To learn more or to register, visit the event website www.execsintheknow.com/events/crs-charleston/.

About Execs In The Know

Execs In The Know is a global community of customer experience professionals, from various industry verticals, all focused on the same thing – excellence in customer service and experience. Execs In The Know gives brands a platform to share and gain insights, benchmark their brand, stay on top of the latest trends in CX, and create lasting relationships with their peers – “Leaders Learning From Leaders.”

Execs In The Know holds their national event – Customer Response Summit – twice a year (in the Spring and Fall), giving executives the opportunity to connect face-to-face. They also hold a number of other live regional events throughout the year including Subject Matter Briefings (on topics like social media, AI, SMS, outsourcing, etc.), Lunch & Learns, Workshops, and EITK Dinners. The community is able to stay engaged long after the events come to an end through industry content and thought leadership, webinars, reports, and various social communities.

Learn more at www.execsintheknow.com.

Media Contact:

Alyssa Pitura
info@execsintheknow.com

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