PHOENIX, ARIZONA – April 3, 2018 – Advocates for customer experience professionals, Execs In The Know and COPC Inc., have announced the release of the 2017 Corporate Edition of the Customer Experience Management Benchmark (CXMB) Series. The 11^th volume in the series, titled The CX Journey: Strategic and Operational Insights, provides an understanding of the current CX landscape. Specific areas of expanded exploration include channel consistency, quality programs, and CX priorities for corporate professionals. Traditional Care (phone, email, and in-person), Interactive Care (online/video chat, FAQ, and self-help), Social Media Care (Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc.), and Mobile Care (apps, text/SMS, and mobile chat) are all explored.

Key Insights from the 2017 Corporate Survey:

– Only 50% of respondents answered “Yes” when asked, “Is your company’s leadership fully committed to a customer-first strategy?”

– Thirty-four percent of respondents didn’t believe their company had a good understanding of which channels their customers preferred, nor how these preferences differed from current channel offerings.

– Interest and investment in chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI) exploded in 2017, with more than a threefold increase in the percentage of brands naming chatbots and AI as the technology of most interest and/or investment.

– Only 14% of respondents felt their brands were doing a good job of providing a consistent customer experience across channels and solutions, while only half of brands (51%) had any initiatives to create greater consistency.

The CXMB Series is a resource for customer care professionals, looking to enhance their customer care program, improve brand opinion, and drive customer satisfaction. Brands such as Marriott, Blue Rock Energy, The Mine, The Home Depot, LinkedIn, Hyatt, Desjardins, CIBC, Williams-Sonoma, Inc., and more participated in this year’s survey.

“The leaders in the Execs In The Know community truly display a customer-first commitment in everything they do,” said Chad McDaniel, President and CEO of Execs In The Know. “Our goal with every edition in the CXMB Series, is to help brands better understand the consumer, validating investments and identifying possible areas of improvement. We are thrilled to provide this resource to our community, to further assist them in the pursuit of customer service excellence.”

“We are honored to play an ongoing role in the creation of this valuable industry research. We hope this work will continue to enlighten and inspire,” said Kathleen Jezierski, COO of COPC Inc. “We’d also like to thank the many brands that participated in this year’s survey. Their experience and expertise is what makes this report possible.”

The full 2017 Corporate Edition is available for purchase at https://execsintheknow.com/cxmbseries/2017-corporate-edition/.

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.

To learn more about Execs In The Know, visit www.ExecsInTheKnow.com.

About COPC Inc.

COPC Inc. provides consulting, training, certification and the RevealCX™ software solution for operations that support the customer experience. The company created the COPC Standards, a collection of performance management systems for call center operations, customer experience management, vendor management, and procurement. Founded in 1996, COPC Inc. began by helping call centers improve their performance. Today, the company is an innovative global leader that empowers organizations to optimize operations to deliver a superior customer experience across all channels. COPC Inc. is privately held with headquarters in Winter Park, FL, U.S. and with operations in Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America, India and Japan.

COPC will also be giving an educational pre-conference seminar at CRS Denver in September, 2019.

For more information, visit www.copc.com.

Media Contacts

Alyssa Pitura
Director of Marketing and Brand Experience
alyssa@execsintheknow.com
www.execsintheknow.com
@ExecsInTheKnow

Lezli Harrell
Vice President, Marketing
COPC Inc.
lharrell@copc.com
www.copc.com

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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.

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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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