Johannesburg, 15 Nov 2016
2016 has been the year of the chatbot: from Jarvis, Mark Zuckerberg's Iron Man-inspired assistant, to Microsoft's rather unfortunate Tay experience, it seems we can't get enough of chatbots.
Here in South Africa, we're already seeing them being trialled in fields as diverse as banking and healthcare - with one scheme enabling pregnant women in remote areas to access much-needed health information, says Danny Drew, Managing Director, Avaya South Africa.
Chatbots are increasingly being "employed" in customer service - not to replace human agents, but to help free up their time to provide a more personalised service.
Automation in customer experience is all about making things faster, easier and more streamlined for customers - so we don't have to repeat ourselves multiple times, and explain our problems to different agents every time we contact an organisation.
Chatbots funnel and streamline conversations, making contact centres more efficient and responsive. They can provide standard replies that are appropriate and informative, and once the conversation becomes more complex, or a more in-depth solution is required, a human agent can step in and help.
Customers today expect to receive an always-on personal digital experience, and with 89% of companies now preparing to compete primarily on customer experience, meeting that expectation is no longer optional.
The problem that customer experience professionals face is that there are just so many experiences - more than we poor humans can keep up with. Chatbots can take away the menial tasks from agents, allowing them to focus on the human element that is so crucial to driving customer satisfaction and enabling them to provide better and warmer collaboration with their customers.
This not only leads to higher CSAT scores and greater customer loyalty, it can help improve motivation levels for the agents themselves, which will help reduce churn and eliminate the need to keep training new staff.
This will also allow organisations to essentially retain and boost service levels, with fewer agents and reduced costs on the overall contact centre infrastructure. Today, a contact centre's costs are predominantly for agents and real estate; technology and process design and operations come in a late second from a cost point of view.
With a multichannel contact centre, the biggest challenge in delivering an awesome customer experience is gluing the pieces together: linking the various knowledge and functional teams to customer service, delivering new capabilities and features that will, eventually, enable us as customers to call one time, and see our problems solved. This "first-touch" resolution wasn't possible before, and vendors that put together tools and technologies to achieve that still lag behind.
At Avaya, we like to say we engineer out the complexity so the user experience is simple and intuitive. We build all our customer and team engagement solutions on the same development platform, Avaya Breeze, which provides an entirely new way to develop business communications applications, profoundly simplifying application development, while delivering built-in capabilities for enhanced mobile, customer-facing and hybrid/cloud requirements.
Avaya Breeze makes it easier to build new, turnkey applications, with developers able to "snap-in" complementary services. We've already introduced a chatbot snap-in, so developers can create an automated self-service solution and deploy it easily on a public or private cloud.
When it comes to tapping the potential of chatbots and artificial intelligence, we've only just begun. Visitors to the Avaya stand at the recent GITEX Technology Week event, in Dubai, were able to see the future of customer experience, with a solution built on Breeze. Combining a range of technologies, including biometrics for identification and analytics to predict behaviour patterns, our "Noor" virtual assistant can help customers conduct a range of transactions and guide customers in their choices.
Here at Avaya, we are currently working on the next stage of digital evolution, with a chatbot solution capable of holding intelligent conversations with customers, answering their queries, and resolving customer service issues. It works by leveraging self-learning artificial intelligence technologies to model customer language and dialogue interactions. As such, it's able to predict customer preferences and resolve problems - almost before the customer knows it has one.
Ultimately, though, whatever happens with the technology, one element is always going to remain human: the customer. The best service - the kind that boosts CSAT scores, inspires word of mouth reporting, and ensures loyal, happy customers - will therefore likely require a unique, human response. Chatbots and automation will play a key role in delivering that service - by freeing up agents' valuable time to provide it.
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