Aspect’s acquisition of Voxeo several years ago was largely motivated by the success and innovation of their long-standing “design once, deploy anywhere” concept that gives customers the freedom to add voice and text self-service channels with minimal effort. Combine that with Aspect’s history of delivering agent-assisted interaction management and WFO solutions in the contact center and we have something special in terms of guaranteeing seamless omni-channel connections with consumers.
We can deliver a high level of autonomy for customers to solve simple problems on their own, thereby setting the stage to elevate the role of contact center agents to trusted advisors in solving more complex issues. We then added natural language understanding (NLU) to our portfolio last year so we could unlock another powerful capability for empowering consumers to get answers to questions. (Have you met Edward yet?)
Knocking down silos has been the guiding inspiration to these efforts. “Design once, deploy anywhere” in and of itself allows you to deliver a consistent customer experience on all channels — but the ability to deliver a continuous, context-aware customer experience across those channels, even between self-service and live agents, that is what defines a real customer service solution.
The deployment of “chatbots” siloed from the larger customer service landscape has had its share of challenges. Many of the first generation of chatbots have been labeled “frustrating and useless” (Gizmodo), “spammy” (The Guardian) and “buggy at best” (Tech Times). The promise of automation was greater than the actual implementation.
As it turns out, many of our favorite “automated” tools that provide more seamless experiences than last month’s wave of chatbots have humans behind the curtain. Human-assisted AI dominates the concierge landscape, as pointed out by Bloomberg last month in “The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots” – here discussing x.ai, whose bot “Amy” helps schedule meetings:
The company advertises Amy as an AI personal assistant who can “magically schedule meetings,” and its software does scan e-mails and can usually guess that “tomorrow” means Tuesday. But the system isn’t yet ready to take the next step on its own. Multiple former AI trainers said that as recently as a few months ago, trainers looked over parts of almost all incoming e-mails — to evaluate what Amy guessed the user was saying— before Amy generated an auto response. A company spokeswoman said the service still has trainers verify “the vast majority” of information in e-mails so the system can improve.
It’s also worth noting that much of the Bloomberg article is also dedicated to the high level of cognitive dissonance and work dissatisfaction that pretending to be an AI can cause for an actual human. Rather than maintaining the illusion of automation, efficient and transparent transfers to a live agent – who can identify as such instead of subjecting the customer to a Wizard of Oz test where they might not notice there’s a man behind the curtain – should improve overall service and agent morale.
Aspect’s chatbot Edward likes to remind Radisson Blu Edwardian’s customers that he’s a neophyte – eager to help, but still needs to learn. He’ll eagerly bring in a person when he knows they can do a better job, giving them context and then moving out of the way so that they can have a real person-to-person interaction. Though this arena is still new, we’ve seen that in the market, fully automated service can result in customer dissatisfaction/backlash, while forcing agents to ‘impersonate AI’ negatively impacts agent morale and limits their autonomy in delivering the best experience. Automation that can, when needed, segue to live assistance with full transparency and continuity provides the most seamless and successful experience for customers. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.
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