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After « Best Service Is Nos Service », « Me2B », The Frictionless Organization is the new book proposed and co-written by Bill Price and David Jaffe, both members of the LimeBridge Alliance and renowned experts. Beyond these contents that you will certainly have the opportunity to browse, it no longer belongs to companies today to define what customers want; it is the customers themselves who decide! Additionally, we know the importance of the experience lived by the customer during their interaction with the brand or within the framework of the purchasing journey. Dive into the heart of these innovative concepts and become the champion of the customer experience!

The Frictionless Organization, or the organization without friction: Never contact the brand for the wrong reasons! A motto that applies in organizations that have chosen to offer the best experience throughout the customer journey. From product/service design to customer service, simplicity and ease are key. Reducing customer effort, also known as friction by the authors, is the best methodology for limiting interactions without value and increasing those that represent a strong business opportunity.

The 7 keys to a successful customer experience.

 In the digital age, the customer dictates their relationship with companies. They become the owner and determine when they choose to interact with the brand, which now needs to integrate their point of view into its thinking.

For several years now, B2B and B2C have referred to the processes and customer relationship rules necessary to create value in the company.

Today, collaborative experience allows the consumer to design their product or service according to their needs, which requires a new relational mode that showcases creativity and agility.

In a few words, or even in a few letters: Me to Business, or rather Me2B (pronounced in English) defines these new rules.

 Bill Price and David Jaffe explain in « The Best Service Is No Service, » published by Wiley, how to achieve a successful Me2B experience, through 7 fundamental needs that value the customer and their experience, thereby consolidating their loyalty to the company:

You know me, you remember me You offer me choices You make my life easier You value me You trust me You surprise me beyond all expectations You allow me to be better and do more

Me2B leaders create experiences that meet fundamental relational needs in a complex and multiple universe like the Digital world, beyond just providing a product.

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And you? Where are you with your customer promise?

Take advantage of an audit of the maturity level of your organization and recommendations proposed by our experts. Contact us!

Activeo, a French member of the LimeBridge Global Alliance and publisher of the French edition of “The Best Service Is No Service,” offers to discuss your relationship challenges by conducting a free diagnostic/audit of your organization, accompanied by recommendations.

During this opportunity, we will be happy to give you a copy of Bill Price’s book.

Conversational bots are becoming increasingly popular in contact centers due to their ability to help customers quickly and efficiently. These virtual agents are able to complement the support of human agents to make them more efficient, improve the customer experience and reduce contact center operational costs. According to Gartner, by 2026, one in 10 agents interactions will be automated using a bot. In addition, bot deployments in contact centers will reduce agent labor costs by $80 billion [1]. In this expert opinion, we will try to demystify conversational bots, how they work, and their design tools.

IVR vs. conversational bot?

In a traditional contact center, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system is used. This is a sequence of menus and sub-menus that identify the intent of the call and route it to the right agent. Compared to an IVR, a conversational bot can directly assist users. The user can directly express his request and say “I want to make an appointment” or “I want to cancel my reservation” … the bot is able to understand this intention and route it to the right agent. If the customer’s request is simple, it can provide answers by itself. Compared to an IVR, interacting with a conversational bot is faster and more natural as customers are increasingly familiar with voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant.

What are the applications and advantages of the conversational bot in a Customer Relations Center?

A conversational bot can automate the entire customer interaction with a contact center, or a part of it, and then transfer it to the right agent. This automation, whether partial or total, helps the agent to process the request, reduce the interaction time with the agent, and therefore achieve significant optimization. Many of the less value-added queries encountered in a contact center are redundant and repetitive and can be automated.

1. Find information: the bot can connect to databases to provide dynamic and personalized answers. It can find general information such as “What are the opening hours?”, “What is the price of a product?”, or questions specific to the customer’s situation such as “What time is my appointment?”, or after-sales questions such as “When does my contract end?”.
2. Authenticate a client: Instead of the agent spending time authenticating a client, the bot can perform this task, ask the security questions and verify the answers by connecting to a database.
3. Scheduling an appointment or modifying a reservation: the bot can identify the necessary information associated with this intention such as the date, time of preference, and request this information from the customer. It can then either make the reservation itself or transfer the customer to the right agent while providing the agent with this context information.
4. Satisfaction Survey: The bot can conduct a natural and rich satisfaction survey by soliciting feedback instead of asking for a simple rating in an IVR. The bot can then analyze the feedback and even the customer’s sentiment.

Note that at any point in the conversation with the bot, if the bot is unable to fully understand what the customer is saying, or if the customer requests an agent transfer, the bot is able to transfer the call immediately to the right agent. As a result, the agent can spend his interaction time with the customer on higher value-added tasks. The agent’s workload is therefore reduced and his interaction with the customer is faster and more fluid.

Technically, what is a conversational bot?

A conversational bot is a computer program that can converse with a user via text or voice messages, respectively called chatbot or voicebot. Technically, a voicebot is just a chatbot with a voice. The main steps of a bot in general are the following:

1. Voice to text transcription (for voice bot only)
2. Understanding the intent
3. Data query and synthesis of the textual response associated with the detected intention
4. Voice synthesis from text (for voice bot only)

Conversational bots are built using “natural language processing” algorithms, which are part of artificial intelligence. Natural language processing is one of the most challenging problems in computer science; it requires Deep Learning algorithms that need large computations and huge volumes of training data. These algorithms transcribe (step 1), understand the words and the intended intent (step 2), and synthesize the voice from the text (step 4). Step 3 does not require NLP, but rather defining database queries to provide the necessary information. Then we build a personalized and dynamic response that corresponds to the identified intention.

However, several tools such as Amazon Lex and Google DialogFlow bring their natural language processing technologies to developers. These are the same natural language understanding engines used by their voice assistants, Alexa and Google Assistant. Tools such as AWS LEX and DialogFlow provide graphical interfaces where in a few minutes you can create and test a conversational bot without having any knowledge of natural language processing. All we need to do is define the set of intentions we are interested in and expect from users. In other words, we need to think of all the reasons why a user will call the contact center. For each reason, we then define the necessary queries and the bot’s response.

What does the design of a conversational bot look like?

Bot design tools provide natural language processing technology to allow us to focus on developing the scenario and defining the intentions. To create a bot, we simply specify the intentions we expect in the design console. Then, you can simply integrate the bot into the contact center flow. Typically, we define several independent or related intentions that correspond to several call reasons. For each intention, we need to:

1. Provide some sample statements. In other words, how a user can communicate this intent.
2. Define the parameters and questions the bot should ask to get the parameters needed for the intent.
3. Define the function that the bot will call to perform the appropriate activity (query in a database, write in a database …)
4. Define the answers that the bot will use to respond to the user

You create a bot to handle one or more related intentions. For example, in a contact center for a medical laboratory, you can automate calls from customers who want to change their appointment and find out the opening hours. You can create a bot with two intentions “Modify Reservation” and “Opening hours”. For each intention, you must complete the 4 steps described above. We will go through them for the intention ” Modify Reservation “:

1. Provide example statements: For example, a user may say:
2.  “I want to change my reservation”
3.  “I want to reschedule my appointment”
4. “Is it possible to change my session today?”

It is sufficient to give a few examples. It is not necessary to be exhaustive. When a customer says these phrases or another phrase that sounds like them, the bot should be able to understand that it is the “Change Booking” intent. Figure 1 shows the statements provided for this intent in the AWS LEX administration console.

• Provide the Parameters and the corresponding questions: For example, to change a reservation, the user must be asked for the new date and time they want. The user must provide these values. The two parameters are: Date and Time. Figure 2 shows how to set the Date parameter in the AWS LEX administration console. For each parameter, we define the question to ask to obtain the value of this parameter:

• Date: “What date would you like?
  • Time: “What time would you like?

• Define the function or procedure to be completed: For example, the bot has to check in the appointment database that the new slot is available.

• If the slot is available, confirm availability and make the reservation.
  • If the slot is not available, suggest other options.

• Define the bot responses:

• “Your appointment is shifted to DAY MONTH YEAR and TIME” where DAY, MONTH, YEAR and TIME are replaced by their values. In this way, the bot’s responses are dynamic and personalized.
  • “The requested appointment is not available, would you like to know what slots are available?”

Conclusion

Conversational bots allow to provide a natural, human-like, personalized and interactive support. They contribute to the rapid resolution of customer requests. They enable the creation of highly personalized and enriching customer experiences. Moreover, they lighten the workload of human agents and allow them to focus on more complex and higher value-added tasks. Many benefits that confirm the trend of human/machine cohabitation and confirm that the AI wave is affecting all businesses and processes. Taking advantage of it to better address the challenges of customer relations and providing a great customer experience are the major challenges of the relevant use of the bot in the customer journey.

Within the framework of a project, let’s not neglect the upstream phase which consists in defining the need, the expected uses, the context, the feasibility with the stakeholders. The recommended method BSINS – Best Service Is No Service – can facilitate the understanding of the need, the mapping of contact patterns to improve performance and rationalize incoming contacts without value. So don’t wait and contact our team to launch your project.

[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-08-31-gartner-predicts-conversational-ai-will-reduce-contac

Articles

How is transformation defined? It is “the action of transforming, the operation by which one transforms, the resulting modification”. The 3 important elements here are: action, operation and result. For a qualitative transformation, an organization must ACT in a more or less conscious way, define and set up the PROCESSES and/or procedures, coordinate and measure the RESULTS.

Our team sought to find and analyze the common success keys to the transformation projects that have been entrusted to us in recent years..

• The Management as sponsor

A global or strategic transformation project WITHOUT the driving force from the Management is doomed to fail: let’s be honest from the start! Your Management must not only be aware of the project in question, but also follow it and find a strategic or tactical interest in it, even if it is different from the original objectives of the project. This means for a project manager to be able to ensure that the different objectives of ALL STAKEHOLDERS are taken into consideration.

1.  Start with the users

Many projects, such as the implementation of an IT solution, begin without asking the end users about the specifications of the tool. At best, before the “go-live”, it is necessary to start communicating about the arrival of a new product, then the users will participate in the training. But what about defining the specifications? Participation in design or specification workshops? Testing?

The best “guinea pigs” are the users themselves, and not the IT team that implements the new tool. Moreover, this is an essential step in change management since it allows them to become familiar with the solution well before the go-live: the fact that the end-users actively participate makes them actors and even “owners” of this solution and the flows that result from it.

2. What is the problem to be solved?

The Management rarely wakes up one morning and says “we have to change everything” (although…), it is often a long process during which everything has been done to avoid resorting to structural change. Maintaining and accelerating performance and competitiveness in the market requires revisiting the way the company operates. This need to transform can then be provoked by a new adaptation to the market, to the customers’ expectations, a regulation, the customers’ feedbacks, or employees’ feedbacks, etc. It is important for the justification of the project to keep the original history and to use it in the communication with the organization. It is also sometimes necessary to present the case study to the Management to justify the corresponding budget, and it becomes critical to explain the problem to be solved and its organizational impact. We do not give the same energy and attention to a full structural revamping that will benefit the whole company and improve the global cost/performance equation as we do with a “stone in the shoe” of a single department.

3. A change of paradigm

How many times have we, as employees, been pushed to use a new procedure that not only doesn’t solve our problems, but worse, creates new ones, or only caters to a portion of a company’s population and yet is applied to the entire organization? The world is full of conveniences that we like to get because they are shiny to our eyes, before we ask ourselves about their usage. Instead of buying features, let’s ask ourselves the right questions, think upstream about use cases and business needs – to be defined in the specifications document – and only then study the tools that meet those requirements, to validate the corresponding budget. This is a change of mindset in the way many companies operate. 

4. Quality vs Time vs Budget

These three elements form a triangle with a critical interdependence between them.

It is important for a project to be clear on the strategy to be applied:

• Do we want to implement the best tool on the market?

We should expect to align the budget accordingly.

• Is there a planning constraint, for example, for regulatory issues ?

If we have to rush, we will probably have to accept a level of non-quality, sometimes even at a high cost!

• What if I want the best on the market while keeping a tight schedule?

It is possible with a certain budget.

Finally, almost everything is possible if we accept that the three points of the triangle evolve in relation to each other. With a little flexibility and imagination, we can find solutions.

5. Measure in a SMART way

When transforming, you need to know where you are starting from in order to determine the point of arrival. What is the current status? How big is the problem? How do we measure it? Then, we will be able to monitor the evolutions during the transition period (what is the rate of usage of a tool? what is the customer satisfaction? etc.), afterwards provide reports at the end of the project. Finally, the presentation of Return on Investment (ROI) to the Management will allow to validate the invested effort. Management guru Peter Drucker once said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. Many forms of measurement exist, the SMART method is excellent for defining KPIs: an indicator should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Temporally defined.

6. Supporting change

Many people think that training is enough to support the changes resulting from a new process or technology.  It is indeed a step in managing the transition, but often one of the last! It is critical to evaluate the efforts that will be necessary for the change depending on the organizational impact, and then to define the actions plan that will follow: the involvement of users according to their profile, level of responsibility, skills, availability and state of mind (we may prefer motivated people and leave out the naysayers, or on the contrary, we may want to train the diehards, the resistant ones, to convince them from the beginning…), and finally, communication & training. Do we need to organize “getting started” sessions, individual coaching? How can we ensure that the “newcomers” welcome guides are properly updated and that the access rights are managed accordingly? All these questions must be asked before or during the project.

7. Standardize the best practices

As a project progresses, the organization begins to change, new practices will emerge, and some will be better than others. It is imperative to detect and apply them to everyone, in order to homogenize practices and standardize the organization. It is also a good way to shine light on the employees who had this good idea and encourage feedback in the company! At the same time, this means that we cannot afford to launch a new product in the wild without monitoring its usage and the way it evolves over time…

8. Continuous improvement

The notion of Continuous Improvement is much abused, however it is not always implemented in organizations, because it requires significant efforts, especially at the human level. The idea that a project never ends is hardly acceptable. Indeed, once the implementation is completed, we wish to monitor its evolution in terms of uses, satisfaction, to keep an eye on “updates or upgrades” in terms of technology, and above all to introduce a loop that will continuously retrieve new needs to implement the following improvements. By integrating this process into the company’s culture, we will progressively allow to boost performance, reduce costs, optimize efficiency, productivity and profitability of the organization at different levels. A continuous improvement approach focuses of taking actions to eliminate non-quality, while reinforcing the elements that generate value. We commonly use the Deming wheel, Plan Do Check Act to pilot those.

Activeo‘s Business Transformation team specializes in supporting change and improvement initiatives around business processes related to or having a direct/indirect impact on the Customer Experience. We ask you the right questions to diagnose the problems, we help you to look for solutions, evaluate their feasibility, and finally, we accompany you in the steering and the implementation of the corresponding projects.

This article is brought to you by

Yolande Le Mercier, Country Manager, Activeo Suisse