Patrick Werdehausen: One objection I've always heard from traditional retailers is that they differentiate themselves from other companies out there because they are able to offer a more personal touch. So they’re unsure about investing in bots. They feel that it could make it quite impersonal, perhaps, this interaction they have with their customers. My typical response to that is, “Yes, if you don’t do it correctly”.
But I’ve seen really cool ways in which different companies use bots, AI, and chat in a connected way to offer an amazing customer journey. One example I can think of is someone who had looked at bots for handling simple repetitive questions, and it works, I guess. But that doesn’t deliver the kind of RoI we’re expecting here. So one project we then did with them was to then look at what their high-volume transactional questions were – where agents are not offering a lot of value apart from just reading information out from their back-end systems to the customer. A very typical question was, “where’s my order?”. It was really easy to automate that with a chatbot. You could even do that proactively to the customer, so he doesn’t have to approach you and ask you about it. And that’s where APIs come into play as well.
“From a company’s perspective, you then have a lot less work, time, and effort invested by your own agents to give the best possible experience to the customer. If a customer doesn’t have to go to the company and ask about their order, and spend 10 minutes of their time asking for updates, that’s a much better experience. That’s just one example of bots improving CX.”
Steven, maybe you can take us through some of the different areas where Vonage successfully has implemented things like this.
Steven Giuffre: Absolutely, Patrick. There are customers that might prefer self-service to quickly get their questions answered. But ultimately, they may require additional information, or their issue may be more complex. As long as there is a connected journey, you’re providing a good experience for the customer.
Let’s drill down into the e-commerce journey to highlight this. It’s important to acknowledge that this is just a starting point for your brand’s specific use cases and purchasing journeys:
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Steven Giuffre: I’ll start at the top with authentication of accounts. This is important for registration and transactions. This is achieved with a secure two-factor authentication solution. For example, Vonage’s verify APIs are a patented solution that deliver pin codes with a user’s choice of SMS or voice. And then cart abandonment can be mitigated when shopper concerns can be addressed in real time, with solutions such as messaging within your application, or, if preferred, via email. The important thing here is the ability to reach customers via their channel preferences, whether via social messaging or voice. It keeps customers informed of the status of their order. Together Vonage and Freshworks offer a combination of self-service and live support that is multi-channel, including messaging integration with SMS, and popular social apps such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.
It's also important to note that video has an ever growing role in supporting e-commerce use cases from product demonstrations to see-what-I-see support scenarios. So the message here is that overall, together, we provide real time self-service and live interactions, as well as enabling AI capabilities that further provide greater context of your customer’s needs, intent, and overall satisfaction. So again, the point here is that these are connected journeys, where you can ultimately provide a better experience to your customers.
Patrick Werdehausen: I’d like to provide a live example. Let’s say I’m an online retailer. I sell bicycles. I’ve got a customer who is pretty upset. He’s already plastered all over the social media channels. Then he gets in touch. He says he’s got his bicycle and it’s got a fault. And he wants to return it. He does that via live chat. So there, you could potentially have a chatbot asking him: “What is the query about?” He says he wants to return an item. There. you could have an inbuilt validation process that checks if this really the person who bought the item.
After that, perhaps you don’t want to just allow him to cancel immediately, rather, offer the ability to chat with an agent first. Pass him on to a live chat agent, who then quickly identifies that it is not necessarily an issue with the bicycle itself, but the way they’ve set it up. Then you could tell the customer that they can return it and you’ll offer them a full refund. But if they’d prefer, they could video chat with an expert who could help them set the bicycle up. So you could seamlessly hand them over from the bot, to the agent, to your technical expert or store employee, who is then on video chat trying to help the customer set up his bicycle. That’s a really cool customer experience.
Steven Giuffre: This is a great example. This is a continuous conversation with the customer. So you can start with that bot, you ultimately transfer to a live agent, who can tell the customer is upset, and can therefore, bring in a bot for sentiment analysis, as well as bring in a manager if necessary, who can request a transcript of the call to further gauge the customer’s emotions.
This all can be done in local languages so that a language bot can be brought in. So there’s a lot you can do within a single conversation to truly enrich that interaction with the customer.