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Customer Experience, Learning & Training, Recognition, Work

Promotion Update & Lucep’s Top 50 Customer Experience Blogs and Influencers

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I’ve been quiet over the last few weeks – life has been busy since I got promoted 😊 I’m now Learning & Development Manager for Comm100.

Our business is growing fast and getting mature enough now that we really needed an L&D lead to drive internal and external training initiatives.

I’m extremely happy to be that person and I’m looking forward to helping Comm100 to grow and learn even better!

I wanted also to post a link to Lucep’s list of their Top 50 Customer Experience Blogs and Influencers, which I’m pleased to be a part of.

Being on the list nestled between the awesome CustomerServiceLife blog and CX & Social media expert Dan Gingiss (as well as so many other CX superstars) is just beyond awesome really, and I’m always humbled and honored when I receive recognition for my writing and ideas.

Thanks Lucep!

Read more at Lucep’s Blog

Customer Experience, Technology, Work

RapportBoost.AI Interview Part 3: Live Chat Data Is the Key to QA

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Here’s part 3 of my interview with Rapportboost.AI – you can access part 1 here and part 2 here.

This time, we discuss live chat data, quality assurance and how live chat contributes to the sales cycle.

The bounty of live chat data that this channel produces is the perfect tool for tracking the success of optimization. After all, with a sound live chat implementation, what matters most at the end of the day is how customers respond.

In our final installment of our Interview Series with Kaye Chapman, Customer Experience and Training Specialist at Comm100, we got down to the nitty-gritty of QA and chat conversion reporting – the proof that your live chat channel performs.

RB.AI: In instances where you are working with a customer who uses chat and then also has channels that are handled by a different company, how do you handle coming up with data metrics and reports?

KC: We are lucky in that we have a really strong reporting suite, so it can report on so many aspects of chat from the very basic stuff like chat volume to customer satisfaction to more advanced stuff like being able to see how productive agents are, how canned messages are being used, looking at survey fields within chat to see what their usage is as well as through our reporting API and various integrations connecting with other systems like CRM or ticketing. So we consistently found that clients like our reporting suite because it’s so comprehensive and it does allow clients to get the insights they need from chat and apply them to other channels as well.

Chat is a fantastic tool because you can get so many different reports and statistics from it. When you’re thinking about telephone service, for example, it can be a difficult process to actually gauge how effective a particular call has been. Some years ago, I was a quality assessor myself, and to really understand quality it was a very long process of call selection, call listening, checking a variety of different systems for customer and interaction data, marking things down on a separate scoresheet, and finally providing feedback to the employee.

With chat, it’s much easier because you can immediately see from the chat transcripts how the chat went, you have all the data regarding the customer and their satisfaction, you have all the data regarding how long the chat was, what resources were used, and how it was wrapped up. Most of the data you need to drive quality is built in, and I would say from a quality and continuous improvement point of view, chat is a fantastic tool to make those continuous improvements more easily than traditional channels.

RB.AI: I absolutely agree that live chat data can be leveraged to simplify QA. Earlier we spoke about using live chat for sales as opposed to customer support, and you mentioned Comm100’s conversion reporting tool. I’d love to hear your expertise in leveraging data to see how much chat contributes to the sales cycle.

KC: Absolutely, it’s important to have visibility over ROI from any communication channel you have. Chat Conversion reporting is an amazing tool that allows businesses to analyze live chat data to see straight away how chat is contributing to the sales cycle. Once a client has let us know what a conversion is for them, whether it’s a sale or a download or something different, we can link those conversions to chat records so it’s easy to see what agents contributed to a sale and how exactly they did that. Clients can then put processes in place to replicate those successful results, not only through agent coaching but by more automated processes such as using successful prompts in proactive chat invitations and canned messages, which can be personalized to particular customer segments. All in all, conversions reporting gives a lot of insight into exactly how chat drives the sales cycle and means that viewing the process of how chat drives sales as more of an art than a science just isn’t correct anymore.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Emotional Intelligence, Technology, Work

Rapportboost.AI Interview Part 2: Chat With Emotional Intelligence

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Here’s part 2 of my interview with Rapportboost.AI – you can access part 1 here.

This time, we’re taking on the topic of emotional intelligence and discussing how technology can help in delivering emotionally intelligent customer interactions.

As Augmented Intelligence transforms the workforce, emotional understanding is proving to be an essential component of brands’ interactions with their customers. After discussing live chat agent training in Part One of our Interview Series, we asked Kaye Chapman, Customer Experience and Training Specialist at Comm100, to shed light on the best strategies for chatting with emotional intelligence.

RB.AI: Let’s talk about emotional intelligence. This concept is of special importance to us at RapportBoost.AI because we help brands use high-EQ to achieve increased revenues and conversions when using chat for sales. What are some measures you’ve found to be effective for chatting with a certain level of emotional intelligence?

KC: Regardless of use case, emotional intelligence is helpful for agents across the board, given that EI is such a cornerstone of effective personalization. It’s important for chat agents to be able to pick up on specific language and to understand how they need to adapt their behavior to suit that particular customer. When I’m thinking about how to promote communication in an emotionally intelligent way, one of the things I encourage agents to do is take full advantage of the canned message library and save those phrases that have been especially impactful. Make sure that there is a constant cycle of trying things, evaluating them for effectiveness, and using them in the future if they have been successful.

RB.AI: I think we are all excitedly watching conversational commerce take off and that has to do with so many things, such as making purchases through cell phones and the fact that millennials like to chat. For these reasons, do you think sales and chat will converge in the near future?

KC: I think sales and chat are already converging, and it’s exciting to see organizations using tactics like Account Based Chat to engage with key prospects – we liken it to “rolling out the red carpet” for customers by providing them with experiences that are deeply personalized. I do think conversational commerce is going to get bigger and it is going to be the thing that separates out the wheat from the chaff in terms of who does well in the future and who doesn’t.

RB.AI: Agreed. Along those lines, could you talk a little bit about channel optimization and some strategies you’ve used to optimize live chat?

KC: We advocate effective journey mapping to understand what types of customers are coming into which particular channels. We also encourage our clients to think about the concept of channel blending or channel pairing when they are planning different channel mixes, what channels they engage on, and how they can move customers from one channel to another. The idea behind channel blending or pairing is rather than thinking about channels in isolation, you can think about how to use the best aspects of different channels to form a great experience for your customer. For example, chat is fantastic for helping people with urgent issues in a synchronous way. But you can also enable knowledge base integration to live within the chat window, and clients can configure it so that customers go through the knowledge base before they hit an actual live chat agent. Now, that’s fantastic because, from a customer’s perspective, it might not be so easy to find out where a knowledge base is on a client’s website, it might be that your customer’s in a little bit of a rush, it is just that rush aspect that makes it easier for them to speak with an agent. Actually positioning the knowledge base within the chat window gives customers more choice to select a channel that suits them, and obviously, there are big bonuses there for clients as well in terms of deflecting unnecessary query types from chat.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Learning & Training, Technology, Work

Winning Live Chat Training for Your Customer Service Team

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Implementing live chat for your customer service team might seem like a major decision—and it is!—but it is only the first step in modernizing your customer service strategy. Luckily, implementing a live chat system on your website is often pretty simple, but a tool isn’t useful if your teams aren’t trained to use it properly, and aren’t fully on board with its potential to make life easier.

Simply giving technical training on the new system and then letting your agents loose won’t prepare them adequately for the task. The agents might not be prepared enough to adapt their existing customer service knowledge to the live chat system—which could cause negative encounters with customers through misinterpreted comments, slow chats or grammar gaffes.

Because of this, it’s important to back up systems training with training focused on the experience of your live chat customers, helping your agents to understand the service impacts of your new channel. Here are five things to consider when giving effective chat support training to your team.

  1. Words, Tone and Body Language 
  2. Professional customer service agents understand that all face-to-face communication is made up of three different elements: words, tone and body language.Telephone communication can be tricky since agents can’t rely on assessing a customer’s body language to get more insight into what they’re thinking and feeling. Extra attention needs to be paid to words spoken, and the tone they’re spoken in, to accurately ‘read’ a customer. And when communicating back to customers, words and tone need to be delivered and moderated carefully in order to communicate in a clear way.Live chat presents extra challenges. Without being able to hear a customer speaking or see their body language, how can you read the subtleties of their communication to truly understand the meaning of what they’re saying? And how can you demonstrate listening and friendliness or build rapport by simply exchanging typed messages?Attention to wording here becomes absolutely crucial in allowing you to do all of this. Agents need to step up their communication a notch to consider sentence structure, word choice and conversation flow in building and assessing the intent of a communication.

    Top Tip    : Hold a short training session introducing the Mehrabian communication model and ask your agents to consider the impacts of not having tone or body language to help them communicate. Questions to ask include: What problems could arise through relying on just words to communicate with? How could miscommunication occur? How could this be prevented?
  3. Live Chat School If you’ve ever attended a formal, ‘classroom-based’ training session, you’ll know that the most important part of learning is actually applying the knowledge you’ve learned in the workplace. Indeed, one of the most highly regarded training models there is states that as much as 70% of learning occurs through hands-on, on-the-job work, not through structured training sessions.That’s not to say there isn’t a place for formal training sessions—just that the most effective adoption of live chat expertise comes through checking and facilitating learning while your agents are using the software. Building in an extended training period after initial live chat training is a great way to give your agents the space to experiment in their approach until they are handling the software like experts.

    Top Tip    : Introduce ‘Live Chat School’ after initial live chat training by setting standards for your team to attain, and assessing them throughout the extended training period. Once they hit targets for customer satisfaction, chat length and/or utilization, ‘graduate’ them to your regular quality assurance program.
  4. Spelling and GrammarWhen you hired your telephone-based agents, it’s unlikely that you paid much attention to their writing, spelling and grammar skills. In fact, you may have forgiven some mistakes they made on their resumes because, after all, they didn’t need top-notch writing skills.You may have held mock customer interactions with them, listening to how they sound on the telephone, their ability to reassure and assure customers through careful vocal communication.Live chat doesn’t make these skills redundant. However, it does require agents to brush up on their writing skills. Agents with sloppy writing or bad grammar reflect badly on your company, causing customers to question the abilities and professionalism of your staff.

    Top Tip    : Hold a ‘Grammar Police’ themed quiz, testing agents on common grammatical mistakes and giving a prize to the top ‘Grammar Cop.’ Back this up by ensuring that agents have access to a style guide which sets the standard for correct spelling, capitalization, punctuation and sentence structure.
  5. Live Chat ScriptsMost telephone-based agents will have a set of standard scripts they use in conversations: for example, their greeting and closing messages to customers.Live chat as a system is unique in that any of these scripts can be added as shortcuts in the agent console, saving them time in their interactions.Live chat scripts can also be used to speed up interactions and improve quality outside of these standard scenarios—for example, by adding scripts to discuss product features without missing any key details, or for giving complete instructions on how to reset a password.It’s important for you to acknowledge how important scripts can be in increasing quality and saving time, and to give your agents the chance to think creatively about how they can develop scripts that work well for them.

    Top Tip    : Hold a scripting workshop for your agents. Examine what scripts are already used, what scenarios new scripts could be written for and the advantages of these. Make sure to discuss potential time savings and the reduction in needing to repetitively type out the same statements for different customers.
  6. In the Live Chat Customer’s ShoesIn their telephone-based work, your agents will already be pretty clear on the factors of their service that impact the customer experience. Wait times, clarity of communication and transfers between departments are prime examples of situations which can destroy the customer experience if handled badly—or enhance the customer experience, if done really well.Live chat software presents extra situations that can either enhance or degrade your customers’ experience. The time taken to respond to a message, the use of canned responses and the ability to share screens all add new dimensions to the customer experience that you and your agents probably haven’t considered.

    Top Tip    : Hold an ‘In their shoes’ training session. Split your agents into two groups and ask them to take the viewpoint of one of your customers. Ask one group to imagine and script the best possible customer experience that could be had while using live chat for a range of real-life scenarios. Ask the other group to script the worst experience which could be had. Once done, ask them to share and question them on their decisions: what impact do certain agent actions have on live chat? Why do these actions occur—through accident, or intent? How can they be mitigated against (if bad) or adopted (if good)?

Implementing live chat may require your existing team to stretch their skills and capabilities to adapt to new ways of communicating with your customers. Given the right tools, the right training and the right perspective, your team will continue to deliver the top-notch service your brand is known for through this rapidly growing and heavily preferred channel.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Recognition, Work

I’m a CX Accelerator Community Organizer!

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Very proud to announce that I’m now a community organizer for the awesome CX Accelerator community on Slack!

I’m a big promoter of communities of practice to support professional learning, so it’s a real pleasure to be involved with this group and to be able to support the good work Nate and the team have put in to expand and share knowledge relating to CX, both inside and outside of the contact center.

If you haven’t yet checked out the community, click through to take a look at what it offers, what others say about it, and see how you can join.

I’d love to see my blog readers sign up and join in the fun and learning – please do mention that I sent you!

Customer Experience, Learning & Training, Technology, Work

RapportBoost.AI Interview Part 1: Live Chat Agent Training Drives CX

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It was awesome to have been able to spend some time chatting with Dani, Meredith and the team at RapportBoost.AI – a fantastic company working on AI and augmented intelligence for contact center agents, blending this with a strong focus on emotional intelligence.

In this interview we discuss agent training, call center customer service and AI in the contact center.

Live chat agent training is one of the most innovative spaces in today’s customer experience ecosystem. From canned responses to augmented intelligence, companies are training their live chat agents with technology more than ever before. We sat down with Kaye Chapman, Customer Experience and Training Specialist at Comm100, to talk about leveraging live chat agent training to drive customer experience and success.

RB.AI: You’re a huge advocate for implementing learning and development techniques to drive positive customer experience outcomes. Could you share some of your insights regarding effective live chat agent training?

KC: Absolutely. Effective live chat agent training has to be centered around customer needs and experiences. In the last few years, we’ve seen an incredible pace of change when it comes to the customer experience. Customer expectations are changing, new technology is being integrated into business practices and business models, and our products and offerings at Comm100 are evolving in step with the industry.

In this environment, companies need to stay agile to be able to react to customer needs. Several approaches to learning and development allow companies to do so. When helping people learn a piece of software, a golden rule of training and development that I often suggest is that live chat agents should be getting just 10% of their knowledge from formal learning experiences, 20% from colleagues, and 70% from on the job learning.

What this means for us and other vendors is it’s vital to look at a variety of different ways to help agents develop their knowledge of whatever software they’re using, not just giving initial training and relying on that to be enough. This includes making good use of knowledge bases and having a range of learning materials available for live chat agents to reference that integrate multimedia such as photos and video.

The best customer experiences are invisible – customers shouldn’t have to go out of their way to get the information they need to solve a problem, and should have ample self-serve materials at their fingertips – and the same can be said for the live chat agent’s experience of learning to use our software. We make sure they’re really well supported to be able to develop their knowledge quite organically, without much extra help being needed from us.

RB.AI: We so often think about generating a frictionless experience for the customer, but the same can be said for your customers that use live chat software, such as West Corporation, Whirlpool, and Stanford University. You want their experience of learning to use that software to be frictionless as well.

KC: That’s right.

RB.AI: When you visit a contact center, how do you assess the workspace and create a plan to provide the optimal channel ecosystem for a brand or company? I would imagine this involves a bit of specialization on a case-by-case basis.

KC: We actually don’t encourage our clients to use any particular patterns or funnel for fielding queries from multiple channels. What our platform does is support customer choice with the idea of being present whenever or wherever the visitor wants to start a chat, from any channel. We coach our clients, where possible, to let the visitor decide and not the company, which is an essential aspect of being truly customer-centric. Our platform supports multiple channels that work together with our integration of knowledge bases, social media channels, and ticketing system. We coach our clients to make use of all these resources together for a better experience for the agent and the customer as well as the use of canned messages, which help to achieve consistency and compliance of responses while reducing knowledge load for front-line agents.

RB.AI: It sounds like you’re making great strides to automate customer chat to remove the burden from the front-line agent through various technologies. I understand that Comm100 is also developing a chatbot. Could you expand on how this bot is integrated into your software environment?

KC: Chatbots are developing rapidly, their adoption is spiking, and for good reason. A correctly configured chatbot service can deflect a significant proportion of customer queries from the contact center, allowing agents to upskill and focus on the more complex questions the chatbot can’t answer.

It’s important for clients to be realistic about what exactly chatbots can handle. At the moment I’d say AI tech is capable of handling 80% of the use cases an organization would encounter. If clients are realistic about exactly what sort of queries their chatbot can handle well and the sort of training required for it to do that, chatbots can provide real cost savings for the business.

It’s good to consider that while many of us think of chatbots as being about conversations, many of the successful use cases I’ve seen involve bots undertaking transactions, such as pushing out credit card forms, confirming a customer’s account information, delivery times and the like. They can also help with resourcing, for example, when agents aren’t online chatbots can provide 24/7 coverage. Also, it’s worth considering that chatbots don’t get sick, they won’t be late for shifts, and they don’t get upset when a customer is rude – so there’s real potential there for chatbots to act as a great backup to cushion you from instances where your human agents might suffer from those issues.

One thing that’s often a concern for clients is making sure that the chatbot is well trained and it doesn’t degrade the customer experience before it improves it. A big part of what we do is working very closely with our clients to ensure chatbots are trained effectively for each business and industry, that it can be effective, it does have contextual awareness, and it’s personalized to the client’s business too.

Originally published here.

Learning & Training, Recognition, Work

Sutherland Labs June 2018’s Coolest Things

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I don’t usually share shout-outs and smaller mentions of my writing on this blog, but I felt like this article was especially worth sharing as there’s a lot of other good articles linked there too, alongside my Zendesk blog on icebreaker training activities.

I loved the ideas on how to shake up your to-do lists with a new formula to help you get organized.

The article around the links between language and mental health is something I find fascinating and relevant for customer experience, as we all know how much the words we speak and hear contribute to building meaning.

It’s always brilliant to hear of instances where my ideas are changing how other teams think and work, so I was really pleased to see my article drummed up some discussion!

Read Sutherland Labs June 2018 Coolest Things here.

Customer Experience, Work

Keynote Learnings from ICMI Expo 2018: Ernesto Salas, Disney Institute

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Trade shows are a fantastic place to get up to date on all of the latest technology, best practices and ideas in your industry. The ICMI Contact Center Expo which took place at the end of May was no different – with a strong keynote lineup and insightful sessions to attend, it was a fantastic event for anyone looking to top up their knowledge on everything CX.

But one of the challenges of so many opportunities to learn is figuring out how to package up those insights and apply them within your contact center. Hearing the philosophies that power world-class companies to deliver exceptional customer experiences is incredibly inspiring, and can drive you to adjust the same philosophies that affect your processes. But working out how processes need to change to fall in line with those same philosophies can be tougher.

In this blog post series, we’ll be picking apart some of the keynote speeches shared at the ICMI Expo, and throwing some light on what those insights could mean for your contact center.

We’re starting off with the opening keynote of Tuesday, May 22nd – “Inspiring Customer Service Excellence” from Ernesto Salas, Business Programs Senior Facilitator at the Disney Institute.

Common Purpose & Brand Promise

Ernesto shared a lot of ideas around the factors which caused Disney to become the hugely successful company it is today. At Disney, one of the most important parts of having a strong customer focus is having a common purpose and a clear brand promise.

Disney’s common purpose is “We create happiness by providing the finest entertainment for people of all ages, everywhere.” This common purpose applies to everyone within Disney – every cast member has a role to play in creating happiness, no matter whether they’re greeting parkgoers or sweeping the streets.

The type of language used within this common purpose is important. Disney’s common purpose isn’t to ensure that it delivers value to stakeholders, or ensures profitable growth. Common purposes like this are both accessible and inspirational for employees of all levels, helping to get them excited about the opportunity to make a difference.

Ernesto also spoke of Disney’s brand promise: “We deliver entertainment with heart.” Statements like this unite internal and external customers in their expectations of the service that will be delivered – helping to ensure consistency across the brand. Customers hate inconsistency, and it’s by tightening up on this that exceptional experiences can begin to be created.

What can we learn from this? I think there’s a few things here that can be applied in any contact center. Firstly, if you haven’t got a mission and vision which unite employees and make it clear what you’re all working towards, it’s good to think about developing one.

If you already have a mission and vision, ensure that employees aren’t so tied up in meeting KPIs that they’re blind to long term goals. A strong vision of service which appeals to emotion helps employees to feel they are part of something worthy and important. It’s that feeling which drives engagement, and is one of the reasons why uniting employees under a common mission and vision is so vital.

Lastly, consider what your brand promises, from your own perspective as well as that of your customers and your employees. If there are mismatches, it’s likely your customers will feel them acutely. Getting to the bottom of what causes those mismatches is a great step in creating consistent, excellent experiences.

Intentional Experiences

Disney magic doesn’t happen by accident. Ernesto spoke to the areas where Disney concentrates on to create positive experiences, noting that Disney’s consistent business results are driven by strategically focusing on certain business areas and opportunities, where other businesses may not see value or potential.

And that’s important, as that’s where differentiation occurs. Paying attention to those areas that fall by the wayside for other businesses is a key to Disney’s success. Or, in Ernesto’s words, “We have learnt to be intentional where others may not be intentional”.

Another interesting idea that Ernesto covered is in relation to stereotypes. He explained that significant service differentiation can occur when widely-held industry stereotypes are ruptured. This is so relevant for contact centers, which still suffer from the high-volume, low-quality stereotypes associated with call centers in the 80s and 90s. There’s a lot of potential for you to rupture that stereotype! Think how you can subvert your customer’s expectations to deliver service that’s not only exceptional for your business, but extraordinary in your field.

Ernesto, Sergio and Aliases in the Contact Center

Ernesto explained that in his previous role in Disney reservations, he used to take on the role of Sergio – a made-up persona who inspired him to deliver better service. In the role of Sergio, interactions were always bright, attentive and helpful. Ernesto was left at the doorway of his home, together with any grumpiness or hang-ups that could affect interactions with customers.

As a former call center worker and manager myself, I’m always a little cautious of management philosophies which advise that your ‘real life’ personality should be left at the door, replaced with a mask of cheery helpfulness. For one, the perspective that personal problems don’t belong at work means that those problems become taboo – with the implication that we shouldn’t acknowledge difficult emotions and that they should be ignored, even if they’re affecting our work. While I’m not suggesting that we all become armchair psychiatrists, I do believe that all of us should be able to bring our whole selves to work, and be able to acknowledge when our ‘real’ personas aren’t doing so great – as it’s that acknowledgement which allows change to occur.

Of course, modern work requires us all to act differently than we would in our everyday lives. That’s certainly true for contact center agents, who are expected to regulate their emotions when talking to customers. So in one sense, maybe adopting an entirely different persona is just part of the job description.

On the other hand, researchers have identified that workers adjust to workplace personas in two different ways. The first is known as ‘deep acting’, or the process of trying to align your internal thoughts and feelings with organizational expectations. It’s a genuine and thoughtful process of self-development, and that process seemed to be what just Ernesto described.

The second way is known as ‘surface acting’. This means workers fake a persona, while leaving their internal thoughts and feelings intact. The problem with surface acting is that it has been shown to lead to higher levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization – two of the three key elements of burnout.

So, following Ernesto/Sergio’s example, should you ask your employees to adopt an alias, in an effort to improve customer service?

In short – aliases can be fantastic to inspire engaged employees to achieve better. But be cautious of mandating their use, as encouraging disengaged employees to fake a persona can be damaging.

Culture & Training

Culture is all-important at Disney, since it’s cast members who are responsible for delivering extraordinary experiences. It’s only through paying attention to employee engagement that those cast members can be empowered to.

Ernesto spoke to the importance of ensuring employees are engaged, as it’s only those employees who will deliver the best service. Hiring for culture fit is all-important at Disney, and once Disney had developed a strong culture it became easy to see who would be a right fit for it.

He also spoke to the importance of training employees, again for engagement and also to ensure that they are appropriately skilled for their role. Ernesto spoke of times where Disney had been challenged on this by other firms, who ask why Disney spent so much on training when employees can leave at any time. Disney’s response to this – “What if they stay?”

It’s always fantastic to hear about organizations putting training and development at the heart of their operations, as many organizations are still only just beginning to understand the importance of the employee experience in delivering great customer experiences.

Tips to take away from this are to consider whether your hiring practices include an assessment of culture fit, and taking a fresh look at your training programs to see if they’re truly engaging your employees and giving them the development they’re looking for. Rolling out an internal survey to assess this is a great place to start.

Conclusion

Ernesto’s description of how exceptional service is delivered at Disney was wide-ranging and detailed, which makes sense, given that Disney are such advocates of paying attention to even the smallest things that others might miss.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Technology, Work

The Challenge of AI Voice Assistants in Customer Service

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During May, Google’s I/O 2018 conference was held to show the latest in Google’s offerings to developers around the globe. While Google demonstrated a lot of different new tech at the conference, it was their keynote demonstration of its latest “Duplex” technology which has lit up the internet.

Duplex uses Google Assistant to call companies on a user’s behalf to perform simple, structured tasks, such as booking a haircut or scheduling a restaurant reservation. While voice synthesis isn’t exactly new, it was the humanlike inflections and natural conversational flow in these calls that many found to be jaw-dropping (or, alternately, terrifying).

If you haven’t yet seen Google’s demo, click through to watch it now, and prepare for your mind to be blown. (Skip to 43 seconds to get straight into the demo.)

Although this technology isn’t yet consumer-grade, Google says it will start to test Duplex within Google Assistant as early as this summer. How then should our customer service operations handle this upcoming customer-side automation in voice calls?

Identify Verification & Trust

Part of the reason why Duplex has caused so many ripples is because it gives a glimpse into a rather dystopian future – one where humans can’t tell whether they’re talking to an AI (causing many to wonder if the Turing testhas been passed by this new tech).

Before now, voice assistants haven’t been capable of holding natural-sounding conversations. But the calls demoed by Google, complete with inflections such as “Mm-hmm” or “Ah, gotcha”, sounded so lifelike that it’s clear the human operators on the other end had no idea they were speaking to an AI.

That in itself has caused outrage – with commentators pointing out that ethical problems occur when service workers and call center staff are unsuspectingly experimented on by Google’s human-sounding AIs. Google reacted to this outcry by asserting that working versions of Duplex should have the ability to identify itself built in.

But whether AIs self-identify or not, the cat’s already out of the bag for anyone considering whether their identity verification processes will need to change as a result of this technology – the answer is undoubtedly, yes. The key to how exactly processes will need to change lies in whether AIs are required to self-identify or not – whether by Google themselves, governments or any other regulatory body.

If AIs are required to self-identify themselves as such and state that they’re acting on behalf of a human, should agents be responding to their wishes as if they were that human? I can easily envisage scenarios where AIs can eventually make payments, change data or perform any other process that has impacts on customer or company – only for the customer to respond that the AI’s actions were a mistake and not authorized by them. How then can we determine human intent behind the actions of an AI?

If AIs are not required to self-identify, issues emerge around trust and standards. As it stands, technology like Duplex is only effective in a limited range of scenarios, making it easy to ask a question that sits outside of the AI’s programming to test whether it’s a robot or not (for example, “Who is the president of the United States?”)

Having agents ask these types of questions to try to weed out the “robots” from the humans is reasonably straightforward. But how will those questions evolve as AIs get smarter? Will they constitute a new, more intrusive layer of data protection processes that we have to subject unsuspecting customers to? What happens then when we speak to human customers who cannot answer these questions – through health issues, a lack of shared cultural understanding, or anything else? Could we be dooming them to be treated like little more than unfeeling robots?

Emotion & Empathy

Speaking of feelings, Duplex brings big questions as to what will constitute effective customer service in the future. Our current, human-focused model of optimal customer experience runs on the premise that if you focus on solving problems quickly, accurately and in a friendly manner, you’re likely to achieve good customer outcomes.

But AIs don’t feel. All the niceties and small talk in the world don’t matter to them. Considering that humans and AIs have different needs and priorities during issue resolution, we could see two distinct sets of standards emerge.

The first relates to service standards for humans – and as beings who have thought and felt in much the same way for thousands of years, I can’t see these undergoing any huge revolution in the future.

But a second set of service standards relates to how we can provide optimal service to AIs. I can see these standards relating to focusing on clear language, accurately clarifying intent, and decreasing emotionality in speech which could cause confusion to an AI – quite the opposite of the emotion-centered training we’ve been giving to front-line agents for decades.

Taking Humans Out of Interactions

Thinking about the role of our front-line customer service agents in the potential applications of this technology, we must consider the messages that Google is implicitly sending about the service employees customers speak to every day to get things done.

PC Magazine sums this up deftly: the implicit message embedded within Duplex is that there’s no need for customers to ‘suffer’ through speaking to service employees to get things done. In one of Duplex’s demonstrations, the lady taking the call has a thick accent that is a little difficult to understand. The AI handles this with little awkwardness, making it clear that even in service situations that can be tricky for customers, machines can handle this instead, removing all of the ‘bother’.

I still believe that human interaction and emotion is what humanizes our brands, and makes them friendly and accessible. And putting myself in the shoes of my agents, there’s something that stings about the implicit message within AI-driven voice calls – that other people see talking to them as a waste of their time.

But I do believe that the best kind of customer service is invisible, that is, mediated through access to a range of easy self-service and digital options available to prevent customers from needing to make inconvenient phone calls. Maybe then we need to focus less on the perceived value of individual interactions, and think instead about downsides of the phone as a communication channel that have caused Duplex to become a customer need.

Phone Calls as Inconvenience

The development of Duplex points to an issue innate in customer service operations – and that is, while phone calls are often the best way for a customer to accomplish a goal, they aren’t always convenient. The rise of live chat, self-service and social messaging channel options has happened as a result of this issue. These channels allow more customers to connect with organizations in ways that don’t take up all of their time or attention, require them to take time out of their day, or prevent them from multitasking while they solve problems with organizations.

The necessity of Duplex (and its positive reception by many) shows that while many organizations see cost or effort barriers to providing service over non-voice channels, clearly for some customers that isn’t good enough. Given that organizations such as Deloitte predict volume of voice interactions to businesses to fall from 64% of all channel communications in 2017 to 47% in 2019, organizations need to consider better ways to connect with their customers than by relying on voice-centric service models.

Automation promises to hold the key to dismantling these cost and effort barriers to multichannel service, as we’re now seeing within Chatbot uptake by firms big and small all over the world. While we’ve been exploring Duplex as a tool for customers to take advantage of automation in their own lives, let’s look at what the impacts are when the tables are turned and organizations can use tools like Duplex to evolve and improve their service offerings in a multichannel climate.

What if Duplex Could Help Organizations?

In the spirit of Moore’s law, it’s feasible to consider that given the current pace of technological advancement, and as a privately-owned company, Google will be looking for other ways to apply this technology, helping them to profit from it and secure its future development.

Because of this, I predict that it won’t be long at all until AIs like Duplex are pitched as a replacement for customer service agents on voice channels.

We can already see the evolution from human-led to AI-led service within other channels. Chatbot services are now handling a good percentage of everyday organizational queries over live chat. Considering that studies show that it’s realistic to aim to deflect between 40% – 80% of common customer service inquiries to chatbots, the same deflection principles could be used to help technology like Duplex to drive the same change for voice.

For voice as a channel, the closest thing we have to this right now is the dreaded IVR. The difference between IVR and AIs, however, is in the promise of service that truly helps, rather than hinders. While IVR is almost universally viewed as an unwelcome hurdle to jump on the way to service from a human agent, chatbots are proving that for certain service scenarios, AI can be as efficient as humans – if not more so, due to their speed, constant availability and scalability.

Projecting the development of this technology for voice interactions within the contact center, we’re faced with some questions. What types of voice queries are ripe for automation, and how can we channel these to AIs in a way that doesn’t add more options to a traditional IVR? What happens when customers can’t tell whether a voice agent is human or an AI? Whether that AI self-identifies or not, how does that reflect on our companies? Could we even be ushered into an age of universal mistrust in customer service where our human agents are treated badly by customers, as if they were robots, because our customers just can’t tell the difference?

Perhaps exploring automation within live chat can throw some light on these questions. I’ve seen many organizations who are meeting these issues head-on within chat – and many are digging deep into customer needs and preferences to harness this technology in ways that are both comfortable for their customers, and effective for their businesses.

A Values-Centered Approach to Automation in Customer Service

Now is the time to reflect on how our businesses will handle customer-side automation coming this year, and how more organizations can handle automation-related issues generally as technology develops.

We can take the lead from design ethicists such as Joe Edelman to consider how best to work with this technology in a way that doesn’t result in negative outcomes for our businesses, our agents or our customers.

Edelman proposes a values-centered approach to the design of social spaces online, and by using this same philosophy, we can consider how AI voice assistants detract from or complements the values of customers and other stakeholders interacting with it. Whether it’s us or the customer who’s automating, great service design will come from a consideration of not only what each party aims to achieve but also how their service preferences are denied or accommodated.

When we can consider the values of our customers and our employees, and how those interface with the needs of our businesses, we can start to use this technology in ways that are helpful and useful to them, morally sound, and which deliver the time and resource benefits that both businesses and customers want.

Originally published here.