May 25 2017 ACE 2016: Customer Service Texting Is Getting Real
I spent last week in Las Vegas at Aspect’s annual ACE conference. Of course, today I’ll only be discussing the conference here. Because, as we all know, everything else “stays in Vegas.” But I will say I got enough time to place third in a poker tournament.
I digress.
Customer service via messaging applications was a central theme surrounding ACE 2016. And It’s about time. We all want simplified customer service interactions. We want it to happen on our schedule, not while waiting 15 to 20 minutes for “the next available agent.”
It’s not just millennials, either. Everyone uses text messaging to communicate. Now companies are finally waking up to text messaging as a channel for customer service that benefits the consumer and the company.
Text Message Self-Service – Make It Conversational
Now that texting is moving from a one-way notification, to being a two-way conversation, how do we perform self-service? Up until now it was by using numbers or keywords as responses to indicate what we wanted – a lot like the IVRs of the past. It needs to be more conversational.
Aspect continues to expand their self-service platform, now incorporating the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities they acquired from Linguasys into their portfolio. This technology allows messaging applications that “understand” real sentences, leading to a conversational self-service interaction. At the conference Edwardian Hotels showed off their automated hotel assistant Edward. I can only imagine the offbeat requests that an application like Edward gets to deal with.
Using this kind of technology, self-service applications can better understand what the caller wants and make the experience simpler and friendlier. One customer service challenge is to not only understand the words of the caller, but also relate them to the context. If a customer asks “Can I get more towels?” and then asks “When will they be delivered?” the application needs to recognize “they” as being the towels.
That’s what a human would do.
Messaging Is Not the Same as Web Chat
A common fallacy is to treat text messaging as simply a variation of web chat. Web chats tend to be real-time interactions – although there are some pauses, so a web chat agent can support multiple simultaneous chats. Text messaging conversations, on the other hand, tend to be a lot more asynchronous.
A consumer asks a question, gets a response and then does something else for a while. They then reply back minutes or even hours later to continue the conversation. The context of this conversation must be maintained – i.e. are they still talking about the towels? As a result, a text message interaction is more likely to span multiple agents – another reason how automation can help.
It’s All Social Channels
Text messaging is not the only channel for this messaging. Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and others are/will be channels for this same type of conversation. What I heard at ACE 2016 only confirmed what I think many of us have known for some time: The conversation needs to not only be supported on all of these channels, but be handled as it moves across them as well.
Remember, reducing customer effort relies on maintaining context!