Could the 22% of CX Professional Leaders please stand up?

There are some fascinating numbers in the State of Customer Experience 2018: The Five Habits of Highly Effective CX Professionals, produced by Engage (www.engagecustomer.com) and Confirmit (www.engagecustomer.com) - and lots else, it’s a really useful document, full of great insight, research and ideas. However, I’m somehow unconvinced by its categorisation of 22% of “CX professionals” as Leaders.
Why?

Let me explain.

Firstly, I have a bit of a problem with the ‘professionalisation’ of customer experience. Of course there are particular tools, techniques and insights which are vital to improving customer experience, but fundamentally listening to customers doesn’t require the reserved membership or the equivalent of a medieval Guild. Practically anyone can do it and everyone in the organisation should be encouraged to contribute. Some of the best insights will be from the employees who spend all day dealing with customers in the field, on the shop-floor and in the contact centre.

Secondly, the ‘Leader’ category described in the State of Customer Experience 2018 is restricted to those respondents who could see “significant increase in budget in the next 12 months (9 or 10 on a 0-10 scale)”. Sorry, but I just don’t buy this! I’m not naive and I understand that in modern, complex organisations investment in the right techniques and technologies are needed as well as a - simple sounding; hard to achieve - willingness to try and understand what the customer wants. But empire and budget-building are no guarantee of anything. Surely better an unfunded and authentic customer orientation than a vast programme of journey mapping, C-SAT, CES, CX and NPS scoring that goes nowhere (and we’ve all seen just those sort of programmes in action)?

Fundamentally, achieving a great customer experience is very hard work for a variety of reasons. Although being given a bigger budget might be a great help (and presumably at least shows you’ve got some of the necessary support from the Board level) of itself it won’t achieve a thing - except make your search for those elusive sources of evidence of the (undoubted) relationship between customer experience and business performance even more urgent!

So, if – despite my reservations - you aspire to be a leading “CX Professional” but have little or no budget, then don’t despair! Here’s a list of 7 things you can do with no budget, except maybe the cost of a few train fares:

1. Set out on a road trip and talk to colleagues (and your suppliers’ and business partners’ employees) who are in contact with customers
2. Go online and take some customer journeys – make some calls, start a chat, follow the Contact Us directions and see what happens
3. Identify some real customers (at random or on the basis of feedback or complaints), make contact, tell them what you’re doing and ask to talk to them
4. Go the contact centre and listen to calls, read emails and chats and write some notes
5. Find out what groups within your organisation are developing new propositions, contact channels, offers and find out if they have a ‘customer representative’ on board. If they haven’t, find one. Quick!
6. Make a first draft of your CX priorities and changes
7. And be prepared to adjust it as you go – your organisation isn’t static and neither are your customers

Source: https://channeldoctors.co.uk/2019/01/11/could-the-22-of-cx-professional-leaders-please-stand-up/

2023 Buyers Guide

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Artificial Intelligence

Page: 12

1.)

Acqueon Technologies Inc. Acqueon's AI-driven conversational engagement software enables sales, marketing and service organizations to engage in emotionally connected dialogs with customers via their channel of choice for significantly improved results. The Acqueon suite adds multichannel campaign management, contact center analytics, desktop, and CRM connectors for your contact center software of choice, including Amazon Connect, Cisco, Nice inContact, and Twilio. Acqueon conversational engagement software leverages the Acqueon IQ platform to aggregate data from the various applications, assemble rich customer contexts, and drive next-best-action using powerful statistical and predictive models.

2.)	Aculab Answering Machine Detection Answering Machine Detection (AMD) enables you to determine the receiving side of an outgoing call and tailor your call flow accordingly. With AMD you can determine if a human, answering machine or fax machine has picked up an outbound voice API call.

3.)

Agara Agara is an autonomous virtual voice agent powered by Real-time Voice AI. It is designed to have intelligent conversations with your customers, vendors, and partners without any assistance from human agents. It can handle a wide variety of calls including inbound customer care calls, outbound lead generation calls, appointment scheduling calls, and overdue payment recovery calls. Agara is available for several industries including banking, insurance, retail, e-commerce, airlines, and telecom. Powered by advanced Real-time Voice AI that understands speech in real-time, automatically determines the right process to follow and guides the caller along in the process with natural conversation.

4.)

Aktify Aktify Aktify is personalizing interactions between brands and consumers at scale with machine learning. It allows contact centers to offload their leads that are not responding to agents to Aktify where AI will be used to follow up through SMS until the customer is ready to talk to an agent. Aktify produces something out of nothing, as typically unresponsive leads are not focused on.

5.)

Balto Software Inc Real-time call guidance and post call data analytics Balto Software is a provider of real-time intelligent call support and coaching. Our software solution leverages artificial intelligence to listen to both sides of a call and deliver mission-critical information and feedback to sales representatives immediately. Our solution is fully customizable and our current customers include sales teams and customer service groups in sectors ranging from debt collections to healthcare and home improvement.

6.)

Call Adapt Soundboard Software Call Adapt is a cloud-based digital soundboard application designed for contact centers. It works with any type of call and integrates with your existing dialer system. Powered by smart audio technology, Call Adapt gives your agents the ability to converse with customers in real time using programmed keyboard shortcuts. The result is perfect pitch delivery and less time spent on repetitive tasks.

7.)	Cognigy Cognigy.AI Cognigy.AI is a Conversational AI Automation platform that enables enterprises to easily create and operate AI-powered virtual agents to automatically handle calls and chats from customers and employees.

8.)

Consilium Software Consilium UniChAI™ Contacting customer service can often be a challenging experience with waiting on hold forever being one of the top reasons for client dissatisfaction. Furthermore, repeating information that was already provided to a chat agent, and generally spending too much time getting answers to questions can all lead to a lengthy, and often frustrating, customer journey. With unlimited scalability, enterprise-level security, and best-in-class data privacy features, UniChAI™ is a conversational AI platform which is playing an important role in improving some of these aspects of customer experience (CX) through chatbots – which are intelligent and natural-language virtual assistants meant to augment a c... (read more)Contacting customer service can often be a challenging experience with waiting on hold forever being one of the top reasons for client dissatisfaction. Furthermore, repeating information that was already provided to a chat agent, and generally spending too much time getting answers to questions can all lead to a lengthy, and often frustrating, customer journey. With unlimited scalability, enterprise-level security, and best-in-class data privacy features, UniChAI™ is a conversational AI platform which is playing an important role in improving some of these aspects of customer experience (CX) through chatbots – which are intelligent and natural-language virtual assistants meant to augment a contact center’s agent-assisted service. These chatbots are able to recognize human text chat and speech and understand the caller’s intent without requiring the caller to converse in specific phrases. Callers can perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment, without the need to speak to an agent. UniChAI™ is designed to deliver a personalized customer experience across any application, device, or channel, with an advanced bot and virtual agent to recognize customer intentions. While most chatbots try to mimic human interactions, UniChAI™ is more than a chatbot – it keeps interactions intuitive and repeatable, using consistent features and helping enterprises to answer and resolve a high percentage of their routine customer inquiries without any human intervention, resulting in increased productivity and efficiency, and certainly a shorter waiting time in queue. UniChAI™ allows contact centers to create intelligent conversational chatbots, and turn their contact flows into natural conversations that provide personalized experiences for callers. Using the most advanced AI technology, a chatbot powered by UniChAI™ can be attached to a non-voice contact flow to recognize the intent of the caller, ask follow-up questions, and provide answers. UniChAI™ maintains context and manages the dialogue, dynamically adjusting the responses based on the conversation, so that contact centers can perform common tasks and address many customer inquiries through self-service interaction with the bot. Benefits at a glance • Personalizing the customer experience: UniChAI™ serves as a virtual assistant, providing real-time context and advice to the agent, making customer and agent interactions more effective as the most relevant customer interaction history is presented to the agent. • 24x7 availability: Customer service is all about convenience, that is services being available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. UniChAI™ chatbot can deliver self-service to clients round the clock, by filling in those hours when your contact center is not staffed. • Improving Customer Satisfaction: Using the advanced capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI), UniChAI™ understands the context and sentiment of the customer query to respond back quickly, thus, reducing operational costs and resulting in greater levels of customer satisfaction. • Easy to Use: UniChAI™ provides an easy-to-use console to create chatbot or conversational interfaces in minutes. • Seamless 3rd-Party Integrations: UniChAI™ provides built-in integrations with 3rd party CRM’s or applications using REST APIs. • Cost-effective: With UniChAI™ there are no upfront costs or minimum fees. Contact centers and technology partners can avail Consilium’s pay-as-you-go pricing, which makes it a cost-effective way to step into conversational AI capability.

9.)

ContactEngine ContactEngine ContactEngine connects conversations across entire customer journeys with One Voice delivering exceptional CX and demonstrable business value for organizations around the world. ContactEngine provides proactive customer service by helping your customers through the channels they’re most comfortable with. It aims to contact your customer before your customer contacts you.

10.)

Daisee Daisee Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-... (read more)Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-the-customer. Unlike legacy speech analytics providers that simply transcribe audio to text and use ‘word spotting’ (i.e building a database of synonyms for every use case - ‘angry’ and ‘manager’ as well as ‘upset’ and ‘supervisor’ and simply spotting for those words), the engine has proprietary use of its sentiment language – a University innovation developed at Daisee, resulting in far more accurate transcription, enabling derivation of the context of a conversation. The Programmable Scorecard™ scores every call, and automatically activates a workflow for low-scoring, high-risk calls in near-real-time so they can be immediately reviewed and remediated. As the solution is pre-trained out of the box, deployment is a matter of weeks, not months and there is no setup or professional services fees – just a straightforward SaaS based pricing model. Ensure 100% of your phone interactions are not only monitored but also analyzed and scored with high-risk calls triaged for fast review and remediation.

11.)

eGain Corporation Automate the routine and boring and augment the interesting with eGain AI (Artificial Intelligence). eGain is a pioneer in AI for contact center customer service and customer engagement and has developed cutting-edge technology as also best practices and proven use-cases over the last two decades. eGain’s patented Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) technology, called Guided Help, is a simple but powerful AI technology used to find answers to customer issues, and for process guidance and decision making. Along with Knowledge and Analytics, Artificial Intelligence forms the core of the eGain Customer Engagement Hub platform and its omnichannel and digital-first capability.

12.)

eGain Corporation eGain Knowledge+AI eGains omnichannel customer engagement solutions power digital-first experiences for leading brands. Infused with AI, machine learning, knowledge and analytics, our award-winning platform helps clients automate and optimize customer journeys via virtual assistance, messaging, social, mobile, web, and contact centers.

13.)	Emmersion Automated Language Testing Emmersion offers automated assessments to quickly and accurately test speaking, writing, and grammar fluency in 9 languages and counting. We help contact centers improve CSAT scores by screening for top talent and retaining top performers.

14.)

enthu.ai Conversational AI We help you automate your QA program using artificial intelligence. Why just listen to 6 calls when you can listen to 100% of your calls that too without adding any additional resources. We empower QAs to get to the right calls, find coaching and training opportunities and improve overall Customer experience.

15.)

Eudata Convy.AI Scale up your business using Convy AI, the artificial intelligence that acts like a human helping enterprises to better interact with their clients and agents to be focused on the value added transactions. Convy.AI is used to support, entertain and simplify the experience of million of customers every month. Convy.AI understand natural language (but supports also button based UIs), simply integrate many front end (chat, email, whatsapp, IVR, Alexa, google home, ...) and it's zero code admin interface enables everybody to manage conversations.

16.)

ExecVision ExecVision is a conversation intelligence platform built to drive human behavior change which positively impacts individual, team, and organization performance. The software ingests, transcribes, and analyzes conversations to provide actionable insights for coaching, upskilling, and more informed decision making. Sales, QA, customer success and support teams use ExecVision to create a consistent experience across the customer journey.

17.)

Koopid KoopidAI Most customer-facing interfaces make it the end user’s job to figure out how to navigate and find their way to where they need to be. This is true of websites and mobile apps as much as it of touch-tone IVRs. The interface is usually designed for the most generic of uses; and because making changes is expensive and time-consuming, these interfaces tend to be inflexible with regards to evolving times, use cases or user needs. AI can help create user interfaces that are adaptable and personalized. Advances in Conversational AI make it possible to interact with the user in natural language. Many IVRs are being re-configured to work this way and businesses are also introducing text-based cha... (read more)Most customer-facing interfaces make it the end user’s job to figure out how to navigate and find their way to where they need to be. This is true of websites and mobile apps as much as it of touch-tone IVRs. The interface is usually designed for the most generic of uses; and because making changes is expensive and time-consuming, these interfaces tend to be inflexible with regards to evolving times, use cases or user needs. AI can help create user interfaces that are adaptable and personalized. Advances in Conversational AI make it possible to interact with the user in natural language. Many IVRs are being re-configured to work this way and businesses are also introducing text-based chatbots. An even more powerful technique enables AI to manipulate the visual aspects of the user interface as well. Imagine interacting with what seems like a just-in-time mobile app or web-site, created just for you - the user - and optimized for exactly the problem you are trying to address at this moment. A Conversational UI, as it were. Deploying Conversational UI’s can dramatically improve rates of self-service, reduce call volumes and greatly simplify the customer experience. Further, integrating a Conversational UI into a natural language IVR and providing a seamless experience across channels can enable intuitive and personalized experiences that are truly delightful. And in an era where customer loyalty is closely co-related with the quality of experience, that is a game changer for the business as well.

18.)	LivePerson Automate up to 70% of messaging conversations on your website, SMS, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp and more. LivePerson has a complete solution to create, manage, and optimize bots for businesses of all sizes.

19.)

Master of Code Conversational AI Solution Conversational AI Solution offers the next wave of customer and employee experiences through business preferable digital channels: website and mobile chat, mobile app, SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Google RCS, Apple Business Chat, Amazon Alexa, Slack, Microsoft Teams. Our Conversational AI Solution enables brands to easily help customers to do self-service to increase their containment rates and save time and money. How we create conversational experiences: Virtual Assistants/Bots: Chat or Voice. Customer self-service helps to save you money, time and boosts your containment rate. Conversation Design. A user-centric conversation design methodology that converts and retains yo... (read more)Conversational AI Solution offers the next wave of customer and employee experiences through business preferable digital channels: website and mobile chat, mobile app, SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Google RCS, Apple Business Chat, Amazon Alexa, Slack, Microsoft Teams. Our Conversational AI Solution enables brands to easily help customers to do self-service to increase their containment rates and save time and money. How we create conversational experiences: Virtual Assistants/Bots: Chat or Voice. Customer self-service helps to save you money, time and boosts your containment rate. Conversation Design. A user-centric conversation design methodology that converts and retains your customers Intelligent Analytics. Real-time bot performance and actionable consumer behavior analytics

20.)

Mediatel Data Srl Contact Center Solution AI-Driven Mediatel Research and Development team developed Artificial Intelligence Engine, part of the Contact Center platform, suitable for vocal interactions using Natural Language Processing modules and digital interactions, used in chat sessions, for chat bots, email management for email dispatching or text messages.

 

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