Water utility’s new chatbot to be a fountain of knowledge to customers

Facebook Messenger bot helps to engage the views of customers

One of the leading water and sewerage companies in England and Wales has successfully launched a chatbot, designed by Synthetix, to engage the views of their customers on the water company’s plans for 2019 and beyond.

As part of the 2020-2025 initiative, customers are asked to rate the company’s plans to address challenges and issues, such as keeping bills affordable, improving the environment, water quality and customer service. Launched via Facebook Messenger, responses from customers are captured via a smiley feedback system and Synthetix is delighted to report that aggregated data already show the bot achieving a high level of engagement.

The bot is fully GDPR compliant and the company will be using the feedback data to continue improving their customers’ experience, and importantly, to help shape their business plan.

The chatbot’s high levels of interaction confirms the success of this utility’s approach to customer engagement, making it easy for customers to understand and cast their views on issues important to them. They will also submit how the results impact on their business plan to the regulator.

Alastair Taylor, Commercial Director at Synthetix says: “Synthetix is delighted to have delivered another successful deployment to our customer who are already invested in a plethora of our powerful AI-driven online customer service software. It’s no wonder that their high standards of customer service have them recognised by the water industry regulator Ofwat, as one of the most efficient water and sewerage companies in England and Wales.”

Omni-channel, 3 ways to get there

A single view of the customer

The variety and choice of communication channels in recent years show no means of slowing down and keeping up with customers wanting to interact with you, over every conceivable medium is challenging, even to the biggest brands. To further complicate matters, each channel appears to need its own integration interface to be implemented into legacy or on-premise systems. And by the time a new integration is agreed, purchased, implemented and IT or contact centre staff trained to use it, the next advance in technology makes the realisation of creating ‘a single view of the customer’ seem to be nothing but an ideology.
But for those businesses chasing omni-channel deliverability there are 3 approaches that might help make the dream a reality.

Self-development

This is a great option if your team can maintain the resources necessary to integrate with a specific API of a new contact channel and are able to sustain the code especially when a service deprecates or update its APIs. Developer-savvy businesses can piece together its own omni-channel solution but using a load-balanced network that is fail-over tolerant, and able to auto-scale to as many servers as required is key to maintain brisk performance and keep data safe.

Employing PaaS

Platform as a Service offers a rich palette of technically integrated platform solutions designed to increase agility, lower costs, and reduce IT complexity. Customer service software vendors that offer omni-channel APIs enable businesses to build, deploy, integrate and extend their own online customer service applications in the cloud using flexible RESTful APIs.

Using ready-made integrated tools

Using a complete platform for automated, self-service customer experience and agent assisted channels will ensure you maintain high levels of satisfaction and engagement no matter how customers choose to contact you. A vendor worth their weight will offer APIs to integrate with your CRM to allow for omni-channel deliverability. Look for a vendor that offers a ROI calculator to prove the impact of savings to be had using a complete online customer service suite, or those that offer

The frightening truth about bad customer service

(Cue horror laughter sound effect)

With Halloween mere weeks away, monsters, ghouls and witch outfits line the stores. One must wonder what the Celts, who started the tradition with their festival of Samhain, would say about Halloween. Who knew that ‘scary’ could have such entertainment and monetary value.

However, with fright night so close and the breath of Christmas chasing shortly behind, will your customer service strategy deliver magical customer experiences or turn ‘nice’ customers into nasty brand hating trolls? Horrendous customer service can have even the most loyal customers turn into fire breathing dragons if they feel that they have been let down.

Mirror mirror on the wall, what should businesses do to have it all?

Businesses looking to gain the competitive advantage should make customer experience their focus point. Bain & Company reports that companies that excel at customer experience grow revenues 4 – 8% above the market.

The frightening truth is that when customers experience bad service, with multiple digital channels to choose from, it could be hard to stop the domino effect tarnishing your brand’s reputation, once it’s in motion. Deloitte research shows that 85% of customer service organisations view customer experience as a competitive differentiator. However, to improve customer experience, it’s important to understand how to gauge and measure how customer expectations translate into good or bad experiences.

**Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!**Customers want answers in the channel they’re from. And will see red when it takes too long.

It seems obvious that we all want quick answers to questions, however with Statista reporting that over 81% of the UK population now own a smartphone and with the revelation that is 4G, consumers are increasingly turning to online channels to contact an organisation to resolve a customer service issue. In fact, Mckinsey & Company report that 75% of online customers expect help within 5 minutes.

Alarmingly, figures show that response rates and times to questions sent via e-mail or posted on social channels are proving disappointing, having a significant effect on customer satisfaction levels.

Twitter

• Over 1.5 million direct questions go unanswered (Source: socialbakers)
• Average question response time is 9 hours (Source: socialbakers)
• 20% of users posts mentioning brand accounts are questions (Source: socialbakers)
• Only 32% of brands have a dedicated customer service handle (Source: Simply Measured)

E-mail

• 41% of consumers expect an email response within 6 hours (Source: Forrester)
• Only 36% of retailers actually respond that quickly and 14% never respond at all (Source: Forrester)

Facebook

• Only 65% of questions are responded to by brands on Facebook (Source: socialbakers)
• 25% of user posts on Facebook pages are questions (Source: socialbakers)
• Dust those customer experience cobwebs

With a large percentage of posts on social media being questions, it makes sense to give customers the opportunity to self-serve answers to the most commonly asked questions themselves online, rather than keeping them in a perpetual state of hold. And since conversation is part of natural human behaviour after all, it’s no surprise that 35% of consumers would prefer to see more brands answering questions, using chatbots. (Source: ubisend, 2017)

Treat

At Synthetix, we’ve have experienced first-hand, the positive impact self-service through Virtual Agents / bots, web self-service and integrated knowledge has had on customer service delivery and are eager to prove that it is not a second-rate customer support channel or scary.

Three challenges contact centres should have overcome by now

Unlike the uncertainty surrounding Brexit negotiations, the last ten years’ advances in technology (and especially AI) has helped many leading brands turn their contact centres into profit centres by improving first contact resolution, decreasing agent burnout and making their customers happy.

Technology has also changed customer expectations and customer experience can no longer be sacrificed for the convenience of the brand. Customer service is an essential part of contact centres, and with uncertain times upon us, delivering exceptional customer experience to customers via their channel of choice might have some contact centres feeling like they don’t have the right weapons to win the battle of delivering increased customer satisfaction whilst also reducing their cost-per-serve ratio.

But, there is hope yet for those who choose their arms wisely…

Bite the bullet with efficiency

Unpredictable call spikes cause frustrated customers and weary agents, resulting in lost revenue. Self-service options like Visual IVR, FAQ Search and Virtual Agent chatbots help to optimise agent contact, coping with spikes in enquiries and assisting with rapid contact resolution in the event that a query is escalated to an agent.

Plan of attack to retain and attract

Teams burning out quickly and high agent attrition costs time and money. Gamification programs promote healthy culture; performance data improves development and retention. Dashboards reporting on agent productivity will assist contact centre managers to identify staff needing more encouragement as well as identifying those to reward.

‘Omni-channelling’ successfully with Customer Experiences

Being there for customers when they reach out via chat, email or social media is challenging when the best skilled agents or a full customer history is not be available. Using APIs and CRM integrations, real-time data can be unified in one place across channels, enabling a 360 degree view of the customer, regardless of which channel they choose to interact through.

These quick reads provide some valuable insight to taking small steps to prepare for the ever-changing customer experience landscape and how it can create winning results in the contact centre.

Water utility boosts customer engagement through Alexa

Alexa natural voice experience aims to offer customers a more intuitive way to interact

One of the leading water and sewerage companies in England Wales has upped the stakes again in their mission to deliver high levels of customer service, with the powerful addition of an Alexa Skill which is set to enhance and offer a new way to communicate service to customers.

Already recognised as one of the top scorers by Ofwat in the SIM league for customer satisfaction, the Alexa natural voice experience aims to offer customers a more intuitive way to interact with this organisation.
The Alexa skill enables customers to have instant access to hundreds of relevant answers to their questions, just by asking. The FAQs are drawn from the same channel-independent repository that serves the website which insures a single source of truth.

The company will capture the feedback from the Alexa skill and use this to develop a roadmap for further voice assistant features, such as integration to middleware and payment processing to make Alexa more functional and personal.

The OFWAT Customer measure of experience (C-MeX) initiative redefines the way water utilities are rated, taking into account customers who have not made proactive contact with their water company. The current investment in new channels and the ability to measure Net Promoter Score will help this organisation to raise their profile and deliver excellent customer experiences through 2019 and beyond.

Alastair Taylor, Commercial Director at Synthetix said, “By launching an Alexa skill, customers will have instant access to hundreds of relevant answers to their questions. SentienceAI, the power behind the technology DNA of Synthetix, enabled us to extend our naturally searchable knowledge and conversational customer experiences to the Alexa voice assisted channel in record time. It’s a privilege to work alongside companies who are embracing technology to help serve their customers better.”

The dawn of a new Contact Centre

AI stretches far beyond Botman versus SuperAgent

Managing a large group of loud personalities, having to forecast and plan resources tightly against projected inbound contact, meeting big targets and running countless meetings, if this sounds like your typical day, you must be in the profession of overseeing a contact centre. Finding time to think about and plan what needs to be done to develop or improve performance is a tough task when most Managers spend their time battling to keep agents and customers happy. To further complicate matters, any big changes need to be run past upper management, which according to a recent report, still perceives the contact centre as a ‘cost centre’.

And with headlines stating that AI will be ‘the death of the contact centre’, it’s understandable that Contact Centre Managers might feel like the world is against them. However, it’s the dawn of a New Contact Centre. Businesses can no longer afford to rely on archaic siloed channels for customer support and experience. The time has come for businesses to fill their customer support armoury with new strategies and AI tech to win the war on remaining relevant and profitable.

As consumers grow more and more comfortable with messaging, AI applications offer the contact centre some dramatic benefits that stretches way beyond ‘Botman versus SuperAgent’. For those businesses looking to invest in AI, there is light in this confusing artificially intelligent world of darkness. There already exists reasonably priced and ‘modest’ AI-powered solutions that can translate into cost savings, increased productivity and improved customer experience with minimal demands on IT resources.

But for AI to introduce new value and break fresh ground, strategists must take an innovative approach to CX and consider its impact beyond its novelty. As a ‘Customer Experience General’ looking to outwit the enemy, the following quick reads provide some valuable insight to taking small steps to prepare for the ever-changing customer experience landscape and how it can deliver ‘super-powered’ results in the contact centre.

Discover the small step towards AI that can deliver quick-win business results – Download the whitepaper.