We all know how frustrating the experience of calling into a customer service department can be. Long hold times, the endless repetition of birth dates, previous addresses, maiden names... It’s enough to make you want to avoid the whole process altogether.
But the cloud—paired with technologies like speech recognition, biometrics, natural language, artificial intelligence and machine learning—is giving rise to intelligent virtual agents that are providing faster, more personalized service.
Automated customer service solutions have been around for a while, but the cloud is drastically improving the model. Intelligent virtual agents can now crunch data about who you are and what you need, providing the kind of efficient feedback loop required to autonomously keep getting smarter.
Automating, Personalizing Customer Service
Software company Nuance is one organization that's focused on developing technologies to help customers answer their own questions and execute their own transactions.
“Most customer service technologies today are as if you were walking into a [bank] branch every day and the teller was asking you questions like they never saw you before," said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager of Nuance’s enterprise division, in charge of customer self-service solutions. "We’re helping [organizations] get back to a time when it was about building relationships.”
One of Nuance's latest forays in the space is Nina, a virtual assistant reminiscent of Samantha in the movie “Her,” about a man who develops a relationship with a computer-operated system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson).
Nina can be incorporated into mobile or Web apps, and uses the cloud to integrate speech recognition, voice biometrics and natural language technologies.
Through a conversational interface, Nina works to discover who you are and what you’re trying to say in order to streamline common tasks such as account authentication, search, queries and transactions. For example, customers can use a banking app that incorporates the technology and ask it to "Pay my Visa bill in full” or inquire “What was my balance last month?”
Domino's Pizza recently announced that it will leverage Nina to enable voice ordering via iOS and Android-based devices, a move that the pizza giant sees as not only streamlining the ordering process but also setting the stage for technology evolution.
“There will be a day where typing on keyboards or with thumbs on mobile devices will come to a close; we want to be the ones who continue to advance the technology experience—hand-in-hand with our customers,” said Patrick Doyle, Domino’s Pizza president and CEO.
Machine Learning
Many viewers of a 2011 episode of "Jeopardy" watched in awe as IBM's supercomputer “Watson” beat its human opponent on the popular game show. It turns out that the same cognitive computing technologies that power Watson are a good fit for businesses looking to serve customers better.
"When you're on your mobile device, you don’t want to read through lists and documentation to find the answers you're looking for. So Watson can read through them on your behalf and just find the answers for you," said John Gordon, vice president of IBM Watson Solutions.
Combining natural language processing, big data, cognitive computing and machine learning, a new IBM product called the Watson Engagement Advisor lives in the cloud and allows companies to incorporate the power of Watson into their own apps. One of the motivating factors for the launch of the Watson Engagement Advisor was to address the growing number of millennials who are completing transactions and interacting exclusively on mobile, according to Gordon.
Watson's 2.5 quintillion bytes of knowledge, paired with the supercomputer's ability to quickly learn a company's product offerings, enables it to provide fast, personalized service to customers.
By automating routine requests, companies can instead focus on higher-value relationships and inquiries while reducing costs. At the same time, they can enhance the user experience for these more routine requests by getting information to customers faster.
“It’s not only a better experience for the end user, but it also keeps them in the self-service channel longer because it works more and more,” Weideman said. He added that he expects customers to gravitate to self-service customer service solutions in the same way they have learned to embrace ATMs and self-service kiosks at the airport.
In addition to benefiting consumers, automated solutions can help companies better train customer service agents through more effective access to complete records of past customer inquiries, according to Gordon. "It helps them get up-to-speed faster and provides the confidence they need to address customer questions faster," he said.
Cloud Drives Solutions and Opportunities
While the cloud has boosted the capabilities of intelligent virtual assistant solutions, it will also be the driving force behind the need for virtual assistants in the years to come.
“You’ve probably heard, ‘This call may be monitored for quality assurance,'" Weideman said. "About five years ago, we started doing this in the cloud. All of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of samples and literally billions of interactions became available to use, and that provided us with a tremendous amount of data that our automated learning systems can use to become more accurate in speech recognition.”
Like Nina, Watson continues to learn from each interaction by constantly updating its wealth of background information from internal and external sources, making it more powerful the more it is used.
"Watson is a learning system," Gordon said. "The cloud has been fundamental to its existence since it helps it to continually get smarter."
The Human Touch
Nuance's Weideman said virtual assistants will become more important as the channels through which customers interact with businesses continue to diversify.
He envisions a time when customers will be able to apply for a mortgage or pay a bill anytime and anyplace, whether it's through a TV, a Star Trek-like badge on their chest or some other means.
With that said, machines can't do it all. Indeed, while there may be fewer customer service agents in the future, there will be a need for people who can handle complex details and transactions.
“We can automate a lot," Weidman said, "but we’ll always need the human touch.”
