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Customer Service Summit Brooklyn 2019 Review
With the capability to consistently provide a superior
customer experience now overshadowing both price and product as what sets a
business apart from its competition, customer service is finally being given the
recognition it deserves as a strategy that can-- and should ---help dictate the
direction of the entire organization.
This was the guiding principle of the 9th Annual Customer
Service Summit, a two-day intensive educational event held at the Marriott Brooklyn
Bridge in New York City October 23-24th, 2018. The two key areas of primary focus under this
umbrella were internal customer centric team strategy…evolving internal
structure and optimizing the workforce to address rising customer expectations
and external customer-facing strategy to find new ways to stay a step ahead in
the nonstop race to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Produced by the UK-based Incite Group (which was sold shortly
before the event to Thomson Reuters and will be rebranded as Reuters Events),
the Customer Service Summit brought together a roster of authoritative speakers
from such leading brands as AARP, Cigna, Citi. GE Digital, Hilton Hotels, Mastercard,
Nike, Raymour & Flanigan, Uber, Southwest Airlines, Walmart and others.
These leaders offered insights on proven best practices employed by their
organizations to help create new standards for omnichannel support and ensure that
the needs of customers will be met as the future unfolds.
The event began with a crisis that was quickly overcome both
by conference management and the hotel team. A pipe burst in one of the seminar
rooms causing a brief delay in the program, but a replacement room was located
and swiftly set up. Attendees were kept well abreast of all changes in the
schedule with frequent announcements made throughout the day to avert
confusion. In the opening keynote sessions, Lance Gruner, Executive Vice
President of Global Customer Care at Mastercard, took an in-depth look at the
future of customer service, elaborating on what is real, what is simply hype
and where does CX fit in the equation as well as the value of making proactive
customer service the linchpin of the business model.
As always, social media was in the Customer Service Summit spotlight,
with Joshua Marsh of Conversocial taking the lead in his portion of the
keynote, examining the role of AI and social messaging now take in customer
service. Social media was an ongoing topic, with several seminars and
interactive classroom-style workshops focusing on conversational intelligence,
fitting social media into the mix and the challenges presented by new digital
channels.
Reflecting many of the solutions being offered on the exhibit
floor, AI was also a primary topic in the conference program with an
interactive panel discussion looking into the many ways that artificial intelligence
and machine learning are revolutionizing support and another session taking a
deep dive into its impact on customer service
As part of the track on internal customer service team
strategy, back-to-back sessions toward the end of the final day of the Summit
explored both key metrics in both QA and building the optimized 2020 workforce.
In the first of these seminars, representatives from thredUP and Boxed
discussed the need for companies to determine the metrics that most served
their customers’ needs and adopting those that helped improve such key concerns
as first contact resolution. In the latter, moderated by CrmXchange’s Herb
Greenebaum, panelists Hillary Curran of KM specialist Guru and Marcelle Bhangoo
of the Boston Red Sox, agreed on the need to use technology to screen for the
applicants with the most relevant backgrounds, but employ the human touch in
the interview process as well.
CrmXchange also spoke with a sampling of solution providers
on the exhibit floor about some of the emerging applications, evolving trends
and strategies that are shaping the future of customer service.

AugmentCXM
describes itself as the “navigation center for contact centers,” providing agents
guidance at every turn of a conversation, alerting managers in real time when
customers seem to be unhappy and analyzing each conversation to understand everything
that is going on. For instance, by targeting high-risk conversations, the
solution enables supervisory personnel to step in and save the interaction
before the customer becomes a detractor on social media. The customer
experience management (CXM) platform gives management what CEO Matt Swanson
calls “a satellite view of every customer and every agent.”
Swanson sees his
company’s mission as being a purveyor of “virtuous AI,” with a philosophy that
believes mankind's purpose is the pursuit of virtue, and to value excellence in
all aspects of life. He noted that most agents now view AI as a ‘scary’
proposition and often believe that something bad is going to happen when it is
implemented. He wants to create a new narrative, stating: “Just as other forms
of technology have freed the human mind to explore more meaning, we believe AI
will, too. AI makes it easier for brands to unlock the mountains of data that
they are not using because it is not readily accessible. But while technology
is ready to provide some answers, there are many scenarios that require
judgement and AI still can’t emulate human dialogue. The proper use of AI at
this point is to augment the data employees need to be effective: it’s the
enabler that helps remove human frustration.”

BlueLeap’s
SaaS application Dialogue is what CEO Eric Burgess describes as a “no code
platform” for creating next level customer interactions. Using prebuilt
technical templates, BlueLeap customers can create business process that
leverages global messaging, AI and CPaaS integration without the need to
develop messy and often fragile integrations.
The Dialogue
application brings together over 2 billion active daily users across multiple
messaging platforms onto just one. It enables non-technical personnel to
simplify workflow, maintain control and compliance of data over the cloud and
manage day-to-day conversations with customers. “Businesses can eliminate
clunky CX processes in service situations, empowering customers to take a
picture of the problem or situation they are experiencing and send it to an
agent,” said Burgess.
BlueLeap’s 2-Way
consumer messaging solution allows consumers to interact with companies like
they do with their friends – using video, images and voice snippets. Workflow
enables immediate, AI enhanced responses with notifications and makes it even
easier for agents to respond to urgent matters, while maintaining the ever
important 360-degree customer view.
Dialogue sits on top
of a contact center’s CRM and seamlessly integrates with it, requiring little
to no additional agent training. BlueLeap operates and has offices and partners
around the world, including the U.S, China, Australia and India.

Forethought
employs AI technology to augment human abilities and make everyone “a genius at
their job.” Co-founder Sami Ghoche calls it a “technology for handling
unstructured text and chat.” The product can be embedded inside help desks in Salesforce
and Zendesk, with customizations available for other CRMs.
Forethought’s Agatha
A.I. technology combines artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural
language processing and natural language understanding. The goal is to help
increase the productivity of support teams by helping new hires onboard more
rapidly and surfacing historical answers to common issues. “In providing
recommended responses, the solution uses answers from previous customer
interactions,” said Ghoche. “We also index a company’s documents such as
knowledgebase articles, Google Docs, videos, and more. As the internal
knowledge grows, Agatha automatically updates to continue increasing first
contact resolution. “
Forethought employs
classification algorithms to deflect high-volume repetitive questions,
categorize incoming tickets, route to the correct individual as well as
preemptively escalate issues when needed.

Khoros believes
it’s no longer enough for businesses to just reach their customers on digital
channels. The critical factor is for companies to be “all-ways connected,”
knowing who their customers are, what they want, and how to make them feel
satisfied throughout the customer journey. Khoros was formed about one year
ago, built on the merger of two widely known customer engagement platforms,
Spredfast and Lithium. The name was derived from the Greek chorus, a
truth-telling ensemble who filter out the noise and describe the main action of
a play with song, dance, and recitation.
In providing customer service, the company
offers Khoros Care which allows brands to engage with a common interface and a
single workflow across multiple digital channels, including messaging apps,
in-app messaging, social, brands' owned communities, and reviews. Businesses
are empowered to personalize one-on-one customer experiences to help quickly
and easily resolve customers’ needs by being immediately accessible on their
channels of choice.
“We’re
doubling down on helping enterprise brands improve efficiency and make a
greater impact on customer satisfaction,” said Katie Duzan, Senior Director of
Product Marketing for Khoros. “We know our ability to support true enterprise
scale--with thousands of agents--across digital channels is unique. Combined
with our signature Community solution, Khoros delivers impressive ROI for
enterprise brands, backed by over a decade of experience.”

Netomi considers itself to be the first
continuous-learning AI platform for customer service which enables enterprises
to securely automate ticket resolution, boost agent productivity and provide a consistently
superior customer experience. “Customer service is no longer a post-purchase
silo or a cost center, it’s is now a primary business driver: a marketing tool
that creates a bridge between brand promise and brand experience,” said Can
Ozdoruk, VP of Marketing for Netomi. “It’s becoming increasingly complex and
expensive for businesses to meet customer expectations for always-on, always-personal
experiences. To meet the needs of what we call the “Relationship Economy” we’ve
designed an accessible AI that can increase the scope, volume and quality of
customer service interactions while controlling costs.”
Netomi
offers integrations with the most popular email, social, chat, messaging and voice
platforms so businesses can offer effective cross-channel customer support in
situations where it matters most. While the company promotes their channel-agnostic
AI engine as one that ‘celebrates the differences of each channel', Ozdoruk
believes their greatest differentiator is email support, which he sees as still
being the most popular digital channel for customers. “Extracting the
actionable intents from lengthy email messages that often include multiple
questions can be extremely challenging,” he said. “By leveraging Netomi’s AI
email support system to understand on what customers are asking in real time, a
business can automatically and instantly resolve over 50% of incoming customer
service queries.” He cited clients reporting that the time for response to
emails had been reduced from 17 hours down to a matter of minute.
Response
on other channels has improved as well. “Fifty percent of interaction volume is
equated to 5-7 repeatable issues,” Ozdoruk noted. “By automating resolutions to
mundane tasks, our client WestJet (one of Canada’s leading airlines), has been
able to deflect inquiries that took up much of the time of their front-line
personnel and achieve a 5x increase in customer engagement while deflecting
more than 50% of the work that was done by their social media team.” He also
pointed to the statistic that 74% of passenger questions were now being handled
by Netomi’s AI which WestJet calls “Juliet.” What he considers remarkable is
that even with the improvement, the carrier has increased the number of agents
as opposed to cutting jobs. “When you ease the anxiety about AI, you boost the
productivity of agents and enable them to do more.”

Soprano Design enables businesses to orchestrate their
communications with customers across the omnichannel spectrum they now prefer
to use, whether on traditional touchpoints such as SMS, Voice, email, IP
Messaging or newer more interactive digital channels like WhatsApp and RCS.
Employees will also appreciate the workflow automation and drag-and-drop user
interfaces made possible by the solution.
The
company, which originated in Australia, specializes in enterprise mobile
messaging. While many in North America still might not be familiar with them,
they have been around for 25 years, have 13 offices worldwide including Atlanta
and Seattle and have 3000 customers including 25+ deployments in the Fortune
500. The company gained renown when the platform was used in SMS voting to help
determine the winner of “Australian Idol.”
“We have over 3,000 companies around the world
including 25+ deployments in the Fortune 500", said Tejal Ranjan, Product
Marketing Manager for Soprano Design. “Having a strong customer focus has
always been a massive differentiator for Soprano. Today’s digital worker wants
simplicity and the ability to send and respond to messages in their messaging
platform of choice. It might be helping a hospital improve operational
efficiencies to reduce patient wait times or helping first responders
communicate more efficiently in emergency situations. Soprano’s cloud-based
mobile messaging platform is designed to be agile, enabling customers to
communicate on their terms, with their preferred channel at the right time and
with the right information.”
While
secure messaging deployments are often complex and take time to implement,
Soprano has already integrated with several of the world’s largest mobile
operators pursuing enterprise and business relationships. The company has the
capability to accelerate the platform onboarding and training of enterprise
teams. Its cloud-based messaging portal has tools to help businesses track and
report on key messaging metrics such as delivery and read receipts, response
tracking, and performance statistics. Soprano Design also offers scalable
validity on a global basis based on its quarter century of experience over
which it has processed more than seven billion messages.

Vanilla
Forums provides a platform that enables customer-centric
companies to build communities that exponentially increase customer loyalty,
improve service by enabling knowledgeable customers to help others, develop
valuable insights and ultimately build a higher level of trust. “Communities
can play a significant role in ticket deflection, said
Luc Vezina, CEO of Montreal-based Vanilla Forums. “By building a huge knowledgebase-- either from
scratch or from repurposing community content-- a well-managed community helps
people troubleshoot more effectively.” Much of the shared information then can
be reused to make self-service easier. Vanilla’s SEO optimization reinforces
the value by ensuring that user generated content will rank high in search
engines.
Vezina
believes that with the growing complexity and volume of inquiries, many
businesses cannot adequately support their contact centers. “The way customers
interact with companies has changed dramatically in the past few years. Pushing messages at customers and only
getting feedback through closed channels such as the phone or email is giving
way to open discussion,” he said. “When customers bond with other customers and
enthusiasts can accurately answer questions, we find it greatly reduces the
need for agents to step in.” He cited computer manufacturer Acer as having
experienced a 4x boost in their community ROI with the solution.
Vanilla
Forums began as an open source project to produce forum software in 2009. The
company offers a Vanilla Success Team to guide businesses through the launch of
a community and provide ongoing strategic and operational advice to help
achieve goals, Vezina noted that it has customers in a wide variety of
verticals, growing from their original strength in tech companies and
videogaming, to financial institutions, health and wellness, consumer products
and more.