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ICMI Contact Center Demo-Conference Provides Guidance for Professionals Questing for Customer Service Excellence
Every company acknowledges that there is a growing need to
deliver superior customer service. For executives and managers to lead their
teams to peak excellence requires making a dedicated effort to gain the
knowledge, skills and technological tools to position their companies to meet
the consumers rising expectations.
The ICMI Contact Center Demo-Conference, held at the Red
Rock Resort in Las Vegas, NV, offered a 360° view of the latest contact center
best practices, and technologies. The event incorporated detailed case studies
from such organizations as American Family Insurance, Penn Foster, Pier 1
Imports, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and others. Attendees had the
opportunity to take tours of the contact center operations at MGM Resorts,
TELUS International, Zappos, UPS and GES as well as the contact center of the
TV show ‘Tanked.”
The event offered a multi-faceted education program
including interactive workshops as well as tracks on Boosting Contact Center
Culture, Maximizing Productivity, Elevating Leadership, Optimizing Technology,
Driving Customer Experience and Achieving Metrics Nirvana. Special events
included breakfast briefings and networking sessions, book signings, lunch and
learns and a new Rockstar Party saluting the movers
and shakers in customer experience.
Demo Hall attendees were able to evaluate the latest products
and services and get detailed answers to questions on how they would make a
difference for their organization. CRMXchange reached out to a cross-section of
exhibitors to gain insights on the high-interest offerings they were
demonstrating and how they might help companies to improve contact center
operations.
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Lightico offers real-time
customer collaboration and smart automation with an in-call collaboration platform
that accelerates contact center performance by enabling businesses to instantly
collect documents, eSignatures and payments from its customers while they are on
the phone. Jake Levant, VP of Marketing for Lightico, elaborated on the
solution’s benefits.
Why is it important for businesses to make it as easy as
possible for customers to complete transactions and resolve issues during the
initial call?
Businesses invest tirelessly to improve customer journeys
and experiences but it's only the “last mile” of that journey that makes the
difference. The last mile is where new customers are created. It's where
service requests are resolved. It's where NPS scores are determined.
Businesses are fumbling their critical relationships in the
last mile - trying to complete complex customer processes like completing
forms, gathering documents and signatures and collecting payments with outdated
tools. Emails, printers, scanners, and clunky websites are no longer
effectively serving today's customers, who are impatient, distracted and
mobile. Its critical to manage those last-mile interactions simply, even with
customers on the go.
What tools can companies use to capture the customer’s
attention from the outset of an interaction?
Companies should use robust, real-time digital engagement
platform that empower their contact center agents to accelerate sales and
resolve service requests - regardless of where customers choose to engage with
them.
Rather than bouncing customers between different omnichannel
touchpoints, agents need to be empowered with solutions that complete
interactions - even complex ones - simply and immediately. For example, with Lightico, while on a call,
customers can digitally sign documents, complete forms, share documents/ID, see
images and videos and process payments securely. In doing so, companies can
capitalize on limited customer attention to complete complex processes and
improve customer experience.
How can organizations, which must adhere to sensitive
compliance regulations, improve the customer experience by using your solution
to gather needed forms, documents and signatures?
Businesses that operate within regulated arenas can improve
customer experience, improve sales effectiveness and reduce operating expenses
by simplifying complex compliance processes.
Lightico brings instant digital engagement tools so documents,
signatures/consent, forms and payments are collected and completed instantly
and in full compliance with the relevant regulations.
With Lightico, companies have options to avoid putting
customers through a frustrating loop that involves the email, print, scan/fax
cycles that many businesses employ. Rather than suffering the consequences
caused by these cumbersome procedures, agents can open a guided, digital collaboration
session with customers to complete entire KYC (Know Your Customer) processes such
as collecting proof of identity or residency (driver’s license or utility
bill), completing eForms and approvals, and simplifying T&Cs confirmation –
all while on a call.
What specific benefits does your solution deliver that
differentiates it from other offerings in the marketplace?
With Lightico, companies can finally address critical
last-mile CX issues. By accelerating processes and improving customer experience
at business-critical moments, companies boost their sales, reduce their
operational costs (FCR), and improve their customer experience (NPS). To find
out how Lightico can improve last-mile CX, see it in action in this video.
MindTouch offers what
they consider to be a smarter knowledge management platform that makes it easy to deliver
the right information to support agents and customers the moment it’s needed.
The company is focused on the need to deliver reliable reports that go beyond
the basics, working closely with clients to design relevant out-of-box reports
to enhance self-service, increase ticket deflection, and improve support agent
productivity. Kathryn Randazzo, Product Marketing Manager for MindTouch,
offered additional details.
Why is it important for a support solution to provide more
productive interactions by ensuring that account and customer insights are
instantly available to agents?
By the time a customer is interacting with an agent it means
they may have already had an unsuccessful self-service experience. These
interactions need to be as frictionless as possible to ensure the customer can
get the answer they need. For an agent to be successful, they need key
information from their system of record to understand who the end user is, what
products they have, and ticket information that was submitted.
From a knowledge management perspective, it’s important for
an agent to also have access to any knowledge the customer may have tried to
access during their self-service attempt. This gives an agent immediate insight
into the intent of the customer’s problem, which empowers them to proactively
solve customer issues. The net result is lower customer effort and reduced
handle time.
How does enabling customers to find self-service knowledge
directly on Google help to both improve CSAT and reduce overall ticket volume?
According to Aspect Software, 73 percent of customers want
the ability to solve product/service issues on their own and one-third say
they'd 'rather clean a toilet than speak with a customer service rep.’
Therefore, any time a customer can get their answer directly through
self-service, it inherently has the potential to improve CSAT. However, they
don’t always start on the company’s website looking for the answers. Instead,
customers often turn to Google because it’s what they know, it’s easy, and they
have had success with it.
Today, Google has become the ‘Agent 0’ interaction. If
you're not delivering knowledge where your customers are needing it, you’re
losing out on the most valuable case deflection there is.
Why is it critical for a knowledge base to be able to scale
effectively to deliver content at any volume level?
Scalability is essential for any organization that is
delivering customer support and service. At some point, knowledge content gets
created at a tremendous rate, often accumulating into the tens to hundreds of
thousands of articles. Thus, most knowledge management solutions struggle to
index all this content and provide answers back to the requestor at a pace that
is desired by those looking for it.
Additionally, scalability also introduces the topic of
reliability–the more content you have, the more unreliable the content can
become due to duplication of content, inconsistent tagging, etc.
The best knowledge management vendors have learned how to
tackle this problem to not only provide lightning-quick responses and accurate
search results, but to continue to do so regardless of the scale of content.
What sets MindTouch apart from similar offerings in the
marketplace?
MindTouch offers a smart, fast and flexible alternative to
traditional KM solutions. Its differentiators include the following:
- Scalability. Built to scale without reducing usability and
reliability.
- Ease of Integration. Extensible into virtually all CRM and
contact center solutions.
- Rapid Deployment. The MindTouch platform can be deployed within weeks instead of months, thus offering customers faster ROI from their customer self-service and agent assistance deployments.
- Depth and Breadth of Functionality. Built exclusively as a
knowledge management platform so it’s more full-featured than CRM and contact
center KM add-on products.
- KCS-Verified. One of only four knowledge management vendors
to be KCS (Knowledge-Centered Service) V6 verified, which gives customers a
proven methodology for integrating the use, validation, improvement and
creation of knowledge into its customer service and support processes.
What specific benefits does your solution deliver?
MindTouch takes a holistic knowledge management approach by
giving organizations a single system for customer self-service and agent
assistance, along with advanced search capabilities and intelligent AI
automation—all of which can be applied across any channel and any device.
The platform was designed with simplicity in mind, offering
deployment times as little as four to six weeks. And its cloud-based platform
means organizations never need to worry about scheduled downtime or maintenance.
The MindTouch knowledge management platform simply offers what
we believe to be the most modern, comprehensive, mature and scalable
architecture available, which results in enhanced operational efficiencies,
faster ROI, increased agent productivity, and an improved customer experience.

Mobile Coach offers a
chatbot platform for the enterprise that enables organizations to author bots
that give them influence in improving the skills and motivation levels of both
employees and customers with a goal of driving desired business results. The
platform’s reporting dashboard and analytic tools empower businesses with the
data to better understand what its audience is thinking and feeling in addition
to measuring program ROI. Casey
Sullivan, Mobile Coach’s Marketing Director, dove deeper in his responses.
What are some of the primary business case uses for chatbots
in employee and customer engagement?
Chatbots are an effective and efficient way to scale common
conversations, whether with employees or with customers. Some common use cases
with employee engagement include the use of chatbots to reinforce employee
training programs such as customer service skills, new employee onboarding, or
managerial skills. Chatbots are also adept at handling many common customer
service interactions, which can include most Tier 1 and some Tier 2
interactions.
Why is it so important to have the capabilities to deploy
chatbots across multiple channels while maintaining data security in all
interactions?
Over the past several years, Mobile Coach has found that in
order to engage end users the chatbot must communicate with people in the
channel they are most comfortable working in--whether that is SMS, web chat, or
a messaging app such as Facebook Messenger.
With clients around the globe and in many data-sensitive
industries including healthcare and finance, security is of the utmost
importance to the Mobile Coach team. Like most end users, we are increasingly
more aware and concerned about the security of personal information. Our
platform is set up to meet enterprise-grade security requirements including
compliance to GDPR, HIPAA and other standards.
What differentiates Mobile Coach’s chatbot platform from
other offerings in the marketplace?
Having chat on a website is standard nowadays. Mobile
Coach’s platform approaches customer engagement from the mindset of chatbot
first, live agent second. We have years of experience developing robust
chatbots that engage with the end user, handling complex interactions, and
creating a seamless transition from bot to agent (and sometimes back to bot)
when necessary.
Other key differentiators in the platform include advanced
authoring capabilities that enable the configuration of numerous script logic
paths supporting many branches with countless rules- based conditions and
triggers. Our platform supports the management of multiple chatbots and their
respective data in one secure cloud solution. The Mobile Coach Platform
simplifies the process of deploying a chatbot across messaging channels,
languages and countries, making it easier for the enterprise to engage with
their customers in the right channel in the right language.
What specific benefits does your solution deliver?
Mobile Coach has more than five years of experience in
building enterprise grade chatbots. Our professional services team provides
full support during the chatbot build out, launch, and post-launch phases. We
work with many Fortune 500 companies to provide complex chatbots that engage
and provide value to the end user and the enterprise. The Mobile Coach platform
simplifies and quickens the process of designing, deploying and managing
chatbots by removing the need for heavy coding skills or complex IT support.

Quantiphi is an
applied AI and machine learning software and services company employing a team
of Decision Science professionals to build scalable analytical solutions to help
bring about the next quantum gain in both customer experience and unit
economics of businesses. They employ advanced Natural Language models and
domain-specific speech recognition, providing a new standard of accuracy
levels. Asif Hasan, Co-Founder and Gaurav Johar, Applied AI Practice Lead at
Quantiphi, offered in-depth observations.
How can organizations use applied AI Machine Learning
software to help translate the promise of big data into information that has a
quantifiable business impact?
Although machine learning has been around for years, it was
previously difficult to use such technologies due to limited data and high
compute cost. That has now changed - data is expanding exponentially and
computing capability in the cloud is highly elastic. Computers can learn from
extensive data and solve real business problems.
At Quantiphi, we see five major areas where machine learning
can be applied to help organizations drive quantifiable business impact:
- Power to understand visuals
- Power to hear and understand language
- Power to understand text documents
- Power to anticipate the future
- Power to optimize complex systems.
In what ways can a business use your analytic innovation
to make faster and better business decisions by tapping into a centralized and
governed data resource?
Quantiphi provides analytical solutions for businesses to
increase their efficiency and reduce cost.
For example, a “no-limit” data lake can systematically transform raw big
data into useful datasets and run on-demand analytics that instantly “scale to
needs.” This type of solution will help
to accelerate analytic innovations and business decisions by tapping into a
centralized and governed data source.
At the core of Quantiphi’s offering lies our ability to
train and integrate Google Cloud’s solution for contact centers, Contact
Center AI, with our clients’ systems. As announced in August 2018, Quantiphi
was a launch partner for the Contact Center AI solution. At the core of the
solution, we have a virtual agent trained on a large data set of call and chat
logs. In cases when the conversation is transferred to a live agent, Agent
Assist keeps listening to the conversation, extracts contextually relevant
information from the knowledge base and presents that information to the live
agent. The solution also allows for automated tagging of calls and chat logs to
different topics, thereby reducing manual effort.
Additional Quantiphi offerings that help our clients
leverage their data to make faster and better business decisions include:
recommendation engines, time series forecasting, image classification, video
intelligence, preventive maintenance, and keyword detection.
How do your natural language understanding and speech
recognition models extend the boundaries of existing solutions?
A majority of the classic natural language processing
techniques attempt to process text without understanding the meaning of the
words. Deep learning enables machines to overcome this problem by training
large neural networks in an environment with similar objects, relationships,
and dynamics as our own, making these models far more powerful. Quantiphi’s
natural language models go beyond the traditional topic and sentiment analysis
and give our clients the ability to build custom chatbots, fraud detection
agents, auto response systems and other powerful natural language understanding
systems at unprecedented accuracy levels.
While conversational speech recognition systems have largely
reached human parity with Google Home and Alexa showing small word error rates,
the same cannot be said about domain-specific speech, which can be laden with
vernacular terminology and slang. Quantiphi’s domain-specific speech
recognition models overcome this problem through careful customization of
acoustic and language components of the model pipeline to offer world-class
accuracy in domain-specific speech. They also perform at near-human levels in
speech emotion detection and other specialized voice recognition tasks.
Quantiphi has worked closely with leading clients to develop
natural language and speech recognition solutions across industries, including
financial trading, media and higher education.
What are the beliefs on which Quantiphi was founded and how
has it helped your organization grow?
Quantiphi was founded in 2013 on the premise that artificial
intelligence and machine learning would be essential building blocks of digital
transformation, and that a new breed of expertise would be necessary to help
businesses harness the full potential of these technologies,
In March 2017, Google Cloud selected Quantiphi as one of
five global launch partners in machine learning and few months back, we were
given the 2017 Google Cloud Global Partner Award for Customer Excellence in the
Machine Learning Specialization. We continue to be committed to bringing
together the power of Google Cloud's machine learning technologies with
Quantiphi's experience and proven use cases in applied machine learning to help
organizations transform their business.

Shelf promotes its capability
to provide a better way to organize and find a company's content, enabling
organizations to limit the time and resources wasted in tracking down
information. The solution shows the exact location of keywords inside of
documents, videos, audio, images and more. Shelf’s intelligent suggestion
engine, Merlin AI, allows businesses to exercise higher new levels of control
over their information. Sedarius Perrotta, Chief Product Evangelist at Shelf, answered
our questions.
In what ways have the methods that businesses manage content
changed in the digital age?
The role of knowledge in the customer experience function is
straightforward; to connect questions and answers as quickly and easily as
possible. In the past, this has meant heavy training, cheat sheets, knowledge
bases, content repositories and many other tools prone to human error.
But the traditional role of knowledge in CX is being
disrupted by four major trends that are driving an irreversible change:
- the maturation of the cloud
- the next generation of big data & analytics
- advancements in artificial intelligence
- and new capabilities to automate knowledge discovery
Knowledge tasks that previously required massive human
effort are increasingly being replaced by technology. The chart below shows
that the burden on people to “manage” knowledge is shifting to automated,
intelligent technology.
Traditionally, the Achilles Heel of KM was the
time-consuming maintenance tasks that an analyst or manager needed to perform
to keep the system up-to-date and accurate. They often needed to get all of this
done along with a multitude of other time-sensitive activities that had a
higher priority.

Can you explain the meaning behind your terminology “The
Science of Organization” and how it relates to organizations having the ability
to quickly access their most important knowledge resources?
New and powerful insights, driven by data and artificial
intelligence, are turning both the discipline of managing knowledge and KM
technology on its head. This will help make the CX function much more strategic
and aligned with business growth through revealing new, powerful insights about
the customer.
Bringing advanced analytics to a KM solution has had an
immediate impact, creating transparency where there was previously a black box.
Giving admins the ability to see what users are doing in the system enables
continuous improvement on the content level, system level and agent level.
Automation is another massive area of impact that
traditional KM never had. KM can now leverage massive amounts of data and
aggregate, transform, and assess trends through analytics and AI. This enables
a new opportunity to create task lists and notify admins removing a burden on
maintenance and administration that was not possible in the last generation of
KM.
AI can also enhance findability in ways previously not
possible. Content can be recommended to agents based on IVR selection, customer
profiles, call resolution patterns and search path history. When searches are
performed, AI can also recommend information based on what agents are looking
for.
How does your solution enable companies to shorten set up
time and ramp-up time?
The first step is setting up the knowledge management system
in the right way. Investing in organizing and structuring the content from the
beginning enables all the powerful technology to function more effectively.
Despite popular belief this could take as little as two weeks to accomplish in
a contact center.
The intelligence that customers, agents and employees need
is not static. It constantly evolves over time. That’s why the breakthroughs in
big data, analytics and AI are so powerful.
Once information is stored in a powerful KM system, the AI
begins to aggregate, process and analyze it in ways a person cannot accomplish. Through dashboards, admins can now easily see
what content is: the most used, going out of date, difficult to find, what
search terms are effective and what search terms are leading to dead ends. With
this insight from the AI, an admin is given a new level of intelligence and
understanding of their content repository.
What differentiates Shelf from other knowledge management
offerings on the marketplace?
- Best search and overall findability in the industry. Search
to the exact location of keywords inside of documents, images, audio and video
files.
- Powerful analytics to gain insight into user behavior,
content usage patterns, and search patterns to enable transparency and
continuous improvement.
- Maintenance Automation to reduce admin overhead and improve
content accuracy
- Artificial Intelligence to learn from user behavior and
suggest improvements
- Award winning User Interface to make onboarding and adoption
seamless
- Integrated with leading contact center solutions
The
next event on the ICMI calendar is the annual ICMI Contact Center
Expo and Conference, traditionally the association’s larger
gathering, which will take place May 13-16, 2019 at the Diplomat Resort in Fort
Lauderdale, FL.