November 2017 - Blueworx

Easing Hectic Holidays with AI

The holidays are in full swing and even if you couldn’t tell already by the Christmas lights that adorn the many homes, you definitely can tell by the wait times, especially when calling into customer service. Two days before Thanksgiving I received text messages notifying me that packages I had ordered from an online giant had been delivered. Awesome, I thought. I love how technology has advanced so much that I knew the exact moment to leave my warm office chair to open the front door. Only this time as the chill blew into my face, my porch was empty. No package, and definitely not two that were clearly marked as delivered just minutes before.

Bots Are Not Just the New IVR

In my last article on virtual assistants and bots improving CSAT by cutting down on boredom (https://www.blueworx.com/do-you-hate-waiting-in-line/ ), one thing I didn’t address was how to add automation to the contact center without it being perceived as just an extension of the IVR. Because, let’s face it, most people don’t like IVR, and few of them understand that without IVR, product costs would increase. So, how do you use chatbots and virtual assistants without adding to the frustration of the customer?

Blueworx Partners with Skytap for Application Modernization

Skytap Cloud to support Blueworx in delivering a migration path to the Cloud for AIX and Linux platforms.

Blueworx, a provider of Interactive Voice and Customer Experience solutions designed to deliver efficient, scalable, and reliable voice technologies, announces a partnership with Skytap, a global cloud provider. Skytap recently announced the availability for support of AIX operating on the Skytap Cloud. Skytap Cloud is the only public cloud offering that supports AIX, Linux and Windows. This partnership enables Blueworx to provide a migration path to the Cloud for Blueworx Interactive Voice Response (BVR) platforms running on AIX or Linux operating systems. Read more about Skytap here.

Technology and Humans Deliver the Best in User Experience

I bet you can recall the last time you had a really terrible customer experience. It was probably pretty recent and could still be as fresh as day in your mind. But are you able to remember a good customer experience, or even a great one? Perhaps it was in a store. Or maybe something as simple as an online purchase. Whatever it was, great customer experiences seem to stand out more than bad ones. And sadly, because those over-the-top-genuinely-want-to-help experiences are few and far between.

User Experience (UX) Design is intended to develop clear, efficient, user-friendly interactions between customers and businesses through a variety of applications. It is more than just recording prompts for your IVR with a voice that “sounds good” or designing a call flow that gets the customer where they need to go. An effective communication interface is intuitive. It is efficient, saving customers’ time and keeping their frustration levels down. A connection is made that is clear and easy to understand, giving the customer a positive experience.

Do you hate waiting in line?

Do you hate waiting in line? On hold? Most of us would certainly answer, “yes.” However, the psychology behind waiting in line says that most of us don’t hate waiting in line – we hate being bored. That’s why there are floor to ceiling mirrors in most large buildings near the elevator. It gives us all something to do (check other people out). In addition, one of the first people who studied the science behind waiting in line was AK Erlang. Some of you may recognize the last name – that’s right, he worked the probability and statistics behind the calculators that allow us to determine the lines/agents/bandwidth needed in a contact center based on busy hour traffic and average handle time.

“So what?” you ask.

Happy Customers = Happy Banks

With the increase in technology making competition for customers more fierce than ever, banks have a huge incentive to improve their customer experience. But just how important is the customers experience to a bank’s bottom line?

According to Forrester Research, the overall monetary impact of customer experience (CX) on a business, defined by how customers perceive their interaction with your company, is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Poor customer experiences are a huge source of wasted money for businesses, which can be quantified in terms of tens of millions of dollars for a typical financial company. Combined with spikes in dissatisfaction due to the changing structure of banking fees, failure to implement and modify top-notch customer service solutions will have devastating consequences. In fact, among all businesses, banks have the highest correlation between customer experience and the likelihood of switching businesses.