The Case for Conversational AI

Learn more about conversational AI at Smart Customer Service 2022.

See more videos from CX Connect 2021 on the CRM YouTube channel.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Brian Morin: You were able to navigate this conversation within your own organization up to key stakeholders and executives in the organization to get them to buy into the same vision that you should be handing some of your customer experience over to AI. Maybe you can talk to us a little bit about what were you able to do to successfully navigate that through you at an organization the size of of TechStyle Fashion Group.

Aarde Cosseboom: Great question. I love this slide because it really is conversational AI. We could have implemented or rolled out just advanced IVR or something that could slightly understand what the member is requesting, but it doesn't really create a conversation with the customer or the member. One of the things that we started with was, we took our executives and we flew them all the way across the Pacific to the Philippines, sat them down, and forced them to take calls for eight hours straight. That sounds a little crazy and intense, but them sitting there, being in the shoes of our agents, doing what they're doing day by day, eight hours a day, before we had conversational AI in place, and resetting passwords and clicking the same button over and over and over again, they understood that these transactional-type conversations really needed to be the simple conversations really needed to be automated.

So we pulled them into a room, did a little breakout session and said, "Well, how can we automate this?" And we all decided, "Let's not do it in a very cheap fashion and have it be a robotic answer back." We wanted to make sure that it was extremely conversational so that when the caller calls in, they could literally say anything under the sun, and it's going to understand full sentences, nouns, intents, and verbs. And then I'll put them into the appropriate path to have the conversation with them.

If they need to jump around in that conversation--maybe they go down this path where they need to know where their order is. They almost get to the end of that path and they say, "You know what, actually, I want to change my membership." They could jump to a different path or a different conversation easily without having to stop, hang up the phone, and call back in or request to speak to a live agent.

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