Does intelligent mobile messaging sound glamorous to you? What about smart messaging? Do you remember those commercials by Staples about the Easy Button®? After spending time with Scott Pawloski of Pypestream and getting an opportunity to see a demo of what their solution can do I started getting Easy Button® type thoughts running into my head.
But we are not their yet. Intelligent mobile messaging and smart messaging all falls under the discussions we are seeing now about bots. Bots or chatbots really just mean automatic processing. And many bots right now are just simple automation that can help customers complete desired self-service tasks.
So don’t be misled in thinking that bots can answer anything and everything. But I think we are headed in that direction. For now, we are not able to freely automate unstructured conversations or chats in a way that can be of great value for customers (or companies).
The reality is the highest performing and most effective bots are purpose-built to solve very specific problems for customers. They are very structured yet have flexibility in that structure that is customer experience minded.
Nonetheless, even in their current iteration, bots can add a lot of value to organizations trying to remove mundane and lower-level intelligence tasks away from agents.
At Call Center Week Winter there was a lot of discussion about bots. And look for this to continue for the next several years.
Watch Scott Pawloski of Pypestream talk Intelligent Mobile Messaging at Call Center Week Winter with Jim Rembach Click to Tweet
What Pypestream Does
Pypestream is a well-funded early-stage company with a proprietary enterprise mobile messaging solution for businesses that leverages Intelligent Automation and chatbots. The company was founded by Richard Smullen in April 2015 after a frustrating experience with an airline’s customer service department.
Since then, Pypestream has grown rapidly and evolved into a fully-fledged technology company that provides enterprise businesses with custom-built, secure and flexible messaging solutions. Source: https://www.pypestream.com/about/
Agent interactions are getting more complex
A Five9/ICMI study found that 73% of contact centers have cited a noticeable increase in the complexity of customer-agent interactions. The study findings suggest that this is due to a combination of transactions taking place across numerous and various channels.
It also shares that there is a shift to more people choosing self-service methods. Hence, picking up the phone becomes a last resort. So by shear nature of the customer preference and journey, the interactions that do end up in the call center are more complex.
This cause and effect is creating a significant shift for executives in their contact center operations. They must continue to increase their self-service options and quality and they must improve the quality and skills of their contact center agents.
Bots are driving human quality
I wonder if self-serve technology providers ever thought about the need for human quality being an outcome of building better self-service technologies. But it is a realistic outcome.
Self-service solutions get better – more complex inquiries make it to agents – agents need higher skills sets in order to support the complex requests.
Greater retention efforts
Who ever thought that bots would cause a greater focus on employee engagement and retention. But that is the natural progression of better self-service.
Let’s finish the thought chain:
Self-service solutions get better – more complex inquiries make it to agents – agents need higher skills sets in order to support the complex requests – organizations need to retain those agents.
So as you are looking at improving your self-service are you also looking at your coaching, retention and engagement strategy? That sure seems like it needs to be part of the same discussion. Don’t wait until its too late.
