2nd Anniversary Special – TeneoTuesday
The Customer Success team of Teneo.AI started in October 2021 to publish an article series called TeneoTuesday. Two years later, you are reading now its 75th edition! The contents have included a lot of variety - the Birth of a Chatbot, User Experience, Large Language Models, and many more. Besides written content, the team has also recorded some nice YouTube videos, so that you can enjoy Teneo in the best possible way.
Since the focus of 2023 has been the Contact Center world and how OpenQuestion can help callers to get to talk to the right agent, our team has shared below some interesting statements around the topic for you. Enjoy this anniversary issue, and feel free to share your thoughts and good wishes in the comments.
Joaquim Bargalló - Director of Customer Success
The Contact Centre will very rapidly evolve in the coming years to truly have the customer at the center of the experience. This means that it will not be acceptable to be 3 min (or more!) going through endless IVR menus, explain the same problem over and over every time you call in, languishing in never-ending waiting queues… such experiences will soon be deemed unacceptable as we move towards a new normal characterized by exceptionally smooth interactions, enabled by a wide array of technologies, including cutting-edge Generative AI.
The conversational bot picking up the phone will automatically have at hand all your customer profile and will be able to help straightaway in most of the issues (the rest will be handled by happy agents offloaded from basic questions). I picture an experience where you use every-day language, engaging in a proactive dialogue where it anticipates your needs, takes into account your previous interactions across various channels, and resolves to leave you completely satisfied.
The technology required is readily available and it continues to evolve with new capabilities constantly being added; there are already great examples of successful implementations at scale. We just need more companies picturing the same and making their customers feeling good!
Britta Guldmann - Customer Success Manager | Training Lead
From a UX perspective, in OpenQuestion a lot of thought has really been put into creating the call experience we would like to have ourselves when calling any service provider, public institution or private company. Personally, I get really frustrated with long menus that are read out to you, forcing you to wait until you have heard all the options as yours might be the last one – you never know! And then you select one, hoping it is the right one. OpenQuestion really addresses that poor user experience, allowing you as the end-user to express your need in your own words - and letting the system worry about what that maps to in terms of call center queues.
From an implementer perspective, I think we can be proud of the simple yet very powerful setup in OpenQuestion which allows anybody to grab the prebuilt content and make it their own. Straightforward, easy to adapt and with endless options for customization and extension.
Agustin Etman - Customer Success Manager | Customer Journey Lead
What I like the most about OpenQuestion is the fact that it has a positive impact on all parties involved: Companies implementing OpenQuestion reap the benefits of happy customers who get properly routed with no waiting times and prepared agents who have more information upfront to efficiently handle a call.
I also believe OpenQuestion is part of what the future contact center will look like: conversational AI capabilities integrated into existing applications to support both customers and agents in solving an issue. Though there are new challenges to overcome, like assuring proper transcription from speech services and finding ways of testing and controlling large language models, it looks like the future of customer service will be filled with much more satisfactory experiences!
Benjamin Kolz - Conversational AI Specialist | Community Lead
I think we will see more and more automatization via conversational IVR systems (OpenQuestion!) in the future in the contact center. Nowadays, many projects are still at a stage where a significant step forward can be taken by handing the callers over to the right agent (increasing the routing accuracy) and by getting rid of the DTMF menus (improving the customer experience). Once contact centers have arrived at this point, the automatization of use cases is the natural next step. Why even hand over to an agent, when your CIVR can help the caller end to end and solve the issue completely. This makes Teneo also the perfect platform for OpenQuestion – it can (already now) seamlessly orchestrate external systems and processes and bring with that their full power into the dialog! Since all mentioned is possible already right now, I hope this future of full automatization is not that far away.
Sofia Hernansanz - Conversational AI Specialist
For me, OpenQuestion solves the oldest story of all in Conversational AI: understanding errors. In short, a simple strategy is proposed to solve the complex problem of correctly routing calls. This represents a double challenge, since on the one hand users must be correctly redirected while on the other hand the task of Contact Center agents must be made easier. With Teneo we have faced both by providing a unique solution.
What I like most about OpenQuestion is that we have all done our part: from the perspective of users, when we have suffered with never ending IVR’s menus, to the experience as implementers. We have selected the quintessence and combined the essential considerations to ensure the success of this type of project. I can only say that I wish I had been able to have something like this sooner!
From my experience I think the ultimate objective or goal of this type of projects is to provide greater freedom of action to users. For this, it is crucial that more processes are automated, so we can talk about a real conversational experience. Today technology already has the capacity, so it must be at the service of our needs and not the other way around.
Chun-Lin Wang - Conversational AI Specialist
OpenQuestion can help contact centers perform in a smarter and more human-like way, compared to the traditional DTMF system which requires the user to listen to a long text message about the different options available. Sometimes the user may find out that none of these options could solve the problem, which is really frustrating. A conversational IVR can save the precious time of the user and understand user’s issue more precisely. Thanks to Retrieval Augmented Generation, we can now build a contact center with more automation and better supported human agents. Of course, there are technical challenges on the way to be solved, such as latency (which is a vital topic on the phone), the right and responsible use of high-performant large language models, as well as cost control and user satisfaction. Luckily, OpenQuestion brings you on track in all those topics.
A BIG THANK YOU FROM THE CUSTOMER SUCCESS TEAM TO ALL OUR PARTNERS & CLIENTS - WE WILL BRING YOU MANY MORE TENEO ARTICLES ALSO IN THE NEXT MONTHS!