Customers.com Technologies

Virtual Agents Improve Customer Satisfaction While Lowering Cost to Serve

Virtual agents deliver bottom-line benefits. They can lower cost to serve as compared to live agents, and they can improve customer sat by improving the speed, accuracy, and consistency of the answers to customers’ questions.

Contrast virtual agents with search and knowledgebase approaches that deliver many answers and leave it to the customer to pick the correct one. This single correct answer makes virtual agents useful for answering many kinds of customers’ questions; certainly customer service questions but also questions about your business and about your business policies, processes, and practices, about your products, and everything about your customers’ relationships with you—accounts, orders, bills, and passwords, for example. They can be your agents for marketing, for sales, and for service.

Leveraging Your Knowledgebase

Like your live agents, it takes time and effort to get virtual agents ready to engage with your customers. You have to give them the knowledge about the business areas that they support. You have to train them to understand your customers’ questions and to correlate or match those questions with the correct answers. The knowledge is contained in/represented by the items in their knowledgebases, their store of predefined answers. Anticipate the questions that your customers will ask, specify the answers, and store them in the virtual agent’s knowledgebase. All virtual agent products that we evaluate have knowledgebases and provide tools and facilities for creating and managing answers. Your customers’ questions will change and evolve with their relationships and with changes to your offerings of products and services and to your business. Virtual agent’s knowledge has to keep up with those changes (just like live agents’ knowledge).

Helping Businesses Deliver Effective Social Service by Leveraging NLP

Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, frequently called text analytics technology, is key to analyzing what customers are saying about your company. So leveraging NLP is a big part of the best social-service products. NLP input is the content of customers’ posts, messages, and feedback, while NLP output is a tree structure that represents and contains their syntax, semantics, context, and intent. NLP processing performs tasks such as:

• Corrects spelling
• Parses content to determine parts of speech and their relationships
• Extracts entities and facts
• Resolves vague pronoun antecedents (anaphora)
• Determines the meaning of unknown words using their morphological attributes
• Identifies phrases
• Identifies relationships between words and phrases

This week’s report is about Clarabridge Analyze, Clarabridge Collaborate, and Clarabridge Engage—the Voice of the Customer/ social-service offering from Clarabridge, Inc., a privately-held software supplier based in Reston, VA. Clarabridge Analyze listens, analyzes, reports, and alerts on customer conversations on social and on internal channels. Analyze’s alerts are sent to Collaborate for their assignment and management. From within Collaborate, facilities of Engage let agents respond to and interact with customers.

How Is Customer Service Technology Changing?

How Did Customer Service Technology Fare in 2012?

With this 4Q2012 Customer Service Update Report, we complete our ninth year of quarterly updates on the suppliers and products in customer service. Yes, we’ve been writing these reports since 2004, focusing on factors that are important in the evaluation, comparison, and selection of customer service products: customers, products, and company activity, staffing, and financial performance.

This quarter the suppliers and products are:

- Aptean Knova
- Attensity Analyze and Attensity Respond
- eGain Service
- IntelliResponse Virtual Agent (VA)
- KANA Enterprise, KANA Experience Analytics
- Moxie Spaces
- Next IT ActiveAgent
- Nuance/VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent
- Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service
- Salesforce.com Service Cloud, Knowledge, Marketing Cloud (Radian6)

Briefly, customer service came back strong in 4Q2012 to post a very good quarter driven by customer growth. We’re relieved and encouraged. Fourth quarters are typically good quarters for software suppliers, as their customers complete strategic projects and spend down expiring budgets. But, at the end of 2011, we were concerned. There had been a string of six consecutive mixed quarters, and it raised concerns about the state and the future of customer service software. One quarter certainly does not make a trend, but we’re encouraged. The suppliers we track have introduced or will soon introduce strong new products and major new product versions that will help their customers deliver better customer service.

How Good Is the Customer Service Functionality in Salesforce Winter ’13?

Knowledge Management Is Strong; Analytics Are Weak

We’ve just done an in-depth evaluation of the customer service capabilities in Salesforce Winter ’13, the latest release of the CRM suite from Salesforce.com. These capabilities include account management, case management, knowledge management, process management, internal communities, and social network management. They comprise the broadest and deepest customer service offering that we’ve seen from any single supplier.

Service Cloud is the Salesforce CRM application that provides the case management capabilities and serves as the anchor. A collection of tightly integrated, but variously packaged and priced features and additional applications provide the rest of the customer service functionality. All of the apps and features run on the Salesforce CRM platform, which provides a very large set of common, shared services, data, and tools.

Third Quarter Update on Customer Service Suppliers

Social-Service continues as the hottest trend in customer service. Integration is on the rise, helping businesses create richer customer service experiences by linking applications from different suppliers faster, easier, and less costly. In 3Q2012, Moxie and VirtuOz announced an integration partnership that enables seamless escalation from virtual agents deployed on VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent to web chat using Moxie’s Chat Spaces.

1. This illustration shows the integration between VirtuOz IVA and Chat Spaces for Windstream. When the customer clicks the "Yes, please transfer me to a Live Chat agent" link in Wendy's response, the escalation is triggered. © 2012 Windstream Corp.

Speaking of virtual agents, our research on virtual assisted-service has continued in 3Q2012 (and into 4Q2012). We’ve published evaluations of VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent on July 26, of Creative Virtual V-Person on September 12, and of NextIT ActiveAgent on November 29. We plan to begin work on IntelliResponse Virtual Agent (VA) very soon, completing a set of evaluations on the leading products. We really think that businesses should seriously consider adding a virtual assisted-service application to their customer service portfolios. These applications use various and typically patented approaches to natural language processing (NLP) technology to deliver a single answer, usually the right answer, to customers’ questions. They’re lower in cost to service as compared to live agent-based assisted-service. They can be more effective and more efficient than traditional web self-service that uses conventional search.

Next IT’s Active Agent: Cross-Channel Virtual Assistant

Virtual assisted-service products should be part of the customer service portfolio for every business. They fit nicely between web self-service built on search and knowledgebases and chat or contact centers. In fact, they integrate with knowledge management and chat.

This week’s report is our evaluation of ActiveAgent, the virtual assisted-service offering of Next IT, a privately held ISV based in Spokane, WA. It’s the third in our research series on virtual agent products. These products use natural language processing (NLP) technology to determine the intent of customers’ questions and to deliver a single answer in response. Yes, that’s right, a single answer. Contrast them with search, which delivers hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of answers and leaves it to customers to figure out the best one(s). ActiveAgent integrates with ActiveChat, Next IT’s chat offering, and has an API that Next IT’s consultants use for integration with other chat apps.

Review of Virtual V-Person: Pioneer in Virtual Agent Technology

Here is our evaluation of Creative Virtual V-Person. It’s the second in our research series on virtual assisted-service. Having been founded in London in 2002 and having introduced its first virtual agent product in 2003, Creative Virtual is one of the pioneers in virtual agent technology. V-Person is a competent offering. Four features characterize and differentiate it:

• Cross-channel virtual assisted service—web, mobile devices, and social networks
• Answers that integrate application data; Python scripting is the data integration mechanism
• Comprehensive knowledge management facilities for creating, editing, publishing, and managing the answers that V-Person delivers to customers and users
• Rules-based question analysis and matching; analysts, with the help of Creative Virtual’s consultants, specify these rules

Creative Virtual targets large financial services, high tech, payroll, telecommunications, and travel businesses and city governments in English-speaking geographies. The firm has a customer base of 40 accounts, mostly in these markets and mostly in the UK.

V-Person is available for cloud or on-premise deployment. Entry level year-one subscription fees are approximately $100,000.

Here's my in-depth product review:

Creative Virtual V-Person
An Offering from a Virtual Assisted-Service Pioneer
By Mitch Kramer, Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, September 20, 2012

VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent

Today, virtual assisted-service offerings focus on the service. VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent is a good example. Its virtual agents are cross-channel virtual agents that deploy on web, mobile, and social channels and can answer questions that help customers complete activities across all phases of the lifecycles of their relationships with businesses. VirtuOz’ Virtual Agents best capability is the range of virtual agent interaction styles. Yes, these Intelligent Virtual Agents can deliver direct answers of text, links, and images to customers’ questions. But virtual agents can also “converse” with customers to guide them to web pages that contain more complex answers or to have a question and answer dialog that leads customers to answers based on how they answer the virtual agent’s question. And virtual agents can perform tasks with case management and CRM systems on customers’ behalves, acting as customer proxies.

By the way, speaking virtual agents are coming back. Think of Siri. Their best fit is on mobile devices for customer service apps that are narrow in scope. For example, “What’s the status of my order?”

We’ll be publishing more evaluations of virtual assisted-service products in the next several months. Next up is our review of Creative Virtual V-Person. Stay tuned.

~ Mitch

VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent
Powerful and Flexible Cross-Channel, Cross-Lifecycle Virtual Assisted-Service
By Mitch Kramer, Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, July 26, 2012

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NETTING IT OUT

VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) is the virtual assisted-service product from VirtuOz, Inc., a privately held, venture capital funded, 10-year-old supplier based in Emeryville, CA, and Paris, France.

Organizations purchase subscription licenses of the VirtuOz IVA for cloud deployment. To date, VirtuOz claims that approximately 25 customer organizations have licensed its virtual assisted-service product.

VirtuOz earns very good grades on our Virtual Assisted-Service Report Card for Virtual Assisted-service—exceeds-requirements grades in all virtual agent technologies (answers, question analysis and matching, and customer service integration) and meets-requirements grades for analytic functionality, product viability, and supplier viability.

VirtuOz IVA is an attractive and useful offering with powerful and flexible capabilities. Use it to deploy virtual agents on web, mobile, and social channels to answer customers’ questions with direct answers, through guided dialogs, or by performing tasks on customers’ behalves within case management and CRM systems.

We recommend VirtuOz for large B2B and B2C organizations in North America and Western Europe that want to add virtual assisted-service to their customer service portfolio to support web, mobile, and social channels for answering customers’ questions across the entire customer lifecycle.

Virtual Agents Are Making a Comeback: How Virtual Agent/Virtual Assisted-Service Technology Is Evolving

We first wrote about virtual agents and their capabilities to deliver what we called virtual assisted-service in 2007 when we published a product evaluation of Human Digital Assistant from H-care, a Treviso, Italy-based startup (now out of business). We felt that virtual agents delivered a useful level of customer service when customers got stuck using self-service facilities and a business wanted to help them by using facilities that were less costly than chat or the contact center. Made sense then. Makes sense now.

We were ahead of the virtual assisted-service curve, a bit ahead of our time. Only a few virtual agents were deployed five years ago. Jenn of Alaska Airlines comes to mind. But many more have been deployed over the past few quarters. Judging by the claims of the current virtual agent suppliers, we think that you could find about 200 customer support/service web sites with virtual agents offering to answer your questions, many of them “working for” the largest businesses—businesses like AT&T, P&G, Symantec, United Airlines, the U.S. Army, and Verizon.

What’s different now? Five years ago, virtual assisted-service offerings focused on virtual agents. Virtual agents used text-to-speech technology to talk to customers, first introducing themselves, then giving customers instructions for entering questions, then voicing the answers. Virtual agents were also animated. They gestured when they spoke. Very cool technology, but customers can read way faster than virtual agents (or even live agents) can speak. The speaking slowed the service. Also, many customers prefer self-service. They’d rather visit a web site than call a contact center. These folks (I’m one of them.) really don’t want to speak with any kind of agent. The are also other significant differences:

• Networks, network connections, and the devices that customers use are much faster now than in 2007. Virtual agents have become faster, too.
• Most virtual assisted-service systems run in the cloud. Businesses can deploy them more quickly at lower initial cost.
• Chat is ubiquitous today. Virtual assisted-service looks a lot like chat.

Customer Service Suppliers Poised for Growth in 2012?

Each quarter we review the state of the customer service industry by providing updates on the nine top suppliers (after industry consolidation): Astute, Attensity, Consona, eGain, IntelliResponse, Kana, Moxie, Oracle, and Salesforce.com.

The first quarter of 2012 was not a good quarter in customer service. After a big 1Q2011, 2011 faded through the next three quarters as customer growth and financial performance were mixed, and product and company activity were relatively light. The fade has continued into 1Q2012.

But no fading for Salesforce.com. SFDC had another huge quarter, continuing its string of consecutive quarters, the latest better than the previous. IntelliResponse had some large deals and shifted from educational institutions to more commercial accounts.

The surprise in Q1 was Oracle RightNow. After Oracle’s acquisition of RightNow closed on January 25, Oracle RightNow began operating as a Global Business Unit, hiring aggressively and introducing regular, quarterly product releases. When Oracle announced its intent to acquire RightNow on October 24, 2011, we felt and we wrote that, post-acquisition, RightNow could quickly lose its identity and its brand and its product could disappear within Oracle’s very large software portfolio. Not the case. No losers in this acquisition. The new Oracle RightNow is bigger and is growing faster than the old RightNow.

Salesforce.com launched a new entry-level customer service offering called Desk.com, which is based on the technology that it obtained in its September 12, 2011 acquisition of Assistly. The firm also launched Salesforce Rypple, its first HCM/HR application that adds social networking to performance management. The product is based on the technology that came to Salesforce.com in its December 15, 2011 acquisition of Rypple.

In fact, Salesforce.com and Oracle make us optimistic for the remainder of 2012. All of the other suppliers have new and refreshed offerings that can help organizations address requirements, especially for social-service and for customer service processes. It’s an election year in the U.S. The economy, certainly the corporate world, appears to be growing. Corporate growth means more customers, and more customers means more customer service.

Here's my quarterly Customer Service Supplier and Product Update for 1Q2012.