Category: Customer Experience

Most iGaming companies are familiar with the competitive nature of competition and the fickle nature of players. While a good marketing and retention strategy incorporating the paradigms of ESG – Environmental, Social, and Governance – would better solidify the customer staying power, it is in communications that most fail to meet the success margins.  All…
The post Using text/SMS messages and AI assistance to retain iGaming customers appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

A trading career sounds like a dream for a lot of people. Working out how to trade forex and potentially make a profit can be a way to make a flexible living while working from home – or even while you are travelling to other locations. It isn’t easy to turn trading into your career,…
The post How to start a trading career appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

If you want a breakthrough, or something at the top of the rankings, or a skill that few have, or the chance to build something you’re proud of…

It doesn’t pay to also require that it be convenient.

Gambling has long been rooted in the culture of Australia and is something that citizens are proud to partake in. With a 90% participation rate amongst Aussies, these bets total an astonishing $20 billion yearly! Most cities contain some form of casino or gaming center as evidence of this fact.  Australia has solidified its place…
The post Culture trip: poker rules in Australia appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Hey, I work in customer service for computer gadgets retail. The customer got an out-of-warranty defective router. The customer is threatening to help him, even though I cannot do anything without a warranty. How should I respond to claims like this from customers? submitted by /u/ArgyleDiamonds [link] [comments]

Wondering how to use artificial intelligence (AI) in your call center? It’s a hot topic, and many call center managers want to know what this rapidly evolving technology will mean for their organizations. There are so many questions — and some concerns, too. Some people worry that AI is dangerous. Others have their eyes on job loss, thinking that AI might replace human agents altogether. For some, there’s nothing to see but opportunity, and they want to discover everything they can about AI technology for their contact center.  
There is plenty to learn about artificial intelligence and its cousin, machine learning (ML). For starters, let’s debunk the myths and get to the facts. The first thing to know is that AI is not something to fear. On the contrary, it’s an excellent tool to enhance the customer experience and give your contact center a boost. Here are some answers to common questions about AI. And a few ideas about harnessing this emerging technology to help optimize your call center operations. 
What is Artificial Intelligence?  
At its core, AI is a computer technology that is considered “smart,” meaning that it’s able to mimic human thinking. AI can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as making predictions, planning, and adapting to circumstances. AIs can also understand and even translate languages. Machine learning is a branch of AI that involves training computers to discover patterns in data sets. The computers then use those observations to make inferences and decisions with little human action or instruction. 

FACT:
The lockdowns of 2020 and onwards accelerated the rate at which contact centers adopted AI technology. Contact centers made a move to AI-powered IVR systems and chatbots to assist with huge customer call demand.

Will AI Replace Human Agents?  
It’s not surprising that job loss is one of the major concerns about AI. Much of what we think we know about AI is speculative — and portrayals of AI in books, movies, and other media have been unflattering at best, and terrifying at worst. From autonomous robots that want to take over the world to ferocious canine war machines, we often aren’t provided with positive images of the potential for AI technology.   
In the real world, there is a strong consensus amongst tech industry experts that AI will significantly benefit people in the workforce. In the contact center, AI can route customer calls, answer simple questions, and write and send general emails. AIs are already doing these tasks. They don’t threaten agents’ employment because these tasks don’t require the friendly touch of a human agent like many other customer interactions do. 
Some tasks definitely DO require the human touch, and AIs can help with that, too, by eliminating mundane tasks like data entry and staff scheduling, giving employees more time to focus on tasks that require a human touch. AI technology can further support agents with its ability to analyze call sentiment in real time and offer in-call scripting recommendations. AI can help the agent understand what the caller wants to accomplish and how they feel, improving metrics like first call resolution and average handle time.  
A Guide to Improving Call Center Operations
3 Ways to Use Artificial Intelligence in Your Call Center  
Using AI can enhance your customer’s experience while also revolutionizing the workday for your agents. Here are three ways you can harness the power of AI to improve contact center operations.  
1. Improve Customer and Agent Experience with AI-Powered IVR 
Interactive voice response systems are the front line for call centers. They act as guides to connect customers with the correct agents for their specific needs. IVRs can save agents time by correctly transferring their calls and improving the customer experience. Equipping your IVR system with AI is a game changer.
AI-powered IVR can use natural language processing to answer specific customer inquiries, which leaves room for the more specialized inquiries (like questions about repairs) to be patched through to live agents. NLP also makes it easier for customers to navigate the IVR, as AI can make the best decisions for skills-based call routing depending on customers’ requests. Customer interaction with an AI that involves smart call routing might look like this: 
 IVR: How can I help you today?
Customer: I need to pay my membership fees.
 IVR: No problem. Allow me to direct your call to the next available Membership Services agent. They’ll be with you shortly.    

TIP:
Fonolo’s Visual IVR system allows your contact center to offer customized call-backs to customers on landlines, online, and via their mobile devices.

2. Improve CX with “Chat Now” Functionality Monitored by AI 
Nothing personalizes a customer’s experience more than providing the ability to get in touch with an agent using the medium of their choice. Offering a “Chat Now” option on your website, where customers can get instant assistance, provides flexibility for resolving online inquiries, no matter the time. An AI-powered chatbot can answer your customer’s questions at any time. It can never be too busy — there’s no queue for chatbots. Customers can click “Chat Now” any time of day and receive immediate answers to many of their questions, written in natural language. 
The Importance of Personalized Customer Service
3. Improve Operations with In-Depth insight into Metrics and KPIs 
AI can take your contact center’s statistics and provide an in-depth analysis of every data point. It can connect dots you might have missed and provide insights into metrics like average handle time and first-call resolution rate. By analyzing customer sentiment, and the tone of the call, AIs can also shed light on your customer experience, and agent performance, improving your entire call center operation. The post 3 Ways to Use Artificial Intelligence in Your Call Center first appeared on Fonolo.

Good riddance.

There’s not a lot of evidence that getting good at writing book reports or regurgitated essays under typical high school conditions leads people to success or happiness later in life.

When typing became commonplace, handwriting was suddenly no longer a useful clue about the background or sophistication of the writer. Some lamented this, others decided it opened the door for a whole new opportunity for humans to make an impact, regardless of whether they went to a prep school or not.

New York City schools are trying to ban GPT3 because it’s so good at writing superficial essays that it undermines the command structure of the essay as a sorting tool. An easy thing to assign (and a hard thing to grade) just became an easy task to hack.

High school essays had a huge range of problems, and banning the greatest essay device since Danny Dunn and his Homework Machine is not the answer. In fact, it’s a great opportunity to find a better way forward.

The first challenge of the essay was the asymmetrical difficulty in giving useful feedback. 30 essays, 5 minutes each, do the math. It doesn’t scale, and five minutes isn’t even close to enough time to honor the two hours you asked a student to put into the work.

As a result, the superficial inspection system led to the second challenge: Students get more points for good typing and clear sentence structure than they did for actually thinking deeply, questioning the status quo or changing their minds. If you grew up in a household with verbally agile family members, you probably did way better on essays than your peers, but not due to much effort on your own.

The third challenge was the lack of clarity about why we were even bothering to have kids write essays. Clearly there wasn’t an essay shortage. Ostensibly, it was either to prove that they read what they were supposed to read, or that they were able to create cogent and persuasive arguments and analysis. Essays were a signal that you could read and you could think.

Except…

They were actually a signal that you could do just enough work to persuade an overwhelmed teacher that you were compliant.

So, now that a simple chat interface can write a better-than-mediocre essay on just about any topic for just about any high school student, what should be done?

The answer is simple but difficult: Switch to the Sal Khan model. Lectures at home, classes are for homework.

When we’re on our own, our job is to watch the best lecture on the topic, on YouTube or at Khan Academy. And in the magic of the live classroom, we do our homework together.

In a school that’s privileged enough to have decent class sizes and devices in the classroom, challenge the students to actually discuss what they’ve read or learned. In real-time, teach them to not only create arguments but to get confident enough to refute them. Not only can the teacher ask a student questions, but groups of students can ask each other questions. Sure, they can use GPT or other tools to formulate where they begin, but the actual work is in figuring out something better than that.

At first, this is harder work for the teacher, but in fact, it’s what teachers actually signed up to do when they become teachers.

This is far less cohesive and controllable than the industrial model of straight rows and boring lectures. It will be a difficult transition indeed. But it’s simple to think about: If we want to train people to take initiative, to question the arguments of others, to do the reading and to create, perhaps the best way to do that is to have them do that.

We’ll never again need to hire someone to write a pretty good press release, a pretty good medical report or a pretty good investor deck. Those are instant, free and the base level of mediocre. The opportunity going forward remains the same: Bringing insight and guts to interesting problems. [More.]

It’s important to track your customers’ interactions with your business. A customer timeline runs right from their first point of contact, up to their most recent purchase. This process of customer brand engagement is referred to as a customer timeline.  It is so significant to track and keep record of your customers’ timelines as they…
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Luxury goods are items that are worth more (to some) because they cost more.

The cost itself is the benefit that is being sold.

There used to be a correlation between superior performance and price. In 1900, an Hermes saddle or a Louis Vuitton trunk was arguably better built for the work it was put to.

Today, though, a more expensive resort, bottle of wine or article of clothing is likely not the item of highest performance. It is simply a symbol that the purchaser is happy to understand and perhaps show off. Poor performance might even be part of the value proposition. Not only can you afford to pay extra, but you can afford to pay extra and have your feet hurt as well.

Over the past few years the way we work has transformed. This will continue to be the case in 2023 with more companies adopting a gig model. For many people, the gig economy is a vital source of income, especially now with increasing pressure from the cost-of-living crisis. On the other hand, quality customer service will be…
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