Marketing

Conversational Commerce, without the BS

I’m investing substantial time and effort in helping people to better understand what all the hype around AI and conversational commerce technologies like chatbots and intelligent digital assistants is about. It can be rather overwhelming in my experience. And I don’t blame you. I’m overwhelmed at times by all this news on A.I. induced jobless futures and fully automated and self-learning machines as well. It looks as if A.I. will change the world before we can even say “what?”. But we know better.

Why use statistics if we can apply math?

I am convinced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning techniques can do great things, and will be able to do even greater things in the future. But it will take some time and many learnings before we get there. Progress has to be made, and will be made for sure. Just not through claiming ever greater disruptive breakthroughs that are based on assumptions, not evidence. Progress will also not be made by seeing A.I. and machine learning in specific, as the panacea to all problems.

As I’ve been saying in this post: Stop asking the machine to find the most probable answer if you know it with certainty yourself. Just provide the machine with the answer and instruct it to provide it when the question pops up. In most cases this will be a faster fix than asking the machine to learn the answer by comparing 100k+ inputs (Q’s) and outputs (A’s) to come up with the best estimate for the answer. This is specifically true since machine learning algorithms tend to make mistakes and therefor require human supervision.

Invest in relevance, not long tail understanding.

Also, NLP has intent recognition rates of 85% to 95%, depending a bit on the width of the application and the time spent on improving it (should be on the high end after a year). You can of course spend hundred thousands of dollars into getting it to 99,8% or better. But should you? In my experience the return does not often justify the investment. What does justify the investment, is making the answers more relevant to the customer/user by using context and personalisation.

Think of it, what is the reason your customer still makes a call after he’s read the airlines luggage policy? Right, he wants to know what that means to him as an occasional flyer with a last minute discounted ticket on a transatlantic flight. Better NLP will not provide him with the answer he’s looking for. A more personally relevant answer will. And of course the threshold for your company could be at 96% or 84% intent recognition. The exact rate is not the point, the point is you should know when to apply other strategies to improve the customer’s experience and get their jobs done.

AI has reached the peak of inflated expectations

Gartner believes that AI has now passed the peak of inflated expectations. That’s good news for all of us, but mostly for you. Because now you can start using AI, without the BS. And you can start using it to solve your problems and those of your customers, not the problem of a company that lacks experience in the field and has a ‘feeling close to certainty’ that conversational artificial intelligence will change the way the world spins.

 

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I Started a New Challenge. Here’s Why and What it is About.

img_1238Sitting in the sun of the south of France last april, I decided to leave my job at Dutch insurer Delta Lloyd. I came to the conclusion it was impossible to close the gap between rising customer expectations, my ambitions and Delta Lloyd’s priorities. As I strive to be on the forefront of customer experience and innovation I decided to accept an offer from CX Company to become their first CMO. CX Company provides a state of the art AI-fueled SAAS platform that enables companies to design and operate all kinds of cool chatbots and conversational virtual assistants across all touchpoints on the Customer Journey. Chatbots and virtual assistants are not only hot topics in VC-land, but also extremely helpful for consumers and businesses to get their jobs done.

 

Please read the full version on Medium to read more about what led me to this decision, the key-challenges I see and my approach in this new role.

‘Customer Experience’-Experience

The most powerful learnings come from reflecting upon your own experiences. And telling about them. Here’s a story I love to share:

We were sitting in one of the largest meeting rooms available. Still it was rather small for the audience of 15+ supervisors and their managers of a large holiday resort. Everything in the back-office was rather small, for any space that could be made available for frontoffice (read: commercial) activities, was made available to that. Smoking was still allowed, so quite some in the room did.

The managing director stood in front of us. I had no real idea who he was, since I had only set foot in the company as a management trainee a couple of days before. And it was only after I left the company that I realized how that meeting was the starting point of my career in Customer Experience. And how the events following it shaped my beliefs.

The managing director told us that top management had decided to put the Customer first in whatever they do. Even though Customer Satisfaction rates had been stable around 80% for as long as he could remember, top management believed that changing the metric (from answering a CSAT question on a scale of 1 to 10, to essentially asking the same question but changing the scale to a 4-box like this: minus/minus, minus, plus, plus/plus) would make a difference. “We“, the managing director continued, “are expected to meet a target of 80% in the top-box, meaning 80% plus/plus scores“.

It remained painfully quiet. No-one asked a question.

It was obvious to me that, although people were trying to get cues from their peers as how to respond, the general feeling was that this new metric was just another top-management toy that would do nothing more than to satisfy themselves. Customers would remain satisfied as they have always been. Business as usual.

The director wrapped-up the meeting with some trivial household stuff and everyone moved on.

Top management had invested millions of dollars in revitalizing the company by divesting some of the smaller locations and completely refurbishing the remaining ones. At the same time they expanded into other countries. It was their firm belief that, although guests would be willing to pay more for these new accommodations, they would only honor us with return visits if the experience on the resort was something a whole lot better than they have been accustomed to. Even though they rated their experience, prior to the transformation, with 80% satisfaction scores.

Fast forward 6 months. Another meeting. A town-hall with almost all staff of the resort. The managing director was standing next to a large video-screen. We had a live connection with the CEO of the company who told us he had some good news and some bad. The good news was that bookings were going up, across the company. Everyone cheered.

“But“, he said, “top-box scores are falling behind expectations. Far behind.” Boom!

He was right. Everyone knew we had been receiving our new metrics for three to four months now, and we did not meet the target by far. Customers that scored us 80% satisfaction rates, turned into Customers that rated only 30% to 40% top-box. What happened?

Many colleagues argued Customers needed to be coached when filling out the survey, because they were not accustomed to this kind of rating-scale. Others claimed it was because of the refurbishment that Customers started to expect more and therefor rated us less, whilst the level of service was still great. Not to mention the price increase of food and beverage that was introduced after the refurbishment. There was little they could do. Some claimed more budget, so that they could hire more employees, but their productivity targets where already sloppy. That was never going to happen.

The CEO talked some more before ending with saying that he loved this wonderful company and expected us to deliver an experience that made Customers love it as much. Most left the room unimpressed.

Yet, something happened, for me and two of my colleagues at least. Together we started making plans to significantly improve the Customer’s experience. We asked our employees and guests, who brought in a ton of new ideas, and we implemented new, small, experiments weekly. From menu-changes to fun surprises during dinner or happy-hours. But most of all we established our ‘signature’-way of working towards our guests. We implemented our key-service promises, without showing them to our Customers by the way, but expected all to live by them. Some therefor could not stay with us.

And then things started to shift. We were creating a buzz. Not just with guests, but internally as well. More importantly, top-box scores started to rise, and rise fast. Within six months our departments hit target. And those were not the only targets we were hitting. Our revenues started increasing, productivity went up as did the gross-margin on our sales as we increased prices. I think I can sincerely say that this was the first time I experienced flow in a professional situation.

It also was my first experience with managing (sort of) a Customer experience turnaround. And through it I gained some key-insights that have shaped both my approach and my beliefs. This is where the love started. This experience is probably why I do what I do. Not in the last place because it taught me some important stuff that I still carry with me today. Here’s the top 5:

  1. If you want to transform behavior, transform the metrics.
  2. The only reason your CSAT scores are lower than you want is because your service is not good enough to produce the results you want, …regardless of where you live.
  3. (Some) people will blame – and try to game – the system.
  4. Involve your employees in the design of your service-promise(s). They’ll not only buy into it, they will demand their colleagues to do so too.
  5. Improving the Customer Experience is good for business!

Now, what’s your ‘Customer Experience’-experience?