Japan Firms Turn to VR for Customer Service Training

Examined VR for this in the 80s.   Useful when well staged with examples.   Saw examples in Japan then. 

Japan Firms Turn to VR for Customer Service Training

By The Japan News, May 8, 2023

A FamilyMart employee receives virtual reality customer service training.

Conventional training requires an instructor to teach employees the various customer-related tasks at the convenience stores, but with virtual reality, trainees can learn on their own.

Increasingly, Japanese companies are using virtual reality (VR) technology to train customer service staff.

Employees of convenience store chain operator FamilyMart wear VR goggles and manipulate a controller to learn various tasks, like using cash registers, ordering products, and accepting delivery orders.

VR enables trainees to learn on their own, shortening training time from 36 hours to 12.

In January, Kyoto College of Hotel, Tourism, and Bridal Management developed a VR-based training program for hotels and inns featuring situations that change according to trainees' responses, so they can manage various scenarios while engaging with different guests.

Japan's manufacturing, automobile, and railway sectors are using VR for inspection and repair, while a labor shortage has prompted that nation’s food service and lodging industries to roll out VR training to enhance efficiency.

From The Japan News

View Full Article  

How Will Generative AI Shape Retail Customer Service?

Good overview...

How Will Generative AI Shape Retail Customer Service  by Tom Ryan in Retailwire

Customer service reps (CSRs) continue to land on lists of the top ten jobs at risk due to advances in conversational artificial intelligence (AI). Some observers, however, are hopeful the technologies only reinvent the role for the customer’s benefit instead of replacing jobs.

Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s group chief executive, technology and chief technology officer, writing for the Harvard Business Review, predicts AI will automate a few repetitive tasks for CSRs, augment others and add “new, high-value tasks” to the CSR role.

“The ability of generative AI to put massive amounts of information at the fingertips of CSRs greatly increases their capacity to resolve the customer’s problem more thoroughly and quickly than either a chatbot alone or a CSR following a rote script,” said Mr. Daugherty. “But because conversational AI can sometimes produce plausible sounding but nevertheless incorrect, irrelevant, or nonsensical responses, a human must remain in the loop to ensure the accuracy and trustworthiness of machine-generated suggestions and information.”

Writing for Unite.AI, Eli Israelovk, CEO of CommBox, a communications automation platform, said AI could reduce stress and increase job satisfaction for CSRs. “They can deal only with the most complex or valuable calls, while bots and other automated features serve more simple queries,” he wrote. 

Yoon Kim, assistant professor of computer science at MIT, speaking to Scripps News, believes that while humans will be necessary for monitoring, ChatGPT-enabled chatbots “can cover a wider range of customer queries, and moreover, enhance the engagement of the customer with the chatbot, and ultimately widen the scope of problems that can be potentially addressed.”

Artificial intelligence was being  touted for its potential to reduce   waits and problem resolution times in a 24/7 timeframe, tailor responses based on individual consumer preferences and drive down costs even before ChatGPT and the hype around it arrived.

Gartner last year predicted that by 2027, chatbots will become the primary customer service channel for roughly a quarter of organizations. Uma Challa, a Gartner analyst specializing in customer service and support technology, said in a release, “When designed correctly, chatbots can improve customer experience and drive positive customer emotion at a lower cost than live interactions.”  .... ' 

Zoom Wants to do More

And want to see more, especially that saves time, records things, organizes things intelligently.  Give us us an after Covid present.   Here for customer service ....

Zoom is driving further into the customer service market

By Anthony Spadafora in Techradar

Video conferencing giant expands its contact center offering with Solvvy acquisition

In its latest move into the customer service market, Zoom has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the AI and automation platform for customer support Solvvy.

Once the acquisition closes, the two companies will provide elevated customer service experiences to enterprise businesses on a global scale and work together quickly to capitalize on new opportunities in both the contact center and customer support segments.

President of product and engineering at Zoom, Velchamy Sankarlingam explained in a press release how acquiring Solvvy will help boost its Zoom Contact Center offering which launched earlier this year, saying:  .... '

Examining 3D Customer Experiences

 Nicely put short piece in Customer Think about how customers will be attracted and engagedwith 3D experiences.  And some notable examples like IKEA Place,  which I have worked with.    My current look at LiDAR also edges on the idea.

Reimagining Customer Experiences With 3D Technologies

By Surabhi Ghosh Chatterjee -May 4, 2021 in Customerthink

The new normal is evolving every day, and so are customer expectations. One of the major shifts in consumers’ sentiment today is – ‘If I can do it online, I will.’ This shift is likely to stay in consumers’ lives as they become increasingly comfortable with technology. Today’s consumers seek personalized and engaging experiences that emotionally connect with them. In fact, 86% of customers say they do not mind paying a premium for a great customer experience. A recent IDC report suggests that customer experiences will become a competitive advantage for brands to gain customer loyalty.

Immersive technologies will play a critical role in the way customer experiences (CX) are reimagined. 3D technologies can be the game-changers in building an emotional connection with consumers and redefining the rules of customer experiences for the future.

Here’s how:  ... " 

About AI and Call Centers

How much will AI and chatbots replace call centers?  Will they ultimately carry on a complete and specific conversation that will solve a service problem most of the time?    Will there be trust and carry through and follow up?  And complete satisfaction?    Will people prefer automatons to people? Some of this is already here,  but there is  a long way to go.   A discussion.

The Truth About AI in the Call Center in 2020
By Thomas Laird  in Customer Think.

The role of AI in the contact center has been a topic that has been brewing in the industry over the past year. The trend I have been seeing is senior executives, senior management, or even the people in charge of budgeting saying, “Let’s just hand this over to AI” or “I want a bot to do this”. They try to take the human aspect out of the call center completely. Sure, saving money is important, but when it comes down to that bottom dollar, you need to be able to guarantee good service, and that only comes from humans. The call center is evolving rapidly and with the introduction of new technology, and the landscape is going to look extremely different in five years from now.  .... " 

Talk on Service Design from ISSIP

I am a long time member of the below:

Upcoming Presentation from ISSIP: International Society of Service Innovation Professionals

Horrors and heroes of building design capabilities in organizations: an industry experience

Speakers: Dr. Marzia Aricò and Alexandra Coutsoucos - Livework on 12th February, 2020 from 11 am - 11:30 am EST

Service design consultancies are increasingly moving from designing the service to designing the machine that delivers the service. We will compare two cases from telco and financial sectors to draw learning on the reality of building design capabilities in large organizations. We will walk you through the experience, from planning to execution, highlighting what works and what doesn’t. How does the plan translate to reality? How can you ensure to plug-in effectively into the existing organizational context? And how do you factor human error in?

Zoom information available on registration.  

IBM Watson and Lufthansa

Customer service is an increasing space for AI technologies.

IBM Watson helps Lufthansa Group optimize its customer service in DSSRseources
Lufthansa and IBM collaborate in the field of artificial intelligence (AI); new AI Studio leverages IBM Garage method

ARMONK, N.Y. and EHNINGEN, Germany, Oct. 29, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the Lufthansa Group have joined forces to establish the Lufthansa AI Studio, a collaboration that will use artificial intelligence (AI) to help address the airline's business challenges, such as improving customer service.

Leveraging the IBM Garage method, the Lufthansa AI Studio's interdisciplinary team consists of IBM Services professionals with diverse expertise working side by side with Lufthansa employees to quickly test new AI-based business ideas and services suitability, implement them in pilot projects, and roll them out within the company.

Focusing on better customer service with the AI Studio

The AI Studio is simultaneously working on more than ten different solutions for various departments within Lufthansa Group with a focus on applications for sales, customer service and operational areas.

One of the first projects of the Lufthansa AI Studio was to integrate IBM Watson solutions, including Watson Assistant and Watson Natural Language Understanding, in the Service Help Centre (SHC). The 22 employees of the SHC support 15,000 Lufthansa agents at 180 Lufthansa stations worldwide in answering service questions involving check-in and boarding processes, which can add up to more than 100,000 support calls per year. By integrating IBM Watson AI services, previously disparate data sources can now be searched for possible approaches and answers to customer queries. The SHC employees can phrase their questions in natural language, and the solution is also trained to 'understand' specialized aviation and internal company terms to enhance results. IBM Watson manages, searches through, analyzes and interprets the various relevant information sources, such as SharePoint and internal ticket systems. In addition to shorter waiting times of the customers at the check-in, the quality of the information provided as a whole was increased.

Follow-up projects to help address greater agility and innovation   .... "

Kinds and Channels of Chat for Customers

Good thoughts about what customers need and the variety of chat channels.

Live chat and customer anxiety   By Niamh Reed in Customerthink

Customers come in all moods and mindsets. Some are confident, some are angry, some are calm, some are anxious. And when it comes to customer service, some contact channels are better suited to different moods than others.

Customer anxiety, in particular, is tricky to manage. Service practices that work for most customers may not create good experiences for anxious ones. One of the best channels for catering to customer anxiety is live chat software.

Here’s why.  .... "

Cisco Moves with MindMeld

Have we seen the emergence of a new general assistant?  I remember the acquisition of Mindmeld, but did not expect this direction.  Don't expect a device to follow,   but likely a business oriented conversational AI and assistance, with the ability to embed in other systems.   Smart homes?  There has been considerable posts about MindMeld in this blog.  Our innovation center did considerable work with Cisco.

Cisco opens up its MindMeld voice AI platform    By Maria Deutscher in SiliconAngle

Back in 2017, Cisco Systems Inc. shelled out $125 million to acquire MindMeld Inc., an early-stage startup that had created a platform for building voice assistants. The offering was one of the first development tools focused specifically on conversational artificial intelligence.

Cisco announced Wednesday that it’s releasing MindMeld under an open-source Apache 2.0 license. The move is meant to lower the adoption barrier for enterprises looking to add voice features to their applications. Just  as important, it will enable outside developers to improve upon to the platform and contribute their code back to the project.

MindMeld provides a set of tools that cover most of the core tasks involved in building a conversational AI. At the heart of the platform is a natural-language processing engine for parsing spoken commands. It can identify the topic a user is talking about, isolate what it is exactly they’re asking for and analyze “entities” such as restaurant names that require special interpretation.

Once a request is parsed, it’s passed on to MindMeld’s question-answering engine. The system can automatically generate replies by drawing on a corpus of information provided in advance by the application developer. MindMeld includes a dedicated module for managing a service’s knowledge repository that helps with tasks such as organizing data and finding alternative answers when an application’s first reply misses the mark..... " 

Customer Service Help and AI Agents

Inclined to agree, with only the most difficult examples handed over to groups of human or specialty agents.

How will AI powered Customer service Help Take over Support?  in MarutiTech Blog

Automation of services has picked up its fastest pace by now, giving users the much needed facility to fulfill their regular tasks. With advanced systems powered by automated solutions, users can now book a restaurant reservation, order a pizza, book a movie ticket, hotel room and even make a clinic appointment. Customer service industry is gaining much momentum especially due to disruption of Artificial Intelligence – a technological breakthrough that has taken almost every business industry by storm.

By transforming customer service interactions, AI-powered digital solutions are prepared to improve every aspect of your business including online customer experience, loyalty, brand reputation, preventive assistance and even generation of revenue streams. Digital market moguls project that by 2020 more than 85% of all customer support communications will be conducted without engaging any customer service representatives.

This blog delves into the subject a little more to convey how AI-powered customer service can possibly help customer support agents online.  ... "

Qualitities of Effective Bots

Nicely done, list at the link is a good start when considering a Chatbot option for customer service.

Few important qualities of highly effective bots     By Juned Ahsan -   in CustomerThink

Bots are gaining popularity because they are effective in providing good customer experience. As bots never sleep you always have the door open for your customers i.e. 24×7, 365 days. Although businesses love bots, but often customers hate them due to legitimate reasons. The most common mistake bots do is that, they pretend to act like humans, and they miserably fail on it. Bots are not a replacement for humans irrespective of how good they are on natural language understanding and speaking. Bots help to provide a communication channel that is more available and more efficient for few well defined tasks.

As it is quite easy to create a bot these days, business jump to create one of their own. But most of them lack purpose and effectiveness. I would like to capture few important qualities of an highly effective bot. ... " 

IBM Bets Big on AI Training

Not unlike what we did in the space in the 90s.   Quality of customer service expectations continue to grow.  Consistency,speed also expected as part of more complex customer interactions.

IBM's Big Bet on Artificial Intelligence Training    By  Anne Fisher  in Fortune.

The next time you call an 800 number with a gripe about a product or service, consider this: Even though it’s a real live person who answers, he or she might not be the one deciding how to deal with you. Instead, a complex series of algorithms may step in, to gauge your mood and react accordingly. One version of IBM’s interactive technology Watson Assistant instantly analyzes your tone of voice. Then, based on precisely how peeved you sound, the system suggests what the service rep should offer as a fix for whatever your problem is—a refund, for instance, or free shipping on your next order—with the aim of holding on to your business.

Wondering why a human CSR can’t just handle this conversation? “People interpret tones of voice differently, so they respond differently to customers,” explains IBM consultant Aman Kochhar. By contrast, he adds, “A.I. is not subjective. So it’s much more consistent.”

Kochhar has been learning to apply artificial intelligence to business problems since last December, when he started taking A.I. courses as part of the first phase of a gigantic new training push inside IBM. Called AI Skills Academy (AISA), the program is designed to do two things. First, it teaches employees about integrating A.I. into their own jobs within the company, from creating marketing apps to improving supply chain efficiency. At the same time, AISA educates IBMers in consulting, sales, operations, and elsewhere how to collaborate with clients to use A.I. in their businesses, too. Divided into two tracks—one for techies (software developers, engineers, research scientists) and one for everybody else—the curriculum has four levels, from basic to expert. .... "

AI and Customer Experience

Largely agree its all about the relatively mundane, though these capabilities must be carefully linked into the right processes and values.

How Companies are Using AI to Revolutionize the Customer Service Experience
By Haris Saeed  in CustomerThink

Various companies are also taking advantage of artificial intelligence technology to improve their businesses in numerous ways — and many of those benefits are trickling down to consumers as well. Artificial intelligence is not always what one may imagine (for better and worse), thanks again to those sci-fi writers. AI is not necessarily used to create humanized robots, although that is a possibility, it is also used to dramatically improve processes within companies.

Machine learning is one aspect of AI that is most commonly used to enhance processes. As Chris Nicholson, co-founder and CEO of Skymind, described it on a recent TechEmergence podcast: “AI is just a box. Math and code. If this, then that. That is the simplest way to describe it.” So, don’t fear an AI takeover of humanity just yet. ... "

Customer Experience Metrics

Good metrics matter.    A good recent survey.

Does it matter which customer experience metric you choose?   By Alyona Medelyan in CustomerThink

Are you responsible for measuring the progress in improving customer experience? If yes, I’m sure you needed to come up with a rationale on which metrics to choose for this: Is it an all ubiquitous Net Promoter Score (NPS), the traditional customer satisfaction CSAT, or a more recent invention Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Is one enough or should you implement several metrics? Does it actually matter? Here, we discuss the two arguments: Pro and against.

Why choosing the right metric matters

Choosing the right metric matters to the extent that the metric must be meaningful to the specific customer touchpoint you’re wanting to analyze. ... "

Customer Service State and Future

Good look at state and future of customer service, including advanced tech being used.   Have noted changes in how I use customer service.   In CustomerThink:

Customer Service: Where We Are and Where We Are Going
By Fara Haron in CustomerThink

Product and service-based businesses need a place to direct customers in need. If they don’t have one, it’s a fast road to an angry audience and a poor reputation. Customer service is a constant need across industries and has been for decades. However, not much light has been shed on the vast progress of this industry over the years. It started out with confused or upset customers picking up their landline for help, but today the average contact center supports an average of nine communication channels among email, web chat, social media and much more. To provide some insight on what’s happening behind the customer inquiry scenes, let’s take a look at the evolution of the contact center. How are customers currently serviced, how can we create the most efficient environment today, and how can customers expect to communicate 20 years from now? Perhaps more importantly, what is the data about customer expectations telling us? ... "

Announcing Chatbox for Talking to the Customer

Pointed out to me. Closer to a real continued, intelligent conversation with the customer.  What we hoped to gain in past approaches.

Chatbox launches messaging ecosystem for personalized customer experiences at scale
Chatbox Instant Apps facilitate the dynamic exchange of rich, structured data within messaging streams and can be deployed to any channel, carrier or hardware

SEATTLE, July 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Chatbox announced the launch of its new integrated messaging ecosystem. The Chatbox platform helps businesses deliver hyper-personalized, messaging-based customer experiences at scale across texting, chat and social channels.

Today's consumers are less and less willing to waste time when interacting with companies. They want to get questions answered, make purchases, or get the service they need -- all on their timeline, preferred channel and with no loss of context from their previous conversations. A recent study by Oracle shows that 75 percent of consumers perceive an enhanced experience enabled by modern engagement capabilities in more-personal scenarios. And according to Facebook, the channel of choice is mobile applications: 67 percent of people expect to use messaging apps more to talk to businesses.  .... "

Autonomous Customer Care

Achieving Fully Autonomous Customer Care    By Richard Crowe in CustomerThink

When it comes to customer care, the best customer experience is no experience at all because services just work the way the customer expects—the first time and every time. So how can service providers progress toward this nirvana of customer support?

Building better customer care solutions starts with using connected intelligence to understand when and why a customer is experiencing an issue and how these issues can be most efficiently resolved. All of a service provider’s systems and processes must work together to create a great customer experience. Organizational and system silos make it hard to provide a holistic and real-time view of what’s happening with a customer and determine the next best action to take. The ability to connect domains, derive insights, and automate actions in the moments that matter is connected intelligence.

The road to fully autonomous care—where problems are predicted and resolved automatically, before the customer notices anything is wrong—lies in mining the vast trove of data that service providers collect, and learning valuable lessons from it using big data techniques.   ... " 

Chatbots as Customer Service Reps

Overview on the concept of retail chatbots.   This time of year you have probably encountered a few.  Key is doing it right. It is not easy to do them well. Participating in some design. 

Will chatbots replace customer service reps?
by Guest contributor  Retail TouchPoints staff ... in Retailwire

Undoubtedly, chatbots, both text and voice-rendered, will replace a large majority of customer service representatives.  - Shawn Harris

Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the Retail TouchPoints website.

Chatbots — AI applications that simulate human conversation — are becoming more pervasive in online and mobile customer service, and acceptance of them is growing: 55 percent of American consumers and 65 percent of Millennials report that they want chatbots involved in the process. In addition, 20 percent of consumers say chatbots in general are definitely making things better, while 40 percent say chatbots are helpful but not yet living up to their full potential. .... " 

Customer Service via Cognitive Solutions and BPM

Found this customer service example to be interesting ... in particular that it uses Business Process Modeling (BPM)  and Watson.    I believe any such problem should include a BPM analysis.

 " ... Customer insight gathered from unstructured data can lead to new business opportunities, improved customer satisfaction, and a greater competitive edge in the industry. Outthink your competitors by becoming a Cognitive Business. .... 

With Princeton Blue’s Cognitive Customer Service solution, you can benefit from the combined capabilities of BPM and IBM Watson

Princeton Blue, founded in 2006, is a leading provider of digital automation services and solutions delivered via Business Process Management (BPM), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies .....  "