Opus Research’s Intelligent Assistants Conference London (April 26-27) is drawing closer. With lots of great customer case studies planned, we’re looking forward to helping conference participants learn more about how intelligent assistants (IAs) can address many of their customer support challenges.

As a preview, here are five quick tips for architecting your company’s digital self-service strategy.

Focus on Offering Solid Self-Service
As we talk to companies across all different verticals, people consistently tell us of growing pressure from customers to offer top-notch self-service options. Most customers don’t want to phone into a call center to get a question answered, a problem resolved, or a purchase completed. If self-service options aren’t readily available, or if they don’t work, the competition is just a click or voice command away.

Small Steps Can Lead to Big Gains
Implementing an IA solution that combines speech recognition, natural language understanding, language output, and even predictive analytics is the holy grail. But if your company is still testing the waters, taking incremental steps isn’t a bad approach. Upgrading the search function on your website and/or mobile app to include Intelligent, semantic-based search capabilities could be a huge win for customers. Offering personalization options could be another great step in the right direction. Taking incremental steps towards a robust set of self-service capabilities can be a good approach.

Don’t Be Afraid of Multi-Channel
The same basic set of technologies that power the IA on your company’s website can be used to run the same, or similar, IA capabilities on mobile apps, responsive web applications, or even chat-based messaging platforms. The great thing about investing in IA technologies is that they are easily extensible and can be leveraged across channels.

Structure Your Corporate Knowledge
At the end of the day, your company’s IA solution will only be effective if it can automatically find the information it needs to assist your customers. Organizing corporate knowledge, even after decades of research on how to do it, seems to have attained about as much success as alchemy. But technologies are emerging that may finally crack open the nut. I wrote about the concept of the knowledge graph in a previous post. While there’s probably no magic bullet, it pays to focus resources on organizing and structuring information about your products and services.

Leverage the Data to Improve Customer Experience Outcomes
IA solutions offer a great side benefit by providing valuable insights into what your customers are asking. Be sure to take advantage of this data. Not only can you use customer inquiries to improve your self-service features, you can also leverage the same data to understand what’s trending and to focus on the products and services your customers care about most.

Self-service options, such as intelligent assistants, are rapidly transitioning from market differentiators to must-haves. We look forward to exploring in-depth case studies in London and at future Opus Research conferences. We hope to see you there!

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

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