Interactions Blog

Customer care, although increasingly important, is constantly evolving. Businesses know they need to excel at customer care in order to remain competitive, but with the pace at which consumer preferences for channels continue to change, it’s difficult to develop a comprehensive and effective customer care strategy.

In an age where technology is constantly improving consumers’ daily lives, companies are also ready for a tech helper. However, the personal virtual assistants that the public knows and loves – Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri – are not in line with what the business sector requires. The answer to business-to-consumer needs? Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs).

By the end of the day today, consumers in the United States will have made over 40 million payments – to their utility company, to their insurance provider, at their local pharmacy, their bank, their supermarket, and more. Furthermore, research indicates that over 50% of consumers have made a payment over the phone with a live agent.

What is an ideal customer experience? For me, it is natural, frictionless and productive; regardless of the brand I’m dealing with, the time of the day, or the channel I use. Now think about the different channels you use to interact with a brand – it could be the website, the mobile application or the trusty phone call to customer service.

It’s that time of year again — when customers are rushing left and right to their favorite retailers (in-store and online) to start or finish up holiday shopping. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Holiday season are officially here — and while that can mean great things for businesses, it’s often a stressful and frustrating time of year for consumers.

By making the right investments in your customer service, you can ensure your customers always have positive things to say about you.

Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) are typically used by enterprise businesses to effectively communicate with their customer base and provide highly functional self-service. With IVAs, customers receive both a personal and human experience. They can speak in their own words and be understood, regardless of accent and background noises, across all channels.

It’s no surprise that your business or brand’s reputation is critical. For better or for worse, in person or online, customers talk. And no matter how fantastic your company, agency, or the experience is once a customer steps through the front door, in many cases your reputation could be all that a potential customer has to work with before they decide to do business with you.

Artificial intelligence has developed to a point where it is impacting our everyday lives — including how we interact with the companies we do business with. Hear Phil Gray, EVP of Business Development at Interactions, discuss how AI is impacting customer service at some of the world’s largest enterprises.

It is impossible to ignore chatbots if you are even remotely following the customer care industry. They seem to be everywhere. Some tech publications even called 2016 ‘the year of chatbots’ and 2017 ‘the year when chatbots will actually make customers more productive.

Whether we realize it or not, we encounter machine learning on a daily basis. Aside from in our day-to-day lives, industries from retail to government and more are depending on machine learning to get things done. Below is a short list of how different industries are utilizing machine learning.

Have you ever yelled at a customer service agent over the phone? How about an AI-powered virtual customer service agent? If you answered yes to the latter, then thanks, you’ve made a significant contribution to the evolution of artificial intelligence.