How to Make Automated Customer Interactions More Engaging (Video)

AWS Head of Product, Language Tech Vikram Anbazhagan discusses four key elements of bot interactions that can increase customer engagement in this clip from his keynote at CRM evilution 2018.

See more clips from CRM evolution in the CRM evolution Conference video portal. Learn more about CRM evolution here. 

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Vikram Anbazhagan: How do you make these interactions more engaging? How do you make your customers enjoy this experience and not feel like they're talking to a robo and keep saying "Operator, operator," all the time.

You need your conversational agents to have social intelligence. You need them to have a personality. You need to be able to support different modality and also keep the conversation dynamic. There are a few tools at AWS that we provide that you can use to achieve all these.

For social intelligence, you can write code that, once the user starts interacting with your conversational agent, enables you to fetch all their details and context and figure out what the last order was, what information they've already given you, and what their current account status is. Then you can tailor the conversation accordingly, which gives your conversational agent social intelligence.

In terms of personality, we allow you to provide more than one prompt when you're asking for a particular piece of data. In case they did not provide you the answer you were expecting, you should not just repeat the same sentence four times.

What your conversational agent can do is use a different way of asking for the same thing. That, again, gives you some variety and gives your bot some personality. You can also give your bot some personality in the tone of the voice. With the text-to-speech service, you can choose different languages and pick a language and the voice that represents your brand.

Next is modality. Today, it's not just enough to have a great experience on the IVR, because your customers want to engage with your brand, with your company in many different ways. You need to have that same experience on chat, on Facebook, on your website, on your mobile app. Again, you need the tools that support those capability.

Dynamic conversations. How many of you have had an experience where you're chatting with the IVR, you make a mistake and you're stuck, you're not able to come back? Natural-language technologies need to provide capabilities to have dynamic conversation where, if the user makes an error, there's a graceful way of handling it and changing course.

You should also be able to put things together like what we call intent chaining. For example, once you book a hotel, then you should be able to ask the user, "Hey, would you now like to book a car?" and put together many such capabilities in order to have a very sophisticated conversational agent.

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