bots Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Verbal Transactions

Feb 10

How to Accelerate Contact Center KPI Performance

By nmunro | bots, call center, contact Center, empathy

Reducing agent’s learning curve.

In a recent conversation, I had with a client we discussed why they are using our simulator in their contact center. As a large BPO, their revenue is directly tied to documenting agents are following very detailed KPIs. They asked for me to provide a full list of how our simulator can impact each of these so I thought it would be helpful to share this list with others.

Reduction of AHT, this client wanted to reduce new hire AHT of 12 minutes down to an average of 7
Increase agent confidence which impacts CSAT scores
Improved soft-skills such as expressing empathy, active listening and asking open-ended questions
Improved accuracy of keystrokes and data entry
Reduces the number of times call will be escalated to a manager
Automates measurement of English proficiency

In number six, this was not an intended KPI but as a result of working with a very large technology company, they now use our simulator as a way to ensure outsourced agents are English Proficient. This came up when they enrolled agents at a call center in Vietnam. They were struggling to complete a simulation successfully. Our client thought that the simulator wasn’t working correctly. I assessed that their accents were too strong. The client was somewhat skeptical that this was the case so they placed them into production as voice agents. Shortly after they were in production, customers complained they were not able to understand them. They are now all chat agents. Moving forward all of their simulations now account for and measure their English proficiency with our simulator.

As we have proven many times, if you pro-actively use a tool like our simulator, you can address a lot of the “back office” metrics on the front end and improve the customer experience.

Feb 01

More Metrics vs. More Completions

By nmunro | Adaptive Learning, bots, empathy, simulations

Better Training Metrics to Measure Business Impact

I was one of the first people to evangelize the use of Learning Management Systems (LMS) twenty years ago. Now I’m singing a new tune — find a way to measure skill readiness vs. “completions”.

Initially, the LMS systems served a great purpose. But as time went on, companies began adding more and more features to it to help manage various learning activities. I worked with a client who had very robust features for managing classrooms, assessments, catalogs etc. But the bi-product of this was arming trainers with data on the consumption of activities. I could tell you how many people passed an assessment but couldn’t tell you if these same people knew how to really conduct a proper “lock-out tag-out” procedure.

In a recent survey conducted by Donald H Taylor Learning Analytics made the top spot in what the learning

Web analytics concept

the community has a priority interest in 2020. In previous years personalization and adaptive learning held these top spots.

This is great news for Verbal Transactions — as I have been preaching the benefits of more data for the last four years. In our simulator ACES™ (accelerated contact engagement system) we can pinpoint key behaviors that will truly prepare employees for how to do their job well. We are supplying the “system” to measure these behaviors because the standard LMS can’t do this.

For example: In a standard online training program to teach customer service skills, the manager only knows the following:

When the student started and completed the course
What their score on the final assessment or knowledge checks were

In most instances, this course wouldn’t allow the student to complete the course without successfully reaching the passing score.

If you were to build a similar course in ACES™, you would know the following:

When the student started and completed the course
Did they great the customer properly – and how many times it took them to do this according to best practice
Did they properly express the right level of empathy if the customer expressed dissatisfaction?
How well they demonstrated accuracy when keying in information on a screen or recommend proper items to the customer
Did they ask an open-ended question to properly help the customer uncover their needs
Did they paraphrase their understanding of the customer’s requests or needs properly
Were they able to handle the transaction within a reasonable amount of time
Did the offer any cross-selling items at the appropriate time

Anyway, you get the point. With the new digital transformation taking place, organizations can bring this power of more information to them to help trouble-shoot employee performance problems before they impact the customer experience.

If you’d like to see the simulator in action, just click this link.

Jan 14

Seat Time vs. Skill Readiness

By nmunro | Adaptive Learning, bots, simulations

How to Get the CEO to Notice

Did you know that only 8% of CEOs see a direct correlation to the money they spend on training and business impact? This is one of the reasons why training is the first thing to get cut from a budget when tightening the purse strings.

Why is this?

I’ve been in the corporate training space for almost 30 years now (yikes!). I was lucky enough to follow the evolution of how technology has impacted the delivery and access to corporate training but I have also seen it become a detriment as well.

When electronic delivery or eLearning was first introduced companies proclaimed “Now you can cost-effectively train employees on hundreds of topics.” This never happened, even though the vendors successfully sold libraries of 100’s of courses to their clients, only a handful were really useful to the organization at any given time.

Once the evolution of LMS’s (learning management systems) came about it was the holy grail of managing and delivering training. At first, this was great. As companies grew comfortable with LMSs they began to turn them into something beyond their original intent.

Evolution LMS

As this image shows, LMS and digital delivery of training have evolved from one to many to agile. But the fact of the matter is, managers and executives have no solid information to tell them if the employee can actually perform the task the training was intended to teach them.

Technology — that is not necessarily new- AR/VR and simulations have a better approach at measuring skill readiness. In the past, these learning platforms were too cost-prohibitive. The digital demand has driven the costs of these solutions down allowing for increased access. I still see a lot of organizations trying to fit these delivery mechanisms into the same SCORM world but it just doesn’t work.

We need to explore how an organization will benefit from exploring learning solutions that truly measure skill readiness vs. just seat time or completion stats. With the availability of AI/ RPA and big data and predictive analytics, we can build and deliver training that helps employees learn new skills faster and more competently. This translates into a direct tie to business impact.

If you’re at all curious to see an example of AI/predictive analytics and simulation learning visit our video page.Videos

Oct 04

Why Your AI Investment Should Be In Employee Training First

By nmunro | bots, contact Center, simulations

Did you know that poor customer service is costing corporations $80 Billion a year? Even though our economy is still healthy, I don’t think any company can afford to lose customers.

Every day I read about some new products with “AI” or supposed AI embedded into it. Many of these are bots or customer-facing applications to automate or collect data during a customer journey. But even as you deploy these solutions, if the customer still needs some form of human interaction, your contact center staff will need to have stronger skills to handle the more complex problems.

There is a growing trend and awareness in the corporate training world that has finally recognized that the traditional forms of training either via classroom, online or blended, simply doesn’t fully guarantee your training is effective. It simply allows you to check the box training was giving and maybe an evaluation to tell you if the employee found it enjoyable. So What! I don’t know if they can actually perform their job correctly do you?

Here’s where AI comes into play for training. There are new training applications (Like our ACES) that leverage AI and NLP applications to automate one-on-one coaching and guidance to walk an employee through hands-on tasks. Imagine putting a contact center agent into a variety or real-life scenarios multiple times until they have mastered these situations. The embedded AI tracking their behavior pro-actively addresses any mistakes they may make before they engage with live customers.

Plus using a bot like coach removes the need to use your seasoned staff to coach and assist your new hires. Keeping productive and skilled staff on the phone is a much better use of these resources.

Studies show that using this type of technology can even reduce the amount of time it takes to get that new hire up to speed. If you haven’t heard of the term Adaptive Learning you will. This form of learning allows a learner to learn at their own pace with ongoing feedback to calibrate their skills at just the right time.

If you spent a portion of your AI budget in applications like these, it should actually give you a higher ROI on any money you are spending on monitoring customer experiences. If you can proactively reduce call handling times, assure CSAT scores will be high before your agents are placed into production, I think it’s money well spent.

If you want to see an example of this, just click this link to view some sample videos of our ACES simulation.

Aug 17

How To Make Your Own Intelligent Agent

By nmunro | bots, contact Center, simulations

Do you talk to Siri or Alexa like they are a personal friend of yours? Intelligent agents and voice technology has exploded over the last three years. Our appliances, cars and HVAC systems talk to us. Now you can build your own intelligent agent without the need to have programming skills.

Amazon Alexa’s Skills has some great templates. Their Blueprint Skills page provides easy to use templates that cover topics from telling jokes, quiz games, and corporate applications.

Google has DialogFlow which provides templates and tools to incorporate, the built-in functions of your device, like time, location, directions etc. DialogFlow had a longer learning curve for me but I can certainly see the benefits of using this to create your own bots. It will even begin to “learn” how to accept inputs that may not be word for word what it needs to listen for but will begin to accept variations of what you are asking the bot for.

They also offer Actions as an extension of their Google Assistant with some pretty easy to use templates.

There are several new companies forming to provide you with a nice user-friendly tool to build your own bot.

Here are some tips to think about when you are building your bot.

Do you want your bot to have a specific persona
Facebook bot agent
Who are your target users, do they have a device that works with this platform or can they install an app to interact with the platform you are building your bot for
You need to think about what response you want the bot to provide if the user is giving it an input it doesn’t understand.
Does your bot need to be private or secure
Do you want to collect what someone is saying to the bot

Both Amazon and Google have free options which are a great way to play around with them at no risk. Have fun and test it out, you’d be surprised how easy it can be to build your own intelligent agent.

May 21

How We Conducted An AI BOT Smackdown!

By nmunro | bots

Yesterday I had the pleasure of being a co-organizer for Chicago AI Days, one of the largest AI events held in the Midwest. During the planning of all of the presenters, panels, and moderators I thought there was one very important panel of experts missing from this event —- the virtual assistant panel!

As the day rolled on, we planned a sneak appearance of Siri, Alex and Google Assist. After I convinced some members of the audience to assist me with the final presentation of the day, I presented to the audience our panel of experts.

One goal of this exercise was to demonstrate that as far as we have come with voice-based technology and AI we have a ways to go.

We began by asking each of the bots some softball questions like “where do babies come from” and “where can I bury a dead body”. Then my assistant had some harder questions to ask like “when was the first bot created”, none of the panelists got the correct answer.

Then we turned the questions over to the audience. When we asked the bots “why are fire engines red” Google Assist was the only one with the correct answer. One final question of the evening to really try to stump the bots was “What is the definition of AI?” Siri did not get the right answer both Alexa and Google Assist did.

Now time for the audience to vote. Votes for Siri — 2% Votes for Google Voice 45% Alexa was the winner with approximately 53% of the votes! As much as I like Alexa I surprise she won.

This exercise also demonstrated why products like our ACES are still extremely necessary in order to leverage the power of speech assisted applications. ACES leverages what Microsoft’s speech recognition does well and calibrates it to produce better results than the out of the box functionality. We all benefit from the hard work that has already gone into these smart assistive technologies but they are not ready to take over the planet or — AI conferences any time soon.

Apr 30

Simulation vs. RolePlay

By nmunro | bots, call center, contact Center, simulations

The Differences of RolePlaying – vs. Scalable Simulations

Click here to see simulation demos

When I speak to people about our simulator ACES™ some people will interchange the term roleplaying and simulations but there is a difference. As I tend to be a little biased on using simulations vs roleplaying. I thought it would be a helpful exercise to create a chart to list out the similarities and differences between the two activities. This chart below compares the two. There is room for both types of learning methodologies but studies do show that allowing students to spend time in a simulator vs roleplaying, they do perform better. Here is a link to a study conducted by Georgia Institute of Technology conducting a side by side comparison of traditional roleplay in a call center vs simulation.

Mar 28

How to Stop Contact Center Mistakes

By nmunro | bots, call center, contact Center, empathy, simulations

If you had a crystal ball to see into the future, who do you think would be your top-performing contact center agents? Now take that and scale it to all of your call centers both internal and external.

Predict Contact Center Performance

How would this impact your business?

Here is a list of just a few examples:

We would know where the gaps are in hiring and the costs needed to fund recruitment and onboarding
Your quality control managers could pro-actively manage your KPIs
Our scheduling would be much easier
Managers could predict what the AHT would be before any calls were made
Workforce managers would know how many support people to place into each channel with a good estimate of FCR
Turn-over and costs associated with this could be managed better

Taking a look at just this small list you can tell that having the ability to predict who your top contact center employees perform is pretty powerful.

Now I will let you in on a secret – ACES (accelerated contact engagement system) gives you this ability.

How?

ACES gives you a scalable way to catch the contact center agent errors before they happen! Using it’s a powerful simulator, ACES allows you to build realistic immersive simulations that feel like your taking on a real call or chat session.

To see some examples of ACES in action, just click this Videos

Aug 15

How Simulations Can Shorten the Path the Mastery

By nmunro | Adaptive Learning, AI, bots, call center, contact Center, simulations

Simulations for learning

Why do pilots user flight simulators vs. real airplanes? We all know that hands-on experience is one of the best ways to learn a new skill. But don’t take my word for it. In an article featured from Laurdal they state three reasons why simulations accelerate learning and retention:

Simulations increase engagement – By placing students into an immersive environment, they are ACTIVELY vs. passively engaged in the learning
Simulations maximize retention – One of my favorite reasons why simulations are important. How many times have you put people through a training program and the knowledge is lost within a short amount of time
Simulations ensure that learning is transferred to the job – This should really matter to the executive suite, when employees can accelerate their level of applying their skills directly into their work and shorten their path to mastery, this goes directly to the bottom line.

Think of it in this way, if I gave you a manual to learn how to conduct a step by step process, this is an explicit approach to learning something. It’s easily repeated and more commoditized but not as effective. On the other hand, if I gave you access to the equipment and/or placed you into a simulation which immersed you in learning this process. This is an implicit experience but much more valuable in giving you first-hand experience in learning this new task.

Finally, in a study conducted by Roger S. Taylor and Micheline T. H. Chi at the University of Pittsburgh, they conducted a study comparing students who studied using a textbook and those who used a computer simulation. This was the summary of their findings:

The Simulation condition acquired a significant amount of implicit domain information from pretest to posttest, whereas participants in the Text condition did not. These results suggest that educational computer simulations have the potential to significantly enhance the learning of implicit domain knowledge.”

But keep in mind, the simulations need to be tailored to a specific skill or task directly related to the job. It should include some form of immediate feedback and places the learner into a contextual setting, similar to what they will experience in real life. Anders Ericcson was noted as coming out with the study of “deliberate practice” Here is a video where Anders explains this concept.

Watch this video on YouTube

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