It’s the human touch – without the human
While product research, order entry, order history, and order status were some of the first customer service functions to be automated successfully online, new technologies from eCRM vendors are helping to push more complex tasks into the realm of self-service.
At eCRM technology provider eGain Communications Corp., guided assistance is one offering in a suite of CRM solutions that help site visitors find answers on their own. “Search gives you a lot of options to choose from as your answer. Guided help takes you through a series of questions and shows you the right answer,” says Anand Subramaniam, vice president of marketing.
Under guided assistance--essentially, a Q and A session--the online help function displays a question at the user interface and then posts additional questions triggered by various data points in the customer’s responses. Each question-and-answer round draws a tighter circle around the universe of possible answers until the customer is left with a final answer or a finite set of recommendations, according to Subramaniam.
Guided assistance can even provide the human touch in customer service without the human in the form of the virtual assistant. These cyber-agents are online characters based on multiple photos of the same actor displaying facial expressions and gestures of welcome, puzzlement and other emotions. The site serves up the character in different poses to support the content being delivered to the online customer. EGain offers the virtual assistants as another form of guided help online marketers can choose to deploy.
Anurag Juneja, eGain’s vice president of services and solutions, says eGain has seen that less computer-savvy consumers tend to prefer a human-like interaction. “We’ve seen it helps consumers establish a psychological direction toward self-service technologies,” he says. “They are inclined to be more forgiving in certain circumstances--more so than if they have a non-human interface.” The virtual agent also can be used to guide users around a site and educate them on the site’s self-service aspects, he adds.
Back...
