Organizations everywhere are embarking on digital customer experience (CX) initiatives in an effort to build loyalty and increase sales. Yet all too often these initiatives ignore the contact center, creating expensive silos that damage the customer experience and set your strategy up for failure. A successful digital CX strategy goes beyond what your customers are experiencing online to include what’s happening in your contact center.

Contact centers require a great deal of investment – from recruiting and training staff to put the necessary tools in place for agents. A chatbot can help you maximize on those investments while creating a positive omnichannel experience for customers.

Chatbots and virtual agents have become an essential tool for providing 24/7 self-service to digital customers. Available on websites, messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WeChat, WhatsApp and even smart speakers like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, chatbots are helping organizations deal with the growing number of customer contact channels. Today’s customers don’t always expect to engage with a live agent for information and support, and these automated solutions are proven to improve customer experience and customer satisfaction scores.

Yet many organizations make the mistake of only utilizing chatbot technology to create a self-service experience for customers, missing out on the added benefits of using these solutions in the contact center. Chatbots and virtual agents enable organizations to maximize on contact center investments by instantly providing agents with information to assist callers, reducing average call handling times, and increasing first contact resolution. Training time for live agents is drastically reduced with these tools, and you build confidence with customers by assuring consistent communication from all agents. When agents know they always have the information they need at their fingertips, their focus moves from trying to retain knowledge to building better relationships with customers.

A chatbot in your contact center works essentially the same way as a chatbot on your website, except the users are your agents instead of your customers. The tool understands questions asked in natural language, as well as common abbreviations used by your contact center, and can guide agents through processes and forms step-by-step as they assist customers. By giving all staff easy access to the same level of knowledge regardless of experience, anyone from support teams to trainers and coaches can step in to answer customer questions with confidence at peak or busy times.

A chatbot also provides your contact center – and your organization as a whole – with a better understanding of your customers. When your chatbot is integrated with business intelligence tools, your entire customer experience sees the benefits of having better insights for predictive analytics and the next best action initiatives.

Centralize knowledge management control – There are huge benefits to using conversational platforms within the contact center and for customer self-service, but this requires a solid foundation in knowledge management. Chatbots and virtual agents can only give accurate responses if they are backed by a knowledge base with accurate content.

Your approach to knowledge management needs an orchestration platform – a tool that brings together all of your organization’s information sources so that you can centrally control your service experience across contact channels. This platform should allow integration with your existing content sources – other knowledge management systems, customer relationship management tools, information feeds, etc. – so you can easily pull the content you need from those systems, avoiding the unnecessary cost and hassle of recreating everything in another place.

Integrate chatbots and live agents – Offering customers an easy way to self-serve through a chatbot or virtual agent frees up your contact center to assist customers who need, or want, to speak with a real person. Integrating that self-service tool with human-assisted channels like live chat or callback allows customers to be seamlessly passed from virtual to real agent, with a complete history of their conversation being passed with them. There’s no

need for customers to deal with the annoyance of repeating their question or issue, and your live agents can pick up right where the chatbot left off.

In the contact center, this integration needs to include options for agents to provide real-time feedback and suggestions on chatbot content that is inaccurate, incomplete, or out-of-date. The feedback loop should be linked to the orchestration platform so that the comments and suggestions can be easily reviewed and used to make content updates. This enables contact center agents to act as knowledge experts and help keep the chatbot content accurate.

The conversational platform should enable you to deliver assistance to agents providing customer care across all the channels your contact center supports – phone, email, social media, support communities, discussion forums, etc. It should also provide options for agents to use voice and for the tool to be deployed on the IVR (interactive voice response) channel as well for seamless customer experience.

Combine artificial intelligence and human input – The foundations of successful chatbots lie in the control of the response given. A hybrid approach of machine learning and human curation of content allows the chatbot to continually improve based on the way it is being used while also enabling companies to maintain control over the reliability of responses. Combining human curation with machine learning creates dependable self-service solutions and gives organizations the control they need to comply with industry standards and regulations.

Your contact center is a rich source of data that can be used to train your chatbot. Analyzing live chat and

call transcripts are a great starting point for developing your conversational tool. With the use of agent feedback loops, your contact center team becomes chatbot coaches – the knowledge experts helping to keep the chatbot performing well. It's important for your chatbot to learn from interactions with your agents and customers, but it’s equally important that the solution you choose allows human moderation of the machine learning component. It’s simply not realistic to implement a customer service chatbot – public-facing or in your contact center – and then expect it to improve and remain reliable all on its own. Bringing together human input, such as agent feedback loops and user surveys, with semantic matching, statistical self-learning, and neural networks create an efficient and predictable solution for your contact center and your customers. The orchestration platform should allow your organization to continuously fine-tune the machine learning and human curation components.

Organizations everywhere are embarking on digital customer experience (CX) initiatives in an effort to build loyalty and increase sales. Yet all too often these initiatives ignore the contact center, creating expensive silos that damage the customer experience and set your strategy up for failure. A successful digital CX strategy goes beyond what your customers are experiencing online to include what’s happening in your contact center.

Contact centers require a great deal of investment – from recruiting and training staff to put the necessary tools in place for agents. A chatbot can help you maximize on those investments while creating a positive omnichannel experience for customers.

Chatbots and virtual agents have become an essential tool for providing 24/7 self-service to digital customers. Available on websites, messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WeChat, WhatsApp and even smart speakers like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, chatbots are helping organizations deal with the growing number of customer contact channels. Today’s customers don’t always expect to engage with a live agent for information and support, and these automated solutions are proven to improve customer experience and customer satisfaction scores.

Yet many organizations make the mistake of only utilizing chatbot technology to create a self-service experience for customers, missing out on the added benefits of using these solutions in the contact center. Chatbots and virtual agents enable organizations to maximize on contact center investments by instantly providing agents with information to assist callers, reducing average call handling times, and increasing first contact resolution. Training time for live agents is drastically reduced with these tools, and you build confidence with customers by assuring consistent communication from all agents. When agents know they always have the information they need at their fingertips, their focus moves from trying to retain knowledge to building better relationships with customers.

A chatbot in your contact center works essentially the same way as a chatbot on your website, except the users are your agents instead of your customers. The tool understands questions asked in natural language, as well as common abbreviations used by your contact center, and can guide agents through processes and forms step-by-step as they assist customers. By giving all staff easy access to the same level of knowledge regardless of experience, anyone from support teams to trainers and coaches can step in to answer customer questions with confidence at peak or busy times.

A chatbot also provides your contact center – and your organization as a whole – with a better understanding of your customers. When your chatbot is integrated with business intelligence tools, your entire customer experience sees the benefits of having better insights for predictive analytics and the next best action initiatives.

Centralize knowledge management control – There are huge benefits to using conversational platforms within the contact center and for customer self-service, but this requires a solid foundation in knowledge management. Chatbots and virtual agents can only give accurate responses if they are backed by a knowledge base with accurate content.

Your approach to knowledge management needs an orchestration platform – a tool that brings together all of your organization’s information sources so that you can centrally control your service experience across contact channels. This platform should allow integration with your existing content sources – other knowledge management systems, customer relationship management tools, information feeds, etc. – so you can easily pull the content you need from those systems, avoiding the unnecessary cost and hassle of recreating everything in another place.

Integrate chatbots and live agents – Offering customers an easy way to self-serve through a chatbot or virtual agent frees up your contact center to assist customers who need, or want, to speak with a real person. Integrating that self-service tool with human-assisted channels like live chat or callback allows customers to be seamlessly passed from virtual to real agent, with a complete history of their conversation being passed with them. There’s no

need for customers to deal with the annoyance of repeating their question or issue, and your live agents can pick up right where the chatbot left off.

In the contact center, this integration needs to include options for agents to provide real-time feedback and suggestions on chatbot content that is inaccurate, incomplete, or out-of-date. The feedback loop should be linked to the orchestration platform so that the comments and suggestions can be easily reviewed and used to make content updates. This enables contact center agents to act as knowledge experts and help keep the chatbot content accurate.

The conversational platform should enable you to deliver assistance to agents providing customer care across all the channels your contact center supports – phone, email, social media, support communities, discussion forums, etc. It should also provide options for agents to use voice and for the tool to be deployed on the IVR (interactive voice response) channel as well for seamless customer experience.

Combine artificial intelligence and human input – The foundations of successful chatbots lie in the control of the response given. A hybrid approach of machine learning and human curation of content allows the chatbot to continually improve based on the way it is being used while also enabling companies to maintain control over the reliability of responses. Combining human curation with machine learning creates dependable self-service solutions and gives organizations the control they need to comply with industry standards and regulations.

Your contact center is a rich source of data that can be used to train your chatbot. Analyzing live chat and

call transcripts are a great starting point for developing your conversational tool. With the use of agent feedback loops, your contact center team becomes chatbot coaches – the knowledge experts helping to keep the chatbot performing well. It's important for your chatbot to learn from interactions with your agents and customers, but it’s equally important that the solution you choose allows human moderation of the machine learning component. It’s simply not realistic to implement a customer service chatbot – public-facing or in your contact center – and then expect it to improve and remain reliable all on its own. Bringing together human input, such as agent feedback loops and user surveys, with semantic matching, statistical self-learning, and neural networks create an efficient and predictable solution for your contact center and your customers. The orchestration platform should allow your organization to continuously fine-tune the machine learning and human curation components.