Tag: artificial intelligence

The COVID-19/coronavirus has caused many universities to cancel lectures, extra-curricular activities, and large gatherings. Many are switching to online classes as a precaution to stop the spread of the virus.

Virtual classrooms have been changing mainstream education for some time, but the change has been evolutionary. COVID-19 has caused massive disruption forcing colleges and universities to quickly move from traditional education and brace themselves for the transition to virtual classrooms.

Many institutions are experiencing a flood of phone calls as parents and students seek information about campus operations, as well as COVID-19 updates. In this article, we’ll show you how digital technology helps higher education by taking the burden off of their switchboard and providing real-time information that emails and website updates can’t.

Messaging for Higher Education

The use of messaging as a way to quickly connect with students and parents isn’t a new concept.  Higher Education Institutions like Texas A& M implemented messaging well before the COVID-19 pandemic to increase their speed of acknowledgment and response times to inquiries. The use of messaging also increased student engagement.

The Coronavirus has taken the need for on-demand information to a new level. Local and state governments, like the City of Knoxville, have quickly implemented messaging to keep citizens informed during this time of uncertainty. Now, colleges and universities are following suit.

Here are 4 reasons universities are taking advantage of bots and digital channels, like messaging and chat:

• Provide 24X7, real-time updates to students

As calls regarding coronavirus updates continue to swell, colleges and universities struggle to keep pace with existing staff. Shifting calls to digital channels is one step that allows staff to handle multiple conversations at one time. In addition, bots are being used to help parents and students, who may have questions, that can be answered without needing to speak to a person. If a human is needed, visitors can type a word like “human” to quickly exit the bot conversation and speak to someone directly.

• Scale quickly

Your staff can handle multiple, simultaneous text messaging conversations at one time versus one phone call at a time. People don’t always expect an immediate response on text, giving your staff time to handle multiple, simultaneous conversations. Asynchronous conversations allow you to quickly scale and improve your level of service.

• Send proactive communications 

The situation is rapidly evolving.  As guidelines change, schools that want to keep their campus community up to date can send outbound, two-way conversational messages. Your school can maintain the trust and credibility it has earned with proactive, real-time updates..

• Deliver consistent and accurate information

The ability to broadly share information is another reason to consider using text messaging. Quiq’s messaging platform enables staff to save standard replies, called snippets, that can be shared with just a few keystrokes. This means that the same message can be consistently shared across multiple channels.  For campuses with large student bodies, extended campuses, or satellite locations, this could prove to be extremely important as new information arises and institutional guidelines are adjusted.

Communicating Updates About COVID-19

Quiq’s COVID-19 Bot

With Quiq’s messaging platform, we’ve made it easy to present menu options that help visitors get to the right information. As an example, we’ve created a bot to provide guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Chatbots are easy to create and fast to deploy while providing incredible flexibility. As new information becomes available, you can easily update the bot to keep your campus community up-to-date. Quiq’s bot designer uses a drag-and-drop format that makes it easy for any staff member to change and update menu options.

City of Knoxville

The City of Knoxville recently deployed a version of Quiq’s COVID-19 Bot to provide citizens with timely information. Visitors to the site can interact with the chatbot by clicking on the chat bubble.

From there, a selection of menu options is presented to the visitor such as “How It Spreads” or “Travel”. The City of Knoxville has also chosen to include information specific to the county so that citizens can get local updates as well.

Successfully Implementing Messaging

COVID19 information is constantly being updated. Quiq’s messaging platform can be live on your site in a couple of days with just a few simple edits to your website. Your existing landlines can send and receive messages from SMS/text, web chat, and social channels. With minimum training, your staff can be up and running, helping students get the information they need.

Quiq is ready to work with you on offering modern digital channels that have proved more efficient and effective than phone calls and emails. Allow your faculty and staff to focus on delivering world-class education instead of fielding questions. Schedule time today to discuss messaging.

See a Demo Today

When defining digital customer service, it may be easier to say what it is rather than what it isn’t. In order to do that, let’s define the opposite of digital customer service as “traditional customer service.” Traditional customer service takes place over the phone or after waiting in line to speak to someone face-to-face. On the other hand, digital customer service means serving your customers across digital channels. These channels would include email, SMS / text messaging, live chat, Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, and more.

Digital or online service channels have exploded. Consumers love having a wide variety of ways to reach out to a company, because it means they can pick the channel that is most comfortable or accessible to them – versus being forced to make a phone call. It means companies can deliver a great experience, with less work, and that means a lot.

The asynchronous nature of digital service means that agents can handle multiple simultaneous conversations. Customers don’t expect an immediate answer, which gives agents the ability to address more than one inquiry at a time. It also gives customers the freedom to set the pace of the conversation.

Digital Customer Service Solutions Today

Digital channels that once were new and novel are now the norm, like email and Facebook. However, digital channels continue to expand, as well as the technologies that support them. For example, Apple and Google have taken plain text messaging and made it rich. Rich messaging allows for secure payments, scheduling appointments, and the ability to share more sophisticated content. Also, chatbots can be part of nearly every digital interaction and can be deployed as a great compliment to human interactions.

The ubiquity of mobile devices to research, browse, shop, and purchase products has created the need for more web-based service channels that offer assistance without requiring customers to find time to pick up the phone and call a company. Thus, we have seen the the increase of digital customer service solutions and the ability to assist your customers on their digital channel of choice.

Your customers expect a seamless, convenient, and easy digital experience whenever they engage with you. Whether they are looking for help while shopping on your website, trying to book an appointment in your mobile app, or contacting customer service through a Twitter direct message with a question about their order.

Digital customer service can go by other names such as digital customer experience, digital customer care, or digital customer support. Regardless of what you call it, the definition is the same – serving your customers across digital channels and platforms such as SMS/text, live chat, and social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat.

Increased Demand for Digital Customer Service

There are four main reasons companies pursue a digital customer service strategy:

Customer Preferences

Forrester’s executive report, The Digital Customer Experience Improvement Playbook, succinctly sums up the current state of affairs for customer service:

“Customers demand that their digital interactions with your brand be seamless and span devices; that they be able to engage with your brand whenever and wherever they’d like; and that every encounter meet their needs in the moment.”

Companies are adopting a digital-first approach to meet customers wherever they are. Customers demand their channel of choice, whatever that channel may be, to engage with a company. That’s why so many service and support leaders across all industries, in companies of every size, are offering digital channels like SMS, WeChat, and Facebook for customer service and support.

Competition

As consumers seek companies that are easy to engage with, competition continues to offer more options. Customer service organizations are rapidly adopting digital channels and capabilities to meet customer needs and set them apart from their competition.

Cost

Gartner estimates that live channels such as phone, chat, and email can cost an average of $8.01 per contact vs. $.1o to serve on digital channels. Service and support leaders who use these channels as their primary customer contact methods are under pressure to reduce the cost to serve customers.

Scaling

The 2019 holiday season saw mobile sales via smartphones break the $3 billion mark according to TechCrunch; up from the $1.5 billion spent on Cyber Monday a year prior. Scaling resources to meet increased demand, especially from consumers that instinctively reach for their mobile device to engage with companies throughout their entire purchase, is another reason digital customer service is on the rise.

Leaders facing these challenges turned their focus to improving how, when, and where they serve their customers across digital channels with the intent of putting the customer at the center of it all.

And by doing so, they have impacted their business by:

• Engaging with customers they normally would not have reached
• Differentiating themselves with easy and convenient access for customers
• Reducing costs with the shift from phone calls to digital
• Increasing customer satisfaction with much preferred digital channels

Digital Customer Service – Who’s Doing It Right

A quick glance through the client section of our blog will give you an idea of just some of the diversity we see in industries and use cases. But let’s take a closer look to see what a few of these companies are doing and the results they’re achieving,

Increased Engagement

Overstock.com has seen a 98% open rate when communicating with people through texts. As of today, over 15% of all contacts that used to come in via the phone are now coming into the contact center via text.

Aspira, helps people book and manage outdoor recreation reservations. They receive about 300 to 400 texts a day. The ability to text for help is particularly helpful since their clientele is usually in transit to, or already on-site, at a campground or park facility.

Higher Customer Satisfaction

The Laundress has been able to offer a more personalized, “high-touch” experience for the customers of the high-end brand of soaps, detergents, and cleaning supplies. Since implementing Quiq, the retailer handles everything from questions about scents and order status to product recommendations all through text.

Reduced Costs

Outdoor gear and apparel retailer, evo, has successfully reduced their volume of phone calls by implementing Quiq Messaging and chat. Since using the Quiq platform, average call volume has dropped from 70% to 50% of total contact volume.

Optimized Resources

Tailored Brands, known for men’s suits and outstanding customer service, added text messaging to their arsenal of digital channels. Text messaging enables agents to handle 5 text conversations at a time and upwards of 8 during peak demand.

The First Step In Your Digital Customer Service Journey

Let Quiq help you navigate the possibilities and potential of digital channels like SMS / text messaging, rich messaging, web chat, Facebook, and more.

Quiq is an experienced partner who delivers consistently jaw-dropping customer experiences across SMS/text messaging, rich messaging, web chat, and social channels. Quiq’s Conversational Engagement Platform, easily orchestrates commerce and service conversations involving both bots and humans. Let’s connect to better understand your business priorities and objectives so we help you make an impact with digital customer service.

Messaging and chatbots impact on customer service have become the super hero combo where it’s sometimes hard to tell which one is the sidekick because they are both so powerful. Messaging provides the channels that make it possible for you to have more efficient engagement with customers over SMS/Text, web chat, and social, while chatbots help you to automate those conversations.

Chatbots should be easy to build, behave in a way that is natural for customers, and should go across your digital channels. Or at least, that’s the way we think they should be. That’s why Quiq made it easy to build and deploy bots that can be tied to one or multiple messaging channels. We want bots to blend seamlessly in with agents, third-party bots, and other systems within your organization. But we’ll get to that later.

In this post, we’ll take you through some real-world examples from companies who have easily taken their customer engagement to a whole new level with a surprisingly fast implementation of messaging and bots

Messaging + Bots – Team Work Makes the Dream Work

Implementing chatbots with messaging has become the defacto strategy for leaders who seek the holy grail of more efficiency and reduced costs, along with a higher level of service to their customers. Without a doubt, it’s paying dividends. From sales to service and all points in between, companies like Stio, Brinks Security, Club Med, and Office Depot are discovering new use cases to streamline their workflow and save “hu”man hours.

Let’s take a look at the outdoor apparel company, Stio. Like most retailers, this direct-to-consumer company counts on 4th quarter holiday revenue to take the year into the black. Hence the importance and origin story for Black Friday.

With the holidays on the horizon, Stio’s Customer Service Manager, Kim Essensa, turned on web chat and felt an immediate relief from the decrease in calls to their contact center. Past experience had taught Kim that text messaging with Quiq was the next logical step.

Stio implemented web chat with Quiq in October of 2018 and turned on text messaging after the holidays. They immediately realized a 9% decrease in calls. Now, agents handle inbound messages from SMS, web chat, and Facebook ,all within Quiq’s unified workspace. Questions, which are usually about their catalogs or orders, such as shipping status or price adjustments, are handled faster with asynchronous messaging.

In 2019, Stio took another step toward more efficient operations by combining messaging and chatbots in their business. The company, which drops over 1 million catalogs a year, receives calls into their contact center from customers asking to be removed from the physical mailer because they’d rather shop online. Prior to implementing a bot, agents would take those calls one-by-one or the customer would have to leave a voicemail for the agent to handle during work hours . Now, Stio’s bot handles the entire catalog cancellation interaction, saving over 80 agent hours in the first two weeks of implementing bots – that is one full headcount!

Improved conversation quality and scalability?

Synergy – remember that word. If there was ever a time to use it to describe two things working together to achieve an outcome greater than the individual efforts, it would be that time. Brinks Home Security saw the advantages of chatbots with messaging to streamline their busy contact center and to grow their business.

Brinks turned on Quiq Messaging in January of 2018. Brinks’ customers readily embraced the new channel for everything troubleshooting a major issue with their security system, to billing, or to just replacing batteries in their hardware. By adding the messaging channel, Brinks has seen a 14 percentage point improvement in customer satisfaction, increased agent effectiveness, improvements to the bottom line, and a more engaged customer experience.

With nearly 20% of calls moving from the phone to the messaging channel, Brinks has realized significant cost savings. With messaging, agents handle anywhere from 4-6 conversations at a time, as opposed to a 1-to-1 phone conversation.

Now, Brinks is using both messaging and bots to grow their customer base. When a customer returns a satisfaction survey that is positive, they receive a text message inviting them to Brinks’ exclusive referral program where they can earn exclusive hardware for themselves and anyone they refer to Brinks when they sign on. Once referred prospects go live, the Brinks referral bot reaches out to congratulate and thank the referrer and referred parties and ship their new equipment. The program is expected to significantly reduce the customer acquisition costs, while not requiring additional agents to manage.

Integrating With Other Systems

Several Quiq clients have strategically followed a crawl-walk-run strategy when implementing messaging and bots. Stio has been a prime example of a company that started with a basic feature, like web chat, as a foundation for text messaging and bots.

Stio recently integrated Quiq Messaging with their Shopify account. The integration provides agents more insight into which web page the customer is looking at and what’s in their cart, which reduces inquiry time.

Stio continues to push the limits of efficiency and automation because they are focused on keeping their agents available for customers who need human attention. When a customer uses messaging, a bot can collect information and take action on that information. As the screenshot illustrates, the Stio bot captures what the customer’s intent is for the conversation. Once the conversation reaches a point more suited for an agent’s attention, the bot transfers the conversation to an agent.

Stio is optimistic about the integration and believes they’ll see an increase in cart value and conversions because agents will be better equipped with the information they need to close the transaction with their customers.

Industries that benefit from having Chatbots

1. E-commerce Industry
2. Medicine Industry
3. Human Resource Industry
4. Travel Industry
5. Real Estate Industry
6. Banking Industry
7. Hospitality Industry
8. . . . & many more!

Getting started with Chatbots and Messaging

As you can tell from the examples above, there are plenty of ways to deploy bots with messaging to gain efficiency and productivity. From the beginning, Quiq Messaging has provided a way for customers to message companies like they do with family and friends.

With Quiq, companies can use new or existing landlines to send and receive text messages over SMS/Text, Apple Business Chat, Google Rich Business Messaging, web chat and social channels. With Quiq’s newest product offering, Quiq IQ, we’ve brought all of the features you need to easily orchestrate automated conversations involving bots and humans across every channel.

Schedule some time today to talk through messaging and the areas of your business it can make the most impact. We’re happy to help.

See a Demo Today

Quiq is on a mission to transform customer conversations. First, we made it easier for companies to engage with customers over the digital channels they prefer, like SMS/text, web chat, and social. Now, we’re making it possible to automate those conversations and streamline your workflow with the help of bots and conversation rules.

We’re excited to announce a new product to our lineup called Quiq IQ, a complete solution to build, manage and optimize chatbots for your business. In short, Quiq IQ is the no-code, intuitive answer to building and deploying bots in your business. Whether you build a Quiq bot or use a third-party bot, Quiq IQ supports humans, Quiq bots, and third-party bots working seamlessly together.

Easily orchestrate automated conversations involving both bots and humans across every digital channel. Let’s take a closer look at Quiq IQ and how easily you can deploy bots into your business.

Building Bots

Building a chatbot has never been easier with our intuitive bot designer. Our point-and-click interface helps you visualize and build your ideal conversation flow.

Your customers can engage with a bot to efficiently place an order, quickly get an order status update, or even gather more information on a product. There are plenty of options. With Quiq IQ, you can effortlessly map out intent, using a few keywords to determine the customer’s motive and make it easy to get to a human agent whenever the customer wants.

Made some changes and want to undo those changes? Hey, we’ve all been there. That’s why we made a bot designer with versioning, so you can revert to whatever saved version of your bot you want to work with. You can work fearlessly within our bot designer to create a basic workflow and build on it as necessary. Read more about versioning in our Quiq Knowledge Center.

Every bot you create works across all of Quiq’s supported platforms. Build your bot once and run it on SMS/text messaging, rich messaging channels like Apple Business Chat and Google RBM, web chat, and social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. Get the full Bot Designer Guide in our Knowledge Center.

Integrating Bots

The Quiq Bot API is a simple way to make conversations flow seamlessly between humans, Quiq bots, and third-party bots. Quiq’s bot framework facilitates syncing and relaying data between bots and applications.

Quiq IQ enables you to use the right tools at the right time. Quiq’s bot framework allows for integration to third-party systems. Use webhooks to communicate with external systems, trigger other messages, or other bot behaviors.

Conversation Rules

With Quiq IQ, you can build rule sets that can be fired on any conversation event (e.g. start or end a conversation, assign the conversation to another agent or bot, or start a new message). Conversation rules make it possible to orchestrate a seamless experience for your customer throughout the conversation.

Without using code, you can build rules that control when a conversation gets escalated to a human agent or higher tier of support. For example, if the last customer message in a conversation contains the keywords “angry” or “frustrated”, you could create a conversation rule around that condition and add an action to send an auto-response such as “We’re sorry that we’re not meeting your expectations. Let me get you to a human”, and then send the conversation to a human agent for more assistance by routing the conversation to an escalation queue.

Deploy Chatbots today

Clients like Stio and Brinks Home Security have realized major gains in productivity across their digital customer service channels. With the help of Quiq IQ, these clients and many others have quickly deployed bots within their companies to deflect calls, assist human agents, and expedite conversations to resolution.

Quiq IQ is a bot builder unlike any other on the market today:

• The Quiq bot designer helps anyone create a bot. An intuitive, graphical designer makes creating a bot workflow a breeze.
• Messages are automatically transformed to the richest form possible for every channel, so bot developers don’t need to worry about channel capabilities
• Quiq Bots and third-party bots work seamlessly with agents, participating before, during, or after any conversation.
• Agents can invite a bot to join a conversation to capture information at any time during the conversation and the bot will pass it back when done.

We’re ready to help you deploy your ideal bot strategy. Schedule some time so we can help you most effectively deploy bots across your organization.

See a Demo Today