20161027sad_cc_lee_heyward_li2It seems obvious: if you have a “buy” button on your web or social sites, why don’t you have a “resolve” button? The answer is also painfully obvious.

The question was posed by Scott Carr, CEO of Modria who joined Bryan Kramer on a recent #H2HChat (Human to Human chat) [link to video]. His company creates chatbots – applications that respond in chat like a human call center rep with the logic to escalate cases.

My experience is that we don’t have a “Resolve” button because support is often viewed as a cost center and sales as a profit center. They are both customer experience centers. Too many companies have bonus structures that reward the wrong behaviors, sometimes leading them to literally try and hide their contact information on the web site to reduce costly support engagements. No wonder why they were frustrated when they got to social media, where their negative messages were influencing thousands of their friends.

These offended customers often don’t reflect in the metrics pool because behavior, emotion and intensity are fairly new measures where best practices are rapidly evolving.

Customer Experience IS your bottom line. Funding needs to be applied that way, and change is always a hard sell and needs support from the top.

Early adopters are already using machine learning (a.k.a. artificial intelligence) chatbots to help answer and escalate solutions at scale. When you go down this path, don’t make it a phone tree – remember you are interacting with people. You need to measure and understand how people from different backgrounds and places, even in the same country, can pose a question. Despite the epic chatbot fails that will be shared in social media, authentic looking interactions will be rewarded significantly with increased Customer Lifetime Value.

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