We are all getting lazier, according to The Michigan Daily, at least.
Whether it be voice-activated smart appliances, virtual assistants to help lighten the workload, or machine customers to do our online shopping – people are constantly looking for ways to make their lives more efficient, and contacting customer service departments is no different.
Witnessing these new customer habits, Chief Operations Officer at Turo - the world’s largest peer-to-peer car-sharing platform Julie Weingardt recognized the value in creating a more dynamic, omnichannel customer experience.
Easier said than done, of course. Indeed, in the UK, just a third of contact centers are omnichannel – according to market researcher ContactBabel.
Yet, Turo achieved it with UJET, and then started layering conversational AI over the top to magnify the efficiencies of its omnichannel foundations.
In conversation with the CCaaS provider, Weingardt revealed that the overarching focus on reducing customer effort made these conversational AI efforts a success.
“I really find that the old ways of measuring customer experience success are quickly getting replaced with lots of talk about customer effort,” she said.
While this was a step in the right direction, she felt that in order to significantly lower customer effort, she needed a system that could seamlessly blend live and virtual agents.
Blending Live and Virtual Agents to Lower Customer Effort
Weingardt describes the integration of chat, call, and SMS within UJET’s platform as a real “game changer”; praising the vendor’s focus on the overall user experience, rather than looking to sell individual components. She stated:
“Sometimes products say they integrate, and they do, but they don’t necessarily do it well.”
The success of UJET’s integrated system is clear for all to see. By deploying virtual assistants to authenticate customers before being transferred to a live agent, Turo’s average call handle time decreased by 2.7 percent, while its average chat handle time dropped by over four minutes.