In recent years there have been many relationship shifts between brands and their customers, who are living their lives online. The cyber world is not following the traditions of the real world.  With power shifted to the customer, companies are required to seriously focus on customer experience. And the eradication of time boundaries has pushed companies to be available when, where and how customers demand. If brands don’t adapt to customers’ expectations, they miss revenue opportunities and lose customers. This monetary impact is accompanied by reputational impact.  Traditional open hours no longer suit modern customers living their lives digitally. They

Delivering business value through AI AI is being used by every industry to achieve greater efficiencies, deliver more effective and affordable services, and enable better customer experiences. There are thousands of examples of the success and growth it has enabled.  Across all industries ranging from healthcare, education, government, charities, and telecommunications to media, retail, travel and tourism, transportation and logistics, and manufacturing, AI has been embedded into processes, systems, and procedures to add genuine business value.  Caveat emptor The positive impact AI has and will continue to have on businesses, society and government is well understood. However, alongside the positives

How multi are you? In an online world of “multi” everything: multi-modal, multi-platform, multi-channel and multi-media, there is a surprisingly high number of organisations that do not sufficiently focus on multilingual. The widespread adoption of “multi” strategies is being driven by the focus on executing effective customer experience differentiation strategies. Technological advances, customer expectations, competitive advantage, and customer loyalty are just some of the drivers shaping experience strategies and making conversational AI a critical tool in achieving success.  Accompanying all talk about customer experience is personalisation. The two are inextricably linked. Without personalisation the effectiveness of any customer experience strategy

Battling to keep up with AI technically or socially, politically or legislatively? Don’t worry you’re not alone.  Over the past 12 months or so, when speaking with customers, partners, colleagues, developers, industry leaders, friends and even family, a day hasn’t gone by when the topic of AI hasn’t arisen. Not long into a conversation there is, almost universally, recognition of the main issues: 1) speed of change technologically, 2) separate country by country or regional introduction and updates of policy and legislative frameworks, 3) increase in media scare stories of a proliferation of AI generated misinformation; and 4) extreme opinions

All types of retail stores, from supermarkets to clothing, home furnishings, white goods, DIY stores and everything in between, are effectively using conversational AI to execute successful customer experience strategies. Deploying chatbots and voicebots across their multiple customer communication, retail brands are providing customers with round the clock access. They are executing on their customer-centric, customer-first strategies, making themselves available at the customer’s convenience. This means all the time, on every device, and across whichever platform the customer chooses.  Today’s retail chatbots and voicebots are highly sophisticated and extremely savvy. With in-depth knowledge of customers, gleaned from multiple data points

The correlation between customer experience and revenue is well documented. Businesses that approach and treat customer experience as a product can ensure that each stage of the customer journey is expertly designed, developed and delivered. This will enable a brand’s entire customer ecosystem to be joined up to enable a frictionless, seamless and personalised experience for every customer.  Chatbots and voicebots are key digital tools that enable a brand to deliver the quality of experience that customers expect and demand. Technological advancements in recent years have completely transformed the chatbot experience. Whereas once, interacting with a chatbot may have been

Chatbots and voicebots had a bumpy childhood. From finding their feet in the online world, being accepted by organisations as effective digital tools, overcoming learning challenges and limited processing power, all these challenges were overcome. Their adolescent years were spent gaining greater intelligence, acquiring industry specific understanding, and taking advantage of improved processing power to enable conversational AI solutions to fully integrate structured and unstructured data from internal and external sources. Chatbots and voicebots are now at an age of maturity. They are capable and competent grown-ups. It is only natural that maturity carries with it certain expectations regarding the

After years of talk, the contact centre industry is more serious than ever about overhauling work practices for the benefit of all stakeholders. Whether deserved or not, the contact centre has earned itself a less than perfect reputation, attracting considerable criticism. Customers often dread having to call one, fearing they will be subject to lengthy call queues, excessive time on hold, be passed around and have to repeat themselves, or even hung up on. And life inside the contact centre is not easy, with employee attrition estimated at between 30-45%, which is significantly higher than the average attrition in professional

After less than 2 hours in the sky, having taken off from London City Airport, I landed in Berlin. I was looking forward to CCW2024 for a number of reasons: Catching up in-person with our partner sogedes and discussing trends, opportunities and how we can continue to build on our relationship Networking and connecting with potential new clients and partners, and hearing about their challenges and views on conversational AI Hearing from industry experts and the outlook, trends and challenges forecast for the coming year The first thing I noticed when stepping into the hall at the ECC (Estrel Congress

Every day and with every article written, the excitement surrounding conversational AI grows. Companies around the world are increasingly vocal about their capabilities and progress, which are for a good part, theoretically real, but also equally very much imagined when it comes to reality.  Are the theoretical technology breakthroughs in AI we are reading about translating into effective commercial solutions that deliver real business value? Maybe. Sometimes. Not always.  We are bombarded with stories of AI as an easy and quick fix to a plethora of business issues. This is simply not the case. Without doubt, the payoff of a

In 2003, motivated by a vision of a time when “conversations powered by computers would transform the world”, I founded Creative Virtual. Over these past 20 years we have constantly been at the forefront of developing innovative conversational AI solutions that address real business issues and deliver real business value. Our V-PortalTM and V-PersonTM products have won many awards, are rated highly by analyst houses, and have benefited businesses in 25 countries. The Gluon release of our V-Person Technology, which we launched globally on 16 May, continues our history of innovation and bringing to market new powerful solutions that deliver

In the annals of KAUST (King Abdul University of Science and Technology), the 21st of May 2020 is marked as the day of the soft launch of VITA (called KAI back then), the university’s VA (Virtual Assistant); knowledgeable in many things IT related. VITA asks for username or KAUST ID at the beginning, but lets you chat on even without that. It connects to an Active Directory (AD) to pull more user information and helps with all kinds of IT issues. When things get serious, VITA creates a ticket on the user’s behalf – but only if the user authenticates using

The start of a new year always comes with a slew of business predictions from experts, and 2023 has certainly been no different. I think we have learned to take these predictions with a grain of salt, considering them as we plan for the future but not necessarily fully embracing all of them. This is particularly true after the upheaval and uncertainty the world has experienced over the past few years. Sometimes though we come across a prediction that feels very on the money. This year, one of the customer experience (CX) predictions for 2023 falling into that category is