Teleperson Concierge
At Teleperson, we like to say that everyone's an Amazon customer but not every company is Amazon. Jeff Bezos is famous for putting the customer first and in investment, initiatives, and platform features, it's clear that for Bezos these are more than just words. They define strategy.
However, the 'not every company is an Amazon' piece means companies have to meet key operational and financial targets to stay alive in the market. This is why the outsourced customer service TAM is typically 3-4x that of customer experience software. And for years, for the vast majority of the market, customer service has been seen as a cost center rather than as a revenue generator for the company. So naturally, the customer service industry, writ large, has evolved around these metrics--prioritizing company survival over customer needs.
This is the founding philosophy of Teleperson, and one which we believe survives the continued innovation transforming the customer service landscape--most recently, generative AI.
We believe that awesome customer service is not about the chatbot--Gen AI-driven or otherwise--but rather about the choice and control customers have in defining the customer service experience they want. We serve as, effectively, as a translation tool across 100% of the companies and brands a customer shops from, unifying and enhancing the end-to-end customer service journey.
To accomplish this, we need to uniquely meet the needs of various stakeholders.
Consumers
Much of the frustration around contacting customer service is around authentication, routing and servicing. The typical experience requires callers to authenticate by either providing their account number, social security number or user ID, with the more modern options relying on the phone itself to serve as an initial authentication (before ending with an additional passcode). Teleperson will address this frustration by employing a three-levelauthentication program: the first is from the Teleperson app itself. Once consumers have logged into their Teleperson app (through voice, biometric, password, single sign-on, etc.), Teleperson will serve as the first line of authentication for each of the vendors. Teleperson will serve as the trusted third-party between the user and the vendor, simplifying the customer contact experience across each vendor in one’s vendor hub. The user would not need to re-authenticate if switching between divisions as well, again relying on Teleperson’s authentication capability.
Following the wake word, the Teleperson Concierge will listen to the consumer’s main issue.
After consumers state their issue, the Concierge will begin considering various factors, notably:
Consumer’s voice (e.g., does the consumer sound upset?)
What company is the consumer referring to (e.g., “I’d like to change my reservation” would drive the Concierge to search through the consumer’s upcoming reservations booked. If there are more than one, the Concierge would request more information: “Oh, no problem. I see two reservations: one going to Dallas, and the other going to Tokyo. Which one did you want to change?”)
Issue analysis (has this issue happened before with this company?)
Is the company integrated with Teleperson? (if integrated, Teleperson would have the ability to address the need through chatbot) Some issues or questions can be addressed based on knowledge of the consumer’s account, such as previous transactions (“Hey Teleperson, did American Express take my payment yet”), in which case our knowledge of the user’s account can inform the Concierge of the needed information. We are also be offering a Knowledge Management Library, which will be specific to each vendor and can manage questions a user may have where, outside of Teleperson, they would have had to call up the company representative to ask (e.g., product-specific information). The objective of this front-end issue assessment is to remove the frustration from customer service calls by addressing the needs of the consumer seamlessly— whether by chatbot or human. In this way, the customer service call becomes effortless and can be transformed into an opportunity for continually positive engagement with the company itself.
Enterprises
For large enterprises, we offer competitive intelligence at the product level together with other insights about their end-customers they would not otherwise be able to gain (or could do so at significant cost). In addition, while larger enterprises are able to fund or more efficiently manage their customer service needs, we believe that, by and large, their customer service divisions are managed largely as cost centers—rather than profit centers—to be leveraged. The key difficulty is in the size and scope of callers, complaints, refunds, or other complexity drivers for larger players with millions of customers.
Even for larger companies there is a clear tradeoff between providing better customer service and managing internal costs (hence the need to bring in technology which ironically reduces customer satisfaction as it pushes self-service without integrating a customer’s context). With a more contextual understanding of their customers, companies can offer more personalized experiences, as well as acquire more intelligence about both their existing customers and from their customer networks through the social graph features of Teleperson’s Community function. Our ability to provide intelligence to, say, a Home Depot, on the purchase history of their customers vis-a-vis Lowe’s or Walmart, could additionally offer insights into the product or service gaps in their delivery, messaging or actual portfolio. We believe our core value-add for large established companies is the combination of features which can drive superior customer service with contextual intelligence of their customer activity.
Small-to-Medium Sized Businesses
We believe our offering would be particularly beneficial to SMBs who do not otherwise have the requisite digital capabilities to satisfy the expectations of their customers. This is particularly needed in the case of companies which offered required services, such as public utilities. Energy Central highlighted multiple benefits of a mobile app for utility companies, such as personalized experiences, better customer retention, easier transactions, and reduced customer call center volume given, in part, the increase in self-service functionality or automatic information. Our focus on contextual information for the customer means we could predict the reasons customers might call (for example, if there was an outage in their area or they were making a late payment). In the case of banking services, mobile apps have long been recognized as a preferred channel of choice for customers, reflected in the closure of physical banks or investment in mobile applications.
This is even more so following COVID-19: J.D. Power noted in mid-2020 that 37% of retail bank customers were using their bank’s mobile app more frequently than ever before, and nearly half (48%) preferring their mobile phone as the means of depositing a check. While the Teleperson app would not necessarily replace specific functions such as check deposit it would be able to replicate the customer service call in everything from account management to understanding a specific transaction. The Teleperson Concierge would be able to manage the entire transaction with a combination of voice, messaging and email or connect the customer to the appropriate and preferred customer service representative seamlessly.
We offer SMBs the ability to provide advanced customer-centric technologies to their end-
customers and ultimately level the playing field with larger enterprises in their industry, as the customer experience playing field is clearly uneven. Understanding the significant ROI of improving a company’s customer experience, incumbent players across multiple industries devote large sums of cash toward their CX programs, whether in terms of technology, people or processes. As customers have increasing expectations for personalization, omni-channel communication, and even service immediacy, large enterprises will increasingly offer simply better service, winning greater loyalty and shifting customers away from smaller companies who can offer less or at a comparatively greater price. One of the benefits of Teleperson for smaller companies (either in terms of revenue or employees) is the ability to offer advanced CX-focused features, such as conversational AI, behavioral routing, or contextual commerce, that larger, better-funded, enterprises can easily do,
Contact Center Software
For contact center software providers, we can help optimize their existing offering, such as AI-enabled routing where Teleperson will provide a more contextual understanding of the consumer and therefore improve the speed, accuracy and overall experience for consumers themselves. By offering a platform for their customer representatives leveraging the contact center, Teleperson can offer an enhanced experience for consumers while enabling a robust intelligence platform that can be further leveraged to improve contact center technology. In Q2’21, Teleperson plans to work closely with one digital contact center to further identify the specific and direct value-add of our services.
We believe our system can support many of the key metrics tracked by contact centers today.
Teleperson’s value-add in select contact center metrics:
Customer Effort. The reduction of customer effort in reaching the appropriate customer representative or identifying the appropriate information (through self-servicing) is the raison d'être of Teleperson. We believe our technology is unique in creating the “effortless experience” (discussed by Matthew Dixon and colleagues at CEB).
First Contact Resolution. By providing a contextual understanding of the issue, Teleperson can provide information to both the consumer (e.g., sharing ‘how to’ videos for a particular question) as well as the customer representative (who would receive information from Teleperson’s Knowledge Management Library). We believe this could significantly improve First Contact Resolution measurements by call centers today.
Average Handle Time. Both through the Teleperson Concierge or through a more accurate routing and issue management system for customer representatives, we believe our solution can significantly reduce Average Handle Time of calls while enhancing the customer service experience itself.
Volume. By integrating with the company itself, the Teleperson Concierge can address the main needs of the consumer without even needing to access the customer service department of the company, thereby significantly reducing the volume of calls that reach the company’s customer service department.
Average Speed to Answer. For issues which are considered simple, or otherwise preferred by the consumer, the Teleperson Concierge will offer a self-service channel which could immediately address the consumer’s core need. By incorporating the context of both the consumer and issue, we will additionally be able to understand and offer an answer faster than the current call tree option.
Abandonment / Drop-off Rate. By offering choice in the type of media with which consumers prefer to engage while waiting on the line, we believe this will significantly reduce call abandonment.
Self-service completion rate. By offering the Teleperson Concierge to SMBs, we believe we can significantly increase the self-service completion rate of companies across various sectors. Integrating a contextual understanding of both the consumer and issue would further build on the inherent capabilities of a company’s self-service function, thereby also improving the self-service completion rate for the wider industry.
Agent productivity. By incorporating the recorded voice of the consumer prior to the call, together with front-end authentication and a consumer’s account history, Teleperson will increase the productivity of agents who can now spend less time researching the history of the consumer or time spent on authentication in the beginning. In addition, the Knowledge Management Library we will offer should assist agents in solving the issues or directly providing the appropriate information to the consumer.
Join us as we make that vision a reality and chart the future of customer service for the better. If interested in speaking, don’t hesitate to reach me directly!
Thanks for reading 🙂