Ask an Account Exec: How To Create Good Bot Experiences

Could you introduce yourself and your role with Ultimate?

I am Alyse Andre, and I’m part of the sales team at Ultimate. And I’m an account executive.

Why does having a virtual agent improve customer experience?

So, a very common case that we see is with ecommerce teams who are looking for help during seasonal fluctuation times during the holidays. And it’s really hard for them to scale their team with short-term hires and with the training of these new hires. They start to think about how technology can help them during these times, but also after the seasonal times as well.

[This would] enable their agents to focus on what they do best: critical thinking inquiries and also revenue generating inquiries, while using the bot as the first point of contact during these holiday seasons, but also in normal times. That’s one of the main reasons that we see people evaluating AI as for scale.

Sometimes it can also be about enabling another channel for customers to reach out. So if there’s a long queue to wait for an agent on the phone or via email, it’s giving the customer another first point of contact that is instantaneous, can answer common questions, and can also pull any background information if you have a back-end integration setup into your order management system. So it’s all about also opening up another channel and improving customer experience.

How can we ensure that a virtual agent actually creates a good customer experience?

It’s about conversational design, but also the strength of the AI. So with conversational design, we want to put ourselves in the customers’ shoes and determine: how are they going to interact with bot? How should the bot respond? What is the brand identity that we’re working with? What is the tone of voice? That is all part of the customer journey and the experience with the bot.

But it’s also about creating access to agents when needed and escalation paths that make sense. So the benefit of integrating into CRM is we have seamless escalation to an agent when needed, or when someone requests to speak to an agent.

The way that we have set up Ultimate is through CRM integrations into the top vendors like Zendesk and Freshworks. Our customers want to know how can we utilize what they’re already using inside of their team and their tech stack. Can we leverage information inside of their CRM system? And the answer is, of course, yes. And we’re constantly improving our integration potential with these CRMs as well to enable the bot to utilize more information and become more of a part of the tech stack — not a siloed web app that sits on top of what’s missing.