Dennis Fois only recently arrived as the CEO of NewVoiceMedia (just last year), but he’s already delivering exceptional results for the company. Thanks to a life growing up with a family in the service industries, Dennis has always valued the importance of personal connections with customers.
Since his love affair with technology began, Fois has been dedicated to finding new ways of combining technological conversations with the human workforce. As disruptive ideas like chatbots and artificial intelligence transform the way that we look at customer experience and the contact centre, Dennis has some interesting insights into what we should expect from No-BS bots.
Here’s what we learned from a recent interview with the NewVoiceMedia CEO, published on the NVM website.
Using Bots the Right Way for Customer Experience
According to NewVoiceMedia, companies interested in customer experience need to focus on helping their customers achieve their goals quickly, delivering frictionless interactions, and orchestrating emotional connections.
In a discussion on how to use bots “correctly” in the business space, Fois said that today’s companies need to discover what their people are really good at, such as understanding ambiguous problems or empathising with users. Humans need to provide human experiences that customers can relate to. At the same time, bots need to be deployed to manage the tasks that bots are good at. For instance, answering scripted questions or performing repetitive tasks are common tasks for bots. Dennis noted that he believes that there are plenty of good uses for bots and that the best options support and supplement human workers so that they can be “in the moment” in discussions with customers.
The Controversy in Making Bots more “Human”
In the NewVoiceMedia interview, Dennis commented that he’s “against” the idea of adding human qualities to technology. By humanising bots, companies seem to suggest that they can eventually replace people with technology. However, that’s not the goal according to NewVoiceMedia.
Fois feels that bots need to help human beings achieve their goals faster, but they can never be created as a replacement to people. “It’s people first and technology second.”
When NewVoiceMedia creates bots to support the modern working environment, their approach begins with asking how AI can be an enabler to support higher-quality conversations. For NVM, it’s all about making all the people in an interaction feel great because they’re engaging in an authentic and high-quality conversation.
The Future of Contact Centres and Highly Skilled Agents
NewVoiceMedia’s view of the future contact centre and the new contact centre agent suggests that employees in 2019 and the years to come will be more skilled than their predecessors, because technology options like self-service platforms and bots will be able to manage easy and repetitive questions, leaving agents the more crucial and complicated issues to deal with.
Dennis Fois believes that the future of the contact centre will be defined by a workforce of highly-skilled agents that handle more complicated experiences with customers. When people do interact with a human agent, they’ll be looking for someone to support through a high-value and emotionally important part of their buyer journey.
Dennis also believes that the rise of the new contact centre will include new opportunities for workers to exist beyond the standard office or desk space. Thanks to new AI and technology, contact centre workers no longer have to stay within a single location anymore. Contact centre agents can support customers from anywhere, which means that companies can differentiate themselves with more flexible work models for their employees.
The Changing Nature of the Contact Centre
According to NewVoiceMedia and Dennis Fois, person-to-person interactions will always be a crucial part of the customer service experience. Ultimately, Fois believes that human beings aren’t entirely emotional creatures. We’re all driven by our emotions, and we make decisions according to the connections that we can make with other people. This means that customers will always seek other people for support when they want to be sure that they’re making the right decisions.
Dennis believes that robots will never be able to truly overtake humans in the customer service space, but he does feel that certain parts of the tech industry could benefit from an evolution. For instance, Fois noted that the tech industry needs to become a little less “self-absorbed” and narcissistic. Ultimately, companies don’t make innovations for themselves, they discover new ideas for their customers so that they can support end-user and agents. As Dennis said in his recent interview, the thinks that the industry often loses sight of who it’s working for.
