The Future of Self-Service—Virtual Assistants, Speech Recognition and the Internet of Things
When was the last time you actually walked into your bank or even spoke to a bank representative? For many of us, these activities are now rare occurrences.
When was the last time you had a travel agent book a trip for you? It has probably been quite a while, since many people now prefer to research and book the individual trip components themselves.
The history of the Internet has been a story of personal empowerment. Today, empowered customers, especially those in the younger demographics, are more than happy to resolve problems for themselves—valuing the convenience, speed and anonymity offered by self-service experiences.
In 2015 Forrester Research Inc. stated that “Web self-service interactions overtook all other channels. For the first time in the history of our survey, respondents reported using the FAQ pages on a company’s website more than speaking with an agent over the phone”1.
The future of customer service is thus quite clearly self-service. However, what is the future for self-service itself?
Verint recently published an Executive Perspective on the future of self-service that discusses the emerging technologies that will have a major impact on self-service’s evolution. It proposed that customer service is currently on a self-service journey and the ultimate destination will be the personal virtual assistant. Self-service will eventually break out of the enterprise and become a key part of our personal lives.
Mobile phone vendors have been working on personal assistants since almost the development of the first app. Your smartphone comes preinstalled with apps, such as a calendar, reminder, notes, password manager, family location and account status services. Sometimes referred to as bloatwear, many of these apps are seldom used.
This is about to change, and speech recognition software will be the catalyst for turning these seldom-used apps into something more useful. Speech will also become the dominant user interface for the Internet of things (IoT).
Today, four of the largest global IT organizations offer speech recognition software. Speech recognition has the potential to transform the self-service user experience, making it more natural and, most importantly, hands free. Speech recognition will address the often unsatisfactory user experience associated with today’s Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA).
IVA vendors are already augmenting their solutions with speech-recognition capabilities to offer voice-driven information search and retrieval, such as video on demand. Self-service will eventually move beyond voice-driven search to deliver the ability to trigger and interact with processes using speech and enabling the delivery of service to users anywhere and in any situation or context.
Self-service is the future of customer service, and its evolution is inextricably linked to developments in speech analytics and the IoT. We are looking at a post-app world where information and data from multiple sources are combined to deliver a service. Then, when you need information or a service, you’ll just ask for it.
1 Forrester Research, Inc., Contact Centers Must Go Digital Or Die, by Kate Leggett and Art Schoeller, April 3, 2015
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