We all go into conversations knowing what we know – It’s our truth! However, the reality lies somewhere in the middle of any discussion and the goal is to always learn something and share something.
As part of our active listening we’ve distilled the issues faced by our clients into 3 distinct buckets:
· ‘My developers are not UX experts’
· ‘I don’t want to teach my customers my business’
· ‘Our customers are demanding more and I can’t keep up’
Stunning Journeys
The history, legacy or heritage (depending on your point of view) of our evolved architectures has gone through many development phases, languages, and delivery strategies. This has meant we’ve forced the deeply technical staff who know their GitHub from their JVM, to be responsible for creating stunning customer experiences. This has created usability problems for our consumers, so we now bolt UX experts on to the side of our projects to ‘put lipstick on ……’, well you know the rest of this phrase.
Designers can’t build the exquisite experiences they can imagine as the development tooling was created for developers, not UX experts.
Experts in Your Business
Education is the reason UX folk are critical to the evolution of conversational commerce, yet we’re not talking college degrees. Today we have to teach people how to use our systems, they’re big, complex and, for a non-expert, difficult to understand. When a customer can’t get to their outcome online, they call and wait on hold for 10 minutes, impacting their view of your business and costing you money. The bottom line is consumers don’t want to become experts in your business and learn your systems, we just want to get to the desired outcome with as little friction as possible.
The one key goal of conversational AI applications is that put the burden of understanding is moved to the system, and away from the human. This means we need to ensure the journey, experience and outcome are designed in concert and UX is central to that.
Accelerating Change
We also saw Gartner’s prediction suggesting the number of business applications to be built in the next 5 years will be the same as the past 40. Now we can develop faster today than in 1980 (ah, I remember COBOL!), but can we be 8x better? Especially when we take your evolved architectures to conversational, this is a huge amount of heavy lifting. Or is it?
A Different Lens
To build the experiences our customers are demanding we need a different lens to look through.
The first step is enabling non-developers to build conversational AI experiences, connect systems and train the AI. This puts your UX experts in the driving seat.
Next is building a conversational journey based on the desired outcome regardless of channel (voice, messaging, and even smart speakers). Self-service now means creating a conversation with your consumers, not them trying to navigate the pages on your technical website. And always, always, always have an escalation route to one of your team to ensure a positive outcome if the system runs out of ideas. You can fix the broken journey at a later date but don’t make your customers suffer.
Lastly, the development environment must be low code / no code to reduce the development and ongoing maintenance effort. It must use any and all of the NLP platforms under the covers, regardless of AI vendor. The question always asked is which one is best? The answer is ‘it doesn’t matter’, as they are all constantly evolving. Keep your options open, use them all, and just show your customer the best answer for that particular intent. If you look at them as a commodity, you don’t constrict your AI strategy by using a specific provider.
Enabling UX experts to build conversational AI applications on their own, 8x faster than today.
Impossible?
Absolutely not! Let us show you how – www.addaptivecx.com