A good customer experience has to embody three key components

• A for Aesthetics – Aesthetics in its broad sense is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and expression of beauty. According to the great philosopher Immanuel Kant it is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the laws of perception. An aesthetically pleasing experience needs to appeal to one or more of the five senses. For example, walking into a Starbucks Coffee shop you smell the aroma of the coffee, listen to soothing music in the background, and meet with the friendly staff – all together constitute a pleasurable or aesthetic experience.
• C for Contextual – Any customer experience has to fit within the overall context of what the customer is seeking to accomplish. For example, while I am happy to chat with a Resort receptionist about the attractions around the resort when I go on a vacation, I expect a professional and fast service when I am checking into a downtown hotel in Manhattan when I am on business.
• E for Emotion- Depending on the context, the experience should touch the customer ‘emotionally’. While mass media advertising has focused a lot on the emotional aspects, online media have generally not paid enough attention to the ‘emotional’ aspects. However, that is changing rapidly as we will see in some of my subsequent blogs.

While Aesthetics and Emotion deal with experience as an ‘art’ form, the Contextual component of the experience appeals more to the engineering discipline. I’ll explore the Aesthetics of an experience in this post and leave the other two components for subsequent posts.

I want to consider two types of aesthetics – Visual Aesthetics and auditory aesthetics.

Visual Aesthetics: When is the last time that you found your banking or credit card website visually pleasing? Although, most of them are designed for easy navigation they tend to ignore the visual aesthetics behind the online experience. Take a look at Mint – the financial services aggregator site and compare it with your banking site. The ease-of-use, the interactive Web 2.0 interface, and just the pleasing and uncluttered layout brings into harmony the 3C’s of Visual Design – Concept, Components, and Composition.

Visual aesthetics need not always mean, pleasing to the eyes. In some cases, you want to invoke a feeling of ‘disgust’ and make the visual imagery ‘repulsive’ to enable people to act. One of my favorite sites that does this well is the site on ‘Longevity Game’ developed by Northwestern Mutual – an insurance company. It uses visual imagery in an interesting way to capture the attention of the users and urge them to act. The site is a very simple Life expectancy Calculator. Based on the answers provided by the user the system develops a caricature that could be pleasing or repulsive. The purpose of the game is to show the impact of lifestyle and behavioral habits (e.g., eating and exercising habits) on one’s health and life expectancy. The site first engages the user, educates them, and then leads them to action – the 3 E’s of customer experience.

Auditory Aesthetics: While visual aesthetics is easy to comprehend, auditory aesthetics is more of a challenge. What would you like to hear that is pleasing? How can a customer experience change based on auditory aesthetics? The best example of auditory aesthetics I came across was in the airline industry. How many of you really listen to the safety instructions of the flight attendant? After a tiring day or week working away from home and looking forward to the interminable delays en-route home, everyone is ‘switched off’ to the pleas of the Flight Attendant. Listen to the following video – one of the most popular YouTube videos on what an auditorily pleasing experience could be?

Agreed, not many of you might be into ‘Rap’, but this Southwest Airlines flight attendant definitely got everyone listening and I am sure most would not have objected to a little diversion from the dull and boring announcement.

The negative side of auditory aesthetics is extremely important in a Call Center environment. Abusive customer service representatives can significantly damage the reputation of a company. A couple of years back AOL had a very famous case of a customer who was attempting to cancel his subscription and was faced with a really hostile AOL customer service representative.

As it happened the recording of this call went ‘viral’ and within 12 hrs there were more than 700,000 hits to a blog that carried the recording. Within a couple of days the incident was being reported in all major newspapers and TV media, forcing AOL to do damage control (See my article on Slideshare for more details). While this might be an extreme example of auditory aesthetics on the negative side, we often experience terrible customer service interactions with contact centers. Auditory aesthetics is particularly important for contact center agents or service representatives.

Do you have any other visual or auditory aesthetics that has really changed your customer experience? If so, leave a comment behind. I’ll tackle the other two aspects of ACE in my future postings.

ACE of Customer Experience – Part I is a post from: Connections

MIT’s Technology Review, in its 10 Emerging Technologies 2009 rated Intelligent Software Assistant as one of the emerging technologies of 2009.

Search is the gateway to the Internet for most people; for many of us, it has become second nature to distill a task into a set of keywords that will lead to the required tools and information. But Adam Cheyer, cofounder of Silicon Valley startup Siri, envisions a new way for people to interact with the services available on the Internet: a “do engine” rather than a search engine. Siri is working on virtual personal-assistant software, which would help users complete tasks rather than just collect information

These ‘do engines’ are not new. In fact, Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers have talked about and built such limited, task-specific, intelligent software entities for decades now. In fact, the first such Sevak or Intelligent Software Assistant was built to engage in a conversation with its user – like a therapist. Eliza, the first Sevak, was built in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum with just 200 lines of computer code. Things have moved a long way from these humble beginnings, but the task of building ‘useful’ Sevaks or ‘doers’ as opposed to just agents that ‘search’ has kept the attention of many researchers and has captured the attention of a few VCs as well.

More recently, such Intelligent Software Assistants are being commercially deployed is Contact Centers. Botego, Virtuoz, MyCyberTwin, NextIT, SitePal, Soliloquy, and Intellichat are some of the firms that specialize in developing voice or chat-based contact center ‘virtual customer service agents’. They are being used by a number of companies, including PayPal, eBay, Buy.com, Continental Airlines, AMP, and National Australia Bank – just to name a few. While comparing these Agents and their applications is a worthwhile (and sometime amusing) exercise, I will reserve that for a future post. Here I would like to expand on five key characteristics that such Sevaks should exhibit.

• Social – Being able to engage in a conversation with a user that is beyond the immediate task is a critical characteristic of Sevaks. Customers are used to engaging in a conversation beyond their immediate reason for contacting the company. Failing to design an agent that can engage in such conversations can easily expose the agent to abuse and mistrust. For example, one of the sites allows the user to have a conversation with the cyber twin of Paris Hilton. Even a simple question, such as ‘I thought you were a Hotel in Paris?’ results in a incongruent answer, ‘Paris looks like a beautiful city. I’d love to visit the tower’.
• Purposeful - Sevaks or agents need to be pro-active or purposeful. They should explicitly ask for the user’s goal or infer it, before providing an appropriate response. Failing to have this characteristic, will result in ‘entertaining’ but useless applications from a commercial perspective.
• Autonomous – These agents must be autonomous or require no human assistance behind the scenes to resolve customer issues. While it might be acceptable to handle Level 1 questions and pass the customer to a ‘Live Agent’ for Level 2 questions, requiring human monitoring of all agent conversations will increase overhead and costs.
• Rational – The answers provided by agents must follow a logical sequence and be acceptable as adequate explanation for why they answered the way they did. While humans might be irrational when they make decisions, having a Sevak that provides irrational answers will not be conducive to building ‘trust’ that is an essential attribute for success in this domain.
• Emotional – Finally, having a Sevak emotionally connect with the user or empathize with the users’ concerns and issues will be critical. While a virtual customer service agent might be able to take all the abuse from human customers, being emotionless in its response will be counter-productive as well.

SPARE - is a minimal set of five characteristics that Sevaks in contact centers must exhibit. How does one build such intelligent software agents and how do some of the agents mentioned in this blog stack up against there characteristics will be explored in future blogs.  If you are interested in exploring more (and having some fun) why don’t you visit my CyberTwin here or even go to the original Eliza and see how far the technology has evolved (or not!!) since 1966.

Top 5 Characteristics to Look for in Intelligent Software Assistants – The Next Generation of ‘Sevaks’ is a post from: Connections