12 November 2018
The customer service sector is constantly evolving and changing. This year, for the 14th time, the National Customer Service Conference invited experts and representatives from around the world with a shared vision of creating a higher level of customer service. At the 3-day conference, Geomant participated as an exhibitor and lecturer. Our 3 participants Adorján Bortnyák, Dr Gustavo E. Perez-Lopez, and Péter Hóbor summarise their experiences at the event.
What were the most decisive trends around which the lectures were built? What are the most important current aspirations of the contact centre’s sphere?
The most important topics of the lectures were: Digitalisation, Maximising customer satisfaction, the role of human resources in digitalisation, robots, chatbots, automation and the growing importance of cloud systems.
Which Geomant products follow these trends?
All of our products are constantly being developed to follow the current trends and our new brand Buzzeasy has been developed with digitalisation and artificial intelligence in mind from the very first steps of its creation.
Which lectures did you like best and why?
The most important message was the significance of maximising customer experience. I really liked approaching this subject from another angle. On Thursday, the last lecture was a roundtable discussion named “All for the guest! - gastronomy at the table ". I really liked the comparison between hospitality and customer service. András Jókuti gastro blogger and Tamás Mogyorósi, the owner of Food Mafia told some funny stories about how humble a waiter needs to be with guests in the catering industry if they want to be successful. Call centre agents need a similar approach with customers to be successful. Of course, we heard some useful and professional lectures as well, but this performance was memorable as it was entertaining and informative.
Adorján, tell me about your presentation. What was your most important message?
Title of the presentation: Cloud-based contact centres for customer satisfaction
The cloud-based contact centre has many advantages; it provides outstanding call access that results in increased customer satisfaction, no hardware or software needs to be installed, and to operate the contact centre you only need an internet connection. Operators can access the system from anywhere in the world through a web browser or mobile application and usually, the system can be deployed within a couple of hours. Geomant’s Contact Cloud solution offers all this plus a unique set of market-leading-features including video-based identity management, gamification, and workforce management to name just a few.
I also presented a concrete case study about Collab and Geomant collaboration in my presentation. Collab is a European multimedia contact centre (cloud and premises-based) company with a strong heritage of innovation and it has been providing award-winning platforms, fully based on IP architectures, to businesses of all sizes around the world for 10+ years.
Peter, tell me about your presentation. What was your most important message?
Title of the presentation: Building blocks of outstanding customer experience
Customer experience is the new battleground in the fight for consumers who wait for no one in the hyper-connected, on-demand economy. Studies show that organisations believe embedding communications into processes and apps is extremely important, they want a free-flowing interaction application to support all channels. Finding a good solution is not easy, finding an all-solving product is almost impossible.
Geomant's Buzzeasy solution based on the flexible platforms provided by Microsoft Azure, presents a good example of this modular approach by providing a solution for digital communication, chatbot, callback management and enterprise integration, with an orchestration platform that blends the available functionalities (e.g. Q&A, FAQ) with completely bespoke solutions infused with the power of AI.
Gustavo, tell me about your presentation and what your most important message was.
Title of the presentation: Why should artificial intelligence and chatbots have to focus on online retailers today?
Consumer behaviour and expectations have changed significantly in the era of digital transformation. The Y or millennium generation, or "technology freaks" and Z generations, or "digital natives" have the greatest impact on change. They’ve become slaves to new digital channels - they love to communicate and demand an immediate response. The question is what companies do, namely retailers, to win the competition for consumers and reduce the digital divide between the two parties.
Fortunately, today, artificial intelligence (AI) has several tools available to address the business problems of the digital age. Within that, smart chatbots are the best candidates for retailers to take the first step in realising their AI strategy.
Was there any special activity at the Geomant stand?
Yes, we had one. At the end of each of our presentations, we asked 3 questions about the lecture, those who couldn't find the answers on our site (www.geomant.com) asked our chatbot, Gemma, who helped them.
Whoever got the questions right received a gift at our booth. It was a really good activity not only because it motivated the audience to listen to our performance attentively, but also to get to know our website and Gemma, our chatbot solution.
In summary
The event went really well, with many guests giving positive feedback on our talks - this feedback confirmed that Geomant is moving in the right direction.