CX Company is delighted to be recognized as a Representative Vendor in Virtual Customer Assistants by the world’s leading research and advisory company, Gartner.
CCO and co-founder Dirk Jan Dokman proudly adds: “To us, being recognized as one of the Representative Vendors in a crowded market is a fantastic achievement. We’ve worked hard to become what we are today. We power more than 4 million interactions per day on our DigitalCX platform and continue to transform customer journeys into highly personalized self-serve automated solutions. By doing so, we believe that we improve customer satisfaction, reduce live contacts and boost revenues for more than 80 prestigious brands worldwide. We also believe that we are extremely well positioned in relation to the market developments.”
According to the report, “Gartner defines virtual customer assistants (VCAs) as business applications that simulate a voice or text conversation with customers, in order to deliver information or take action on behalf of the customer to perform transactions. Engagement with a VCA is possible via live chat, SMS, consumer messaging apps, native mobile apps, peer-to-peer communities, kiosks and other web-based or mobile interfaces.”
The report goes on to state, “the market for VCAs is working its way through the Trough of Disillusionment on the Gartner Hype Cycle to become a productive platform. In 2018, many transaction-based VCA deployments hit a wall in regard to delivering value and experience. The market is awash with low-end transaction based VCAs and chatbots that deliver a poor user experience, create friction and don’t deliver business benefit. As the market is maturing, these VCAs will fail and create a backlash against VCAs in general, meaning more-guarded buyers.”
Further, Gartner foresees the following: “in order for VCAs to make it to a mainstream productive platform, we have listed the path of evolutions that we foresee, highlighted from the vendor perspective as well as from the customer perspective:
Beyond customer service. In a recent Gartner survey on AI, we found that customer-facing processes are the No. 1 focus of organizations augmenting through AI. We also found that, although customer service and support is the most augmented business process for two-thirds of respondents, sales and marketing are high on the priority list for three-fifths.
Complexity handling. Technology features such as dynamic dialogue will enable automation to handle advanced conversational abilities. In the next couple of years, VCAs will become omnipresent in our daily personal and work routines, going well beyond the task-focused interactions people are familiar with today. VCAs will be proactive, multithreaded and maintain state over time (i.e., as opposed to context switching in a single conversation).
A continuous omnichannel stream of engagements supported by continuous intelligence. In order to service the modern customer well, companies have recognized that all interactions with an organization are part of one large conversational stream that many service providers are trying to act upon/service. This will lead to more appropriate services for enabling and taking advantage of that stream-based outlook, with the VCA increasingly becoming a coherent full-spectrum experience.
Voice-enabled VCA. Access will become ubiquitous. Speech will become the standard interaction method. However, visual communication and text back from the VCA (where possible) will be preferred. VCA access will be available through many different endpoints, from consumer VPAs in various embodiments to preferred chat platforms (both consumer and enterprise).
Blending scenarios. The technological enablers of VCAs will increasingly be a zero sum game. The key differentiator will be the practical application, utilization and orchestration of these technologies into coherent mixed modality experiences. As the market matures, customers as well as vendors will realize that symbiosis between human and machine is the most optimal way to engage customers.
Personalization. Most organizations that buy VCAs today speak about personalization but struggle to execute on their roadmap to include it. This is a critical step in creating an extreme self-service solution. Organizations have recognized this and are making significant investments to unleash their data, resulting in customer experiences that can be more contextual, personalized and proactive.”
How do we believe DigitalCX is positioned in relation to the factors outlined above by Gartner?
With multiple API capabilities, web hooks and out of the box context, DigitalCX delivers personal, contextual and relevant customer experiences. The VCA integrates into all existing contact channels via text and voice, while offering a seamless transfer to a human agent should the customer wish to interact with a human. In addition, CX Company’s cutting-edge Intelligent Assistance R&D enables the VCA to handle increasingly complex interactions.
What do we think makes DigitalCX truly unique?
DigitalCX is built with non-tech business users in mind. Via a simple drag and drop interface, business users can easily design & deliver automated and personalized customer journeys across every digital channel & device. Dirk Jan adds “We simplify technology, making it easy for content editors to build a winning customer experience. You don’t need a degree in computing to use our platform, and this is what we believe sets us apart from Silicon Valley chatbot giants.”
Are you interested in transforming your customer experience to boost customer satisfaction and improve operational efficiency? Get in touch and we’ll show you how you can create a market-leading digital self-serve solution, generating ROI from day one. Visit https://www.cxcompany.com/contact/
Gartner subscribers can access the Market Guide for Virtual Customer Assistants here: https://www.gartner.com/document/3947357
Gartner, Market Guide for Virtual Customer Assistants, Brian Manusama et al., 11 July 2019
Gartner Disclaimer:
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.