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Tuesday, October 14, 2014 9:20:11 AM
You’ve already met Siri, the earnest, cheeky and sometimes hamfisted personal assistant built into your Apple iPhone, and, belatedly, into your iPad as well.
Siri is revolutionary. She’s also a bit of a toy. Which is where her sister, Nina, comes in. Nina is like Siri, but with an actual customer experience purpose. And some nifty tricks up her sleeve.
Just like Siri, Nina is the work of Nuance Communications NUAN +1.15% [although Nuance has long been able to “neither confirm nor deny” they’re the muscle behind Siri, this vagueness being a requirement of partnering with hyper-secretive Apple].
Anyway, Nuance does accept paternity for Nina, who Greg Pal, VP of Marketing, Strategy, and Business Development for Nuance Enterprise Division, describes as the “multi-channel virtual assistant for customer service that provides intelligent and natural interactions across a variety of customer self-service applications, including text messaging, voice, mobile apps and the web.”
Uh huh. Let me parse that for you.
In other words, Nina provides voice-based assistance a la Siri, and does it for commercial, non-iOS uses. Her identity–including her name, tone of voice, and vocabulary–changes with each commercial application in order to fit the branding of the company in question, which so far include Coca-Cola , ING Netherlands, Windstream Communications, and others.
For example: Nina recently bent her gender for the sake of Domino’s Pizza, where as “Dom,” she offers voice ordering within the Domino’s app.
The Dom version of Nina is all about pizza. He’s both a virtual assistant and a kind of wiseguy Domino’s brand ambassador. Shtick like “My motherboard and fatherboard raised me well” is part of what you’ll encounter when interacting with him
Voice ordering via Dom: Courtesy Domino's Pizza LLC
Voice ordering via Nina (rebranded and gender-bent into “Dom”): Courtesy Domino’s Pizza LLC
A tough cookie behind the scenes
Nina/Dom may seem all fun and games, but behind the scenes, s/he’s kind of a tough cookie. Or, as Greg Pal from Nuance would prefer to put it, Nina not only “provides human-like customer service conversations via text or speech interactions” (using natural language understanding), she “provides connectivity to CRM, ERP and database systems.” When necessary, Nina “intelligently routes conversations to live agents and connects with other backend systems.”
And check this out, paranoids and sci fi writers: Nina can be combined with voice biometrics technology to “securely and conveniently authenticate a customer by the sounds of their voice.”
Nina’s the tip of the iceberg
Nina is the tip of the iceberg of simulated human activities going on in streamlining customer service and customer experience. Some of these industry innovations, including the combination of inbound technology and outbound abilities provide good examples of how to serve customers better in innovative ways.
Technology-driven anticipatory customer service
One of my principles of the customer experience is that good customer service only becomes great customer service–service at such a high level that it starts to bind a customer to a brand, when it becomes anticipatory customer service, service that seems nearly (although not creepily) mind-reading, service that makes a customer feel “at home,” recognized, acknowledged.
Generally such extraordinary service depends on empathetic, highly trained human beings. However, sometimes it can benefit from empathetic, anticipatory systems and technology. Nina falls into this category, as do conversational IVRs (interactive voice response systems) such as you can now encounter using technology from Nuance and other firms; such systems, as Greg Pal would put it, “gain contextual understanding from an ongoing dialog with callers and quickly route calls based on that understanding.” In addition, “by proactively providing information based on the context of upcoming activities (i.e., flights, payments, appointments) as part of the IVR greeting, companies can further speed up the interactions and enhance the experience.”
De-stressing Delta passengers
For example, when Delta Airlines can automatically be prompted to ask the [undoubtedly stressed] passenger not “Tell us how we can help you today” but “Are you calling about your delayed flight?” or “Are you calling about your flight tomorrow?” [whichever, based on the calendar or other information about the caller, is appropriate] it removes the caller’s burden of repeat explanation and speeds the time to resolution,
Technology will never be a complete customer service solution
Technology is obviously not a complete solution to the goal of providing a great customer experience and superior customer service. But intelligent technology designed intelligently by humans in a way that actually respects the humans with whom it interacts, is a real improvement over clunky, haphazard technology, endless hold times, and the frustration of having to repeat yourself over and over again because someone didn’t take the time to design a system that listens, remembers, and makes use of the information that’s been input into it by you, the long-suffering customers.
[Disclosure: I was an early investor in MacSpeech, which was purchased by Nuance in 2010. I have no ownership position in Nuance Communications.]
Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant, customer experience consultant, keynote speaker and the bestselling author most recently of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2014/10/13/meet-siris-sister-the-humanoid-future-of-customer-service/
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