NETTING IT OUT

Alme (All me) is the virtual assisted-service product from Next IT, a privately held supplier founded in 2002 and based in Spokane, WA USA.

Next IT offers subscription, transactional, or perpetual licenses for Alme and supports cloud and on-premise deployments. To date, Next IT claims that approximately 20 customer organizations have licensed and deployed it.

Alme earns very good grades on the Customer Service Report Card for Virtual Assisted-Service—Exceeds-Requirements grades for Answers and for Analysis and Matching and Meets-Requirements grades for Customer Service Integration, Analytic Functionality Product Viability, and Company Viability.

Use Alme to deploy virtual agents on web and mobile channels to answer customers’ questions. Customers can ask questions in any language. Virtual agents can deliver answers in any language, can speak answers, and can integrate data from external applications into their answers. Alme supports single question/single answer interactions and complex directed and goal-based dialogs that involve multiple customer-virtual agent interactions.

We recommend that large B2C organizations, especially B2C organizations in Next IT’s target markets—airlines, financial, healthcare, HR, and telecommunications—consider using Alme to add cross-channel virtual assisted-service to their customer service application portfolio. Its virtual agents can deliver complete and sophisticated answers to any customers’ questions, lowering cost to serve and improving customer satisfaction.

Alex, United Airlines’ Virtual Agent

© 2013 United Airlines, Inc.

1. This illustration shows Alex, United Airlines’ virtual agent.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Answer Customers’ Questions and Solve Customers’ Problems

Customer service products help organizations deliver answers to their customers’ questions and solutions to their problems through their case management, knowledge management, search, account management, and social network management capabilities, capabilities that support self-service, assisted-service, and social-service channels. These products help answer and solve customers’ questions and problems about products and services, about business policies, processes, and practices, or about the elements of their customer relationships such as accounts, bills, orders, and contracts.

Virtual Assisted-Service

Virtual assisted-service products and services use software to:

• Solicit and receive customers’ questions, typically within a box on a web page, similar to the box for a chat session, on PC browsers, mobile devices, or kiosks on corporate web sites or social networks. Within the box is an image of a person, a virtual agent, and a text box into which customers enter their questions.
• Analyze customers’ questions to determine its meaning, its intent. Analyses are typically accomplished with natural language processing (NLP) and linguistic analytics.
• Match a customer’s questions to an answer within a collection of predefined answers that best matches the customer’s intent. The matching process use NLP algorithms and linguistic analytics to determine the user’s intent. The collection of predefined answers is contained in the virtual assisted-service system knowledgebase.
• Deliver the best answers to customers within the box on the web page.

Virtual assisted-service is virtual because it uses software to determine and to deliver answers to customers’ questions. It’s assisted-service because it solicits questions and delivers answers in the style that live agents/customer service reps deliver answers on assisted-service channels. Customers escalate to virtual assisted-service from self-service activities when they have difficulty getting answers to their questions. Virtual agents are the faces of virtual assisted-service technology.

Virtual Assisted-Service Can Be a Low(er) Cost Customer Service Channel

Virtual assisted-service is customer service software, not customer service staff. It can lower cost to serve by avoiding or deflecting assisted-service chat sessions and/or contact center calls. It can also prevent or delay abandonment and improve customer satisfaction, delivering answers to customers who might otherwise leave rather than call.

The Best Virtual Assisted-Service—Fast and Accurate

As it is for all customer service, the best virtual assisted-service is...(more)

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