OMQ Rooftop Event – Customer Service Automation 2019

Following our first article about the OMQ Rooftop Event here’s the article about the presentation given by Matthias Meisdrock, CEO of OMQ GmbH.

Inside Berlin’s tallest business building, matters primarily concerned the focus for 2019: namely, the OMQ Chatbot and Automator. These two products help you to automate even more aspects of your customer service.

100 years ago, factory workers on an assembly line had to constantly perform the same tasks and continually repeat recurring processes. Unfortunately, 100 years later, this still remains the case in call centers and service departments. Service agents have to answer the same customer questions every day.

With industrialization, the solution for factory workers arrived in the form of robots. Robotic arms can perform recurring processes on their own. This isn’t so easy in customer service though, as all customers express themselves differently. Since a concern can be expressed in a number of different ways, the system needs to correctly interpret the intent behind the concern. We have developed artificial intelligence for this.

Artificial intelligence at the heart of customer service

At present, helpdesk systems determine the service departments. However, as part of this, customer inquiries are merely sorted and then forwarded to many different service employees.

We offer software that doesn’t manage these requests, but instead answers them automatically. The knowledge is managed by a small group of service employees. Recurring requests are answered by the OMQ software. There is no need for further manual processing.

How OMQ interprets the concerns of customers

OMQ’s artificial intelligence interprets the customer’s concern. Let’s say, for example, that a customer says that his or her item is damaged and wants to know how to proceed now. This inquiry has the same intent as the question “How can I complain about an item?” Our software recognizes the matter concerned and provides a suitable answer despite the different ways in which customers raise the matter.

The basic technology has been developed with international research partners. It is ready to use “out of the box” in the service center and gets better and better over time. It uses feedback from customers and service staff and thereby creates new connections, which assign inquiries in an ever-improved manner.

OMQ as the core feature for customer service

Customers use different channels to get answers to their service inquiries. These include:

• Emails
• Messages via the contact form
• Help pages
• Messengers / Chats

In order for a system to be utilized sustainably, it is important to use a single central system for all these channels. Where companies would otherwise rely on many different isolated solutions, OMQ instead integrates itself quickly and easily into existing systems and infrastructures. Our OMQ technology harvests the same knowledge on all service channels.

The central system has the following advantages:

• The company’s service knowledge only needs to be entered once.
• Customers will always receive the same answer to the same questions. This allows the customer service to achieve the same level of quality across all channels.
• By using all channels, more data is available to the AI to learn from.

Our products are tied to the different points of contact. The following products are available for the points of contact:

• OMQ Contact is integrated into existing contact forms and provides the customer with a real-time response directly on the contact page. This response is displayed to the customer directly beside the contact form. The service department is spared additional work since the customer does not send his or her inquiry. Customer satisfaction is increased because the customer receives an answer immediately.
• OMQ Help is a dynamic help page, similar to a FAQ. If there are many queries raised at the same time about a new “voucher campaign”, the question “How do I redeem my voucher?” will appear at the top of the help page. This means customers can be provided with answers before they have even asked their question. The topic-based search also helps the customer to always find the right answer.
• OMQ Assist helps service agents to answer customer inquiries automatically via email. Agents are shown text components, using which they can compose an email reply with a click.
• OMQ Reply automatically reads the email that has arrived in the inbox. The inquiry is analyzed. The software extracts the customer’s individual questions as quotations and automatically creates an answer to them. Once the system is confident that it has found the right answers, they are automatically sent as an email without any need for a service representative to intervene.

OMQ Chatbot

Messengers and chatbots are becoming ever more important in our society. Young people in particular are increasingly using these systems.

Following an intensive development period, we released the OMQ Chatbot in 2019. During development it was important to solve the common problems of chatbots in customer service. Three characteristics were of particularly importance here.

• The same knowledge database This means that the chatbot, like all other OMQ products, uses knowledge from the same knowledge database. There is therefore no need for service employees to enter new knowledge. As a result, a large pool of knowledge is already available, since the knowledge database does not have to be set up anew.

• Learns via all products Artificial intelligence learns from a large amount of data, since inquiries and feedback concerning all products are simultaneously collated. This helps the system to answer questions faster and better.

• No deception The OMQ chatbot does not pretend that it is an employee, but instead identifies itself as a chatbot at the beginning of the dialog. The chatbot is able to determine on its own whether it can help the customer. It can ask further questions in response if several potential answers exist. If the chatbot believes that the customer has a unique question, it will connect the customer with an employee. The common frustration with chatbots is eliminated.

OMQ Automator

In order to understand the Automator, the service needs to be considered holistically. To this end, we have analyzed the types of questions which arise in customer service and how they can be optimally answered. Based on our analysis we have created the following categories:

• 30% simple questions A simple question is, for example, “What are your delivery costs?” The OMQ system can answer such questions using standardized answers. In the example, the answer would be “The delivery costs are €3.50 for a standard parcel.”

• 10% new questions If a question does not yet exist in the database because a company has a new product or is starting a voucher campaign, the service department often fails to notice this. Using the OMQ system, our customers receive analyses that list current questions which are not yet contained within the knowledge database. These are added and can then be answered automatically by the system.

• 20% individual, indistinguishable Individual and indistinguishable questions are those involving a particular concern that only relates to a single customer and only occurs once in the form. A question is not distinguishable if the customer expresses him- or herself in too complicated or too imprecise a manner and the intent of the question cannot be distinguished as a result. These questions will be answered by a service employee.

• 40% interactive Interactive answers to questions such as “Where is my order?” cannot be answered using a single standardized answer. The customer doesn’t want to know that orders are usually delivered in 3-4 days. He or she wants to know where their own order is right now.

Interactive answers

Using the OMQ Automator, the customer can change an address directly in the reply. As soon as the customer enters his or her request in the contact form, the response “Change address” will appear in this case. Within this interactive answer, the customer can enter his or her address directly.

The OMQ system ensures that all the relevant data is asked of the customer. An action is created from the details, which is then forwarded to a ticket system or the company’s back-end server. This allows a change of address to be carried out automatically without the need for a service agent to intervene.

Do you want to automate your service too?

The Chatbot and Automator complement our holistic system relating to software that can be used in all areas of customer service. All service channels are controlled simultaneously using the knowledge from the central OMQ knowledge database.

By using the knowledge database, over 50% of service inquiries are answered before they are even sent. Your service agents work 10 times faster and can focus on complex and individual customer questions. The system can be integrated within just a few minutes and is immediately ready for use “out of the box”.

If you would like to learn more about us and our technology or see the software in action, please get in touch :)