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Today, after spending almost 25 years running customer service and experience teams for large brands like Apple, Samsung, and EA, I joined ASAPP, a truly amazing company transforming customer experiences and innovating contact center operations with next generation, AI-powered software.

Why join an enterprise software provider after being a practitioner for so long? It’s an interesting next step in my own personal journey starting at Apple where I realized that the role of an agent is one of the most important jobs at any company, as they are the voice of your brand.

ASAPP

I met ASAPP CEO Gustavo Sapoznik and the team at ASAPP late last year, and was genuinely shocked to find a company that delivers on the promise of transforming customer experience. What other companies said they were working on or thinking about, ASAPP had already built. And not just built…but built well, paying attention to every last detail of the experience for both customers and agents, bringing true innovation to the technology that powers this industry in a way that I have not seen in 25 years.

It turns out that helping enable other companies to deliver best-in-class experiences vs. leading an operation directly is two sides of the same coin. Plus the people, the culture, and the product here at ASAPP speaks to the heart of a company and what truly matters. It’s why I am here.

I look forward to helping companies deliver best-in-class customer experiences.

Michael Lawder

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I’m excited for this next part of the journey into the customer experience. While these remain uncertain and challenging times for people—including everyone in the customer experience industry—it’s an opportunity for change and growth in these moments of truth. This new normal is forcing all of us to think differently and businesses have the opportunity to address underlying challenges and build strategies and plans to survive and thrive through these times. I joined ASAPP because I’ve seen how powerful its artificial intelligence capabilities are in driving innovative and new customer experiences—including remote agents—and how critical this technology will become in transforming the way customer service and experience operate, now and in the future.

As ASAPP is a fundamental research-driven organization, I’ll be tackling opportunities to combine the best ingredients businesses will need in the future to build a best-in-class customer experience team that allows them to outpace their competitors.

For the first time, companies don’t have to sacrifice high-quality experiences in the name of reducing costs and I’ve been inspired by the leadership and team here at ASAPP. We’re on a journey to help every company deliver awesome customer experiences and radically increase agent productivity.

Let’s get started!

Making Conversations Easier for Agents

There are a number of levers you can pull to drive dramatic cost savings in your digital messaging program while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. One of the most impactful is concurrency—the ability for agents to manage multiple conversations at once. Concurrency can substantially reduce labor costs by empowering agents to manage up to 6 conversations at once. But isn’t that overly ambitious, demanding for the agent, and challenging to staff? All of these factors are easily solvable in pursuit of massive customer care cost savings.

Your agents can manage multiple conversations at once—and keep your customers happy—when you use AI to support them well.

Mike Friedman

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Achieving high concurrency is all about managing the cognitive load—the amount of your agents’ focus and attention—required by a conversation at any given time. The truth is, most interactions don’t require your agents’ full focus and attention. That means there is an opportunity to productively engage your agents’ remaining brainpower. Further, by reducing the cognitive load of each interaction, you can enable your agents to manage multiple conversations concurrently—all while preserving quality.

At ASAPP, we’ve designed our platform to support your agents and enable high concurrency. We do this through four tactics that substantially reduce cognitive load:

• Micro-Process Automation
• The ASAPP platform exchanges information with your customers, drafts messages and summary notes, predicts needed content, and writes updates to other systems of record (like your CRM).
• Flex-Concurrency AI
• Through machine learning, we’re able to monitor conversations to understand the level of engagement required by the agent based on many factors to dynamically shift concurrency up or down.
• AI-Driven Intelligent Routing
• Sophisticated routing models match your customers with the best agents to meet their needs; agents who’ve solved similar problems before and are more efficient.
• Highly Instrumented and Researched User Interface
• Optimized user interface designed to manage agents’ focus, reduce swivel-chair behavior, and help agents engage in concurrent conversations without missing a beat.

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By applying the tactics and technologies above, we can drastically reduce the cognitive load of each customer conversation and free up their attention to handle multiple conversations at once.

Technology and Workforce Management’s Role in Driving Higher Concurrency and Throughput—Part 2

As the product manager for the agent experience on the ASAPP platform, I get many inputs to my team’s roadmap. In shaping our roadmap as a Product, Design and Research team we try to balance cutting-edge experimentation and data-driven advancements with ideas that come directly from talking to and observing users. We find enormous value in doing what we call side-by-sides with agents.

Agents are power users—they are adept with all the ins-and-outs of the product, which makes them incredible sources of insight into potential areas for growth. On a recent site visit we sat side by side with agents to get feedback on recent product updates and observe ongoing workday pain points. While we were there our team noticed an interesting behavior in how agents were composing messages.

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Quick typing led to many typos—which some agents took the time to correct while others did not.

Cosima Travis

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Whenever agents chose to type a message freehand, they would try to type quickly, sometimes on old, sticky keyboards, which led to lots of typos. After a typo, different agents reacted differently. Some would ignore the typos and send the message as is, favoring a quick response over grammatical correctness. Others would finish typing their full response and then spend time right clicking their typos which were underlined in red by Chrome. Many agents would notice typos midway through typing, stop, and backspace in order to manually correct their errors.

My team saw an opportunity to improve quality and efficiency. We’ve all had the experience of trying to get a thought out, mistyping, and feeling interrupted by the consideration of whether to stop and correct it, or just keep going and come back later. For agents, this is happening all day long as they respond to customers, slowing down their response time and distracting from the content of the message they’re composing.

Looking deeper into the data around misspellings, the team observed that agents tend to make the same mistakes over and over again. By simply focusing on the couple thousand most common typos, we could address the vast majority of typo occurrences. Instead of making agents manually correct the typo by right clicking in Chrome or manually retyping, why not just correct it as they go?

As we built our autocorrect feature we wanted to make sure to not over-zealously correct. We all hate when the iPhone corrects a word we meant to type right before we send a message. The team set a high bar– we would only consider the feature successful if agents undid less than 1% of the typos we corrected. When we released this capability in an A/B test, the results were staggering. Not only was the undo rate far lower than 1%, but the impact to response time and overall handle time was substantial. This feature alone was able to cut average handle time by as much as 30 seconds, not to mention raise the quality bar of the responses that agents were sending to customers.

Sometimes the biggest wins come from small simple changes. Making sure our team takes the time to sit with agents often, side by side, ensures we keep a close pulse on what changes will really make an impact, however simple.