How Siri Became a Model for the Future of Consumer Support

When Apple (News - Alert) revealed the revolutionary virtual personal assistant Siri, the company unknowingly unleashed a powerful model for the new age of customer service. 

Even though Siri wasn't made for company support, innovators saw potential for a friendly, interactive agent that didn't involve additional payroll. Siri's rising popularity has also affected customer expectations about voice-activated technology. These innovations feed their appetite for immediate answers. Plus, speech recognition prevents them from having to actually figure out how a particular device or service works. They just ask. 

To respond to these changes, several developers recently released Siri-like applications for customer service. See these apps are changing to the "face" of tomorrow's customer service agent. 

Nuance (News - Alert) Makes Waves in Mobile Service

“Mobile is this really interesting space where customers now carry around a microphone and a screen in their pocket all day,” Andy Mauro told me recently. He is the senior manager of mobile innovation for Nuance Communications (News - Alert).

His company released in August new mobile customer service technology that capitalizes on this idea for voice-enabled self service. They created a Software Development Kit (SDK) called “Nina” that enables companies to add speech recognition and NLU into an existing mobile application. The result is an app that converses similar to Lola. “[Apps built with Nina] enable faster, more convenient navigation using your own phrasing,” Mauro explains.

Customers typically face two common annoyances when they access self-service offerings on a smartphone or tablet. One, they have to type login information and search terms on a tiny keyboard. And two, they have to dig through FAQ or community forum pages to find the answer they are looking for.

Speech is the perfect vehicle for addressing both of these issues. Even though traditional customer service applications might only require tapping through a few pages, that’s enough to stop many consumers conditioned for instant gratification.

Nuance developers drew on the company’s experience automating more than 10 billion calls annually to teach Nina how to interpret the questions mentioned above. 

SRI (News - Alert) International Gets Personal with Lola

Spanish banking giant BBVA had one goal when executives approached SRI International, the research and development organization that developed Siri.

“They wanted to build the Internet bank of the future,” recalls Norman Winarsky, Ph.D., vice president of SRI Ventures, the venture, license development, and commercialization arm of SRI International.

SRI decided to create a mobile application that emulated the kind of conversation a real-world service agent named Lola delivered. This conversation was meant to be nothing like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems that require prompted keywords to deliver answers. Instead, Lola uses sophisticated NLU algorithms and decades worth of speech recognition data to determine the context and intent of the question, no matter how it’s asked.

For example, a banking customer could ask the application, “What was my balance yesterday?” Lola would recognize that “balance” refers to the dollar amount in the bank account and “yesterday” means to exclude transactions from today.

Lola also remembers the context of the conversation. Continuing the previous example, the customer could then ask, “What about the day before?” Lola understands that the customer is still referring to their account balance, and that “the day before” means to exclude transactions from today and yesterday.

The Future Channel of Choice?

These apps have clearly tapped into an unmet need in the customer service market: better, more enjoyable self service. Customers don’t have to wade through frustrating IVRs, sit on hold, or fish through massive community forums. They get instant answers to their questions from a friendly, virtual agent that already knows everything about them. 

So, do these apps have the potential to become the service channel of choice as customers need for instant response grows? Tell us what you think by commenting here.

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Ashley Furness is a Market Analyst for research firms Help Desk Software Advice and Software Advice. She has spent the last six years reporting and writing business news and strategy features. Her work has appeared in myriad publications including Inc., Upstart Business Journal, the Austin Business Journal and the North Bay Business Journal. Before joining Software Advice in 2012, she worked in sales management and advertising.