Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Shedding New Light on Next Generation Customer Experiences

September 17, 2018

There’s a new kind of calling for contact center companies, which are continually morphing into customer experience hubs, and one company has integrated Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant into their knowledge-based platform.

A decade ago, some companies still referred to customer service organizations as “call centers,” accepting inbound voice calls via toll-free numbers, despite the impact of cloud, social media, mobile apps with embedded communications, and the rise of omnichannel chat.


Change is the greatest certainty in the Customer Experience (CX) space, and recently Gartner published new research revealing that 81 percent of CX leaders surveyed reported they will compete mostly or entirely on CX, but less than half had established the rationale for why CX drives business outcomes.

“The goal of CX is to meet and exceed customer expectations, but while 48 percent say their CX efforts exceed management’s expectations, just 22 percent of customer experience leaders report their CX efforts exceed customers’ expectations,” Gartner stated.

“The fact that so many organizations understand the importance of CX to the brand but are unable to deliver outcomes that meet or exceed customer expectations is indicative of the growing need for fresh approaches to delivering more positive outcomes for customers,” said Augie Ray, research director at Gartner. “Leading brands in CX start with a strong foundation in customer satisfaction. Getting this right and understanding how to build upon it to drive positive financial and business outcomes is what sets the best brands apart from the rest."

Gartner introduced the “CX Pyramid” calling it a framework to understand what separates the most powerful customer experiences from the rest, calling on brands to “move up” based on five key stages to reach the ultimate return (loyalty and continued business).

From the ground up:

  • Stage 1: Communication Level – Furnish customers with the information they can use via the right channel at the right time.
  • Stage 2: Responsive Level – Solve the customer’s problem quickly and efficiently – meaning, balance both business and customer goals, measures and strategies.
  • Stage 3: Commitment Level – Listen for, understand and resolve customers’ unique needs.
  • Stage 4: Proactive Level – Provide experiences that resolve needs before customers ask.
  • Stage 5: Evolution Level – Make customers feel better, safer or more powerful.

A New Voice with AI

Voice is now being transformed into a different mechanism for solving consumers’ problems and answering their questions, a jump shift KMS lighthouse is capitalizing on by enabling contact centers to connect with a centralized knowledge base for agents, distributed workforces and customers including chat bots and speech assistants. 

According to a press release issued earlier this year, “Lighthouse’s AI-driven knowledge base, combined with voice search abilities, enables contact centers to reduce incoming calls and save on operational expenses,” so we asked CEO Sagi Eliyahu about specific use cases for this.

“Multiple industries are adopting our technology, including AIG. They wish to make agents professional in all their interactions with their customers,” Eliyahu said. “Lighthouse reduces the dependency of the specific expertise of the agent who provides the service, since they can ask Lighthouse what to do, and our engine will always retrieve the most accurate answer for them.”

Eliyahu also noted their work with hospitals, including the Tel Aviv Medical Center, which is one of the largest hospitals in Israel, and large pharmaceutical providers wishing to base its service on “golden truth.”

“For that they need a powerful solution like ours. Think about an MRI scan; sharing this with a patient might require a special approved document from a specific doctor, approval from the insurer, even instructions about fasting before a test. With Lighthouse technology, the agent simply types “MRI test” and receives all the information in seconds, and can share this via e-mail, SMS and other channels.”

Given this very detailed and accurate guidance, Lighthouse helps to avoid human errors and improves the first call resolution by 20-25 percent, according to the company.

Lighthouse’s scope is broad and may be as much about CRM as it is about Contact Center and Customer Experience. With a unified cloud approach, the system supports sales, service, back-office, technical support, customer self-service, and the integration of live chat and chatbot capabilities.

They claim to deliver “consistent and accurate” answers to queries in less than one second, which naturally leads to happier consumers and more efficient service representatives. 

"We are delighted with the new integration capabilities of Lighthouse. Lately customer experience has been going through rapid digital transformation. We are serving global Fortune 500 companies and the same time mid-size companies via our cloud base offering. However, keeping pace with the requirements is sometimes challenging. Lighthouse, with the new fast and easy integration options offers companies smart chat bots and voice search abilities that both retrieve information from a rich, accurate knowledge base, providing consistent, instant answers to questions,” Eliyahu said.

Customer service and experience will be one of the many areas featured at the upcoming Future of Work conference, taking place January 30-February 1, 2019 in Ft. Lauderdale.  The conference will study the impact of artificial intelligence all aspects of business communication, both internal and customer-facing.




Edited by Erik Linask



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