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The success of a conversational bot depends on a few things. One is its personality. With that in mind, ADT created Olivia, their virtual assistant. Olivia is pleasant (though she doesn't like being asked her age) and her favorite food is pizza. Plus, she loves birthdays. In 2019, she was in charge of ADT's anniversary sweepstakes.
For all this, the company was recognized in the Aivo Awards for the Best Bot Personality category. To get to know Olivia better, Martín Frascaroli, CEO of Aivo, spoke with Gustavo Volonterio, Omnichannel Manager at ADT. Below are some of the highlights of their conversation.
Meet Olivia, the star of ADT's CX strategy
Did you see any change in the service model during the pandemic?
No doubt about it. The pandemic changed our way of relating and our consumption habits. Today customers require quick, personalized and empathetic answers.
2020 was the year of the technological leap and our challenge was to adapt to it. Everything we had planned to do in five years we had to implement in record time.
Besides all this, a new world opened up. So many people who had never bought anything online had no other choice but to do it. Of course there was doubt at first, but then we saw that these apps and channels are safe.
Related article: ADT supports their customers 24/7 and boosts the customer care experience
Who's Olivia and what does she do?
Olivia is our coversational bot, our 24-hour, 365-day customer service center. She answers technical, administrative and security questions.
She also has programmed emotions and reactions. She is warm and empathetic. Sometimes she greets you, sometimes she gets angry if she's insulted, and if she can't understand a question, she transfers it to a human agent. To develop that personality, we had to define an age range, a background, and even her favorite food.
How was the process of creating the bot?
We did it together with the company's communications and marketing team to get a personality that matches our brand and products.
With this type of project there's no clear owner, but everyone has a stake. And actually, Olivia's name came from an employee vote, which also helped us reveal the project launch internally.
What can she do?
At first, Olivia would direct you to already-published content. But we realized if the customer wanted an invoice, they could get it directly from the same system as the bot, so we integrated it with a web service. Today the customer can start chatting with Olivia, ask for the invoice, and Olivia will give them all the options to download it right from there.
Olivia is also integrated with Zendesk so if the customer has an inquiry the bot can't resolve, she can create a ticket to transfer the conversation to an agent within the same operations center.
Basically, the bot manages almost everything and gives you a comprehensive overview of the business. We're constantly reviewing the knowledge base to generate new content. That's essential. We want to provide a solution, not just an answer.
What advice would you give a company in the process of defining its bot strategy?
It's really important to talk to people on the front line. No one knows better what the customer needs and what our opportunities are as a company. So the advice I would give them is to listen and build the personality with all the customer service and technical service teams together. They're the ones who know what the customer wants and how they're going to ask, because they can ask for it a million ways.
What's important is that the processes have to be adapted to the customer, not the other way around.
Do you think all these changes are here to stay?
No doubt about it. The customer who had never made a purchase online saw today that the service is the same or even better than on a conventional channel. If we're dedicated to providing a good experience, these channels are here to stay and they'll continue evolving.
Do you know about our standout customers of 2020?
Check the complete list of Aivo Awards and learn the story behind their conversational bots. If you want to implement our technology into your customer service strategy, schedule a call with one of our representatives.
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