To say it’s been a wild ride is an understatement. Life moves fast in tech startup life, but even we were surprised at the rate of change and number of milestones and accomplishments achieved by our teams for our clients this year. Let’s take a look back on how we worked to support Customer Experience professionals in the last year, and how we’ll continue to do so in 2023 and beyond.
Powering the Purpose
In the spring, we raised $12M in Series A funding, choosing to place our bets on the thoughtful intersection of humans and machines. We aimed to continue transforming AI for customer service not to replace jobs, but rather to empower agents and their leaders to deliver the best possible human-driven experiences to their customers.
In order to do this, we also had to grow internally! Our workforce has grown by an additional 75% year-to-date, and we’ve invested in almost every department to continue to support Customer Experience teams with their digital transformation. Our growing team collaborates on a daily basis, across job functions, time zones, and continents to build, optimize, and iterate upon technology in the CX space. The old adage “it takes a village” rings true every day at Loris, or as we like to say: “one team, one dream!”
Technology Built with Customer Experience in Mind
There’s an intentional double entendre to that statement. When we ideate, explore, test, design, and build features and products at Loris, we do so with our customers’ experience in mind, as well as their customers’ experience. While we could write a dissertation on 2022 launches, from small features to full products and everything in between, we’ll keep it to some of the most important highlights.
Better Insights for Better Outcomes
Why act on instinct when you can act on data-backed insights? In order to do so effectively, CX leaders need data they can trust on topics that matter; User Defined Tags and the combination of Enriched Conversation View and our Sentiment Map help accomplish this.
Intelligent Tagging helps CX & QA managers tell richer stories of trends in conversations by tracking the mentions of certain keywords of interest in conversations. This feature enables leaders to connect the dots between intents and keywords, along with metrics like volume, sentiment, and outcome. Think: conversations with “damaged item” as the primary intent, tagged with keywords such as “broken lid” or “leaking container”.
The Enriched Conversation View was built to enable easier review of conversations, in order to improve managers’ ability to find key moments in agents’ conversations quickly. By jumping to key inflection points with the Sentiment Map and identifying critical messages, QA leaders are empowered to coach on the most crucial issues, instead of selecting conversations at random.
Classifying Customers’ Sentiment Target
It may not be hard to discern when a customer is frustrated, but decoding what the customer is frustrated about is often not so obvious. Our Sentiment Target Classification model enables companies to see what the customer sentiment target breakdown is between the supporting agent and the company. Frustration may unfortunately be taken out on the agent, but more often than not the majority of negative sentiment is actually geared towards the company.
This insight allows CX leaders to better assess agent and policy effectiveness, and informs how best to improve sentiment. If you’re interested in understanding your own customer sentiment breakdown, our Sentiment Detection tool is free!
Empowering Higher Agent Efficiency
We’re constantly looking for ways to make CX leaders and agents more efficient so that they can focus on helping customers; our Workflows and Auto Check In feature are two great examples of such efforts.
Loris Workflows guide agents through specific policies such as order cancellation, issue troubleshooting, or subscription retention, by providing a sequence of steps/actions that agents can use in a conversation. This helps them stay on brand and better adhere to protocols, without requiring them to spend additional time looking it up in a knowledge base or escalate to a specialized agent or manager.
Auto Check In, as the name might suggest, helps agents identify and end chats with unresponsive customers, according to policy (think: not too quickly but also not too slowly). This may sound simple in nature, but when applied and utilized at scale, it makes a measurable impact on throughput and handle time.
Real-Time Intelligence for LiveChat Customers, With More Platforms to Come
In October, we added LiveChat to our already expansive list of integration partners. As told by Loris CEO Etie Hertz, “the partnership with LiveChat will strengthen our ability to expand our offering to customer service and experience teams who are focusing on leveraging the power of AI to transform how they serve their customers across digital channels.”
LiveChat joins the existing list of integrations that includes Gladly, Kustomer, LivePerson, Salesforce, Twilio, and Zendesk. Early in 2023, we plan to add Freshdesk, Intercom, and Khoros, and are always looking for market signals to direct what other platforms to prioritize.
Conversational Quality is the Future of Customer Experience
All of our initiatives at Loris, past and future, are working towards one key goal: improving Conversational Quality. Quality, whether a company has dedicated resources for it or not, is the heart of a successful Customer Experience. Conversational Quality, as we call it, is the continuous improvement cycle that enables you to replicate what is working across all of your organization’s customer conversations.
We’ll be discussing Conversational Quality much more in the months to come, but before we can explore Conversational Quality, we need to reimagine the role and importance of QA, not just to the CX team, but the organization as a whole. For a glance into conversations in the industry happening around the Quality concept and QA function, check out our recent webinar on The State of QA in Support featuring CX experts Ines van Dijk and Ash Rhodes.
2023: The Year of the GOAT
No, not the animal. Customer Service is a hard job, often only made harder by both customer expectations and internal organizational pressures. Too frequently, we see CX leaders and teams become the scapegoats—the individuals or department blamed for retention issues, revenue performance, and so much more.
In 2023, we’re continuing to transform AI for Customer Experience to make Customer Support GOATs: The Greatest of All Time. Empowered by data, insights, workflows, and empathy, we’re working to help CX earn the recognition it deserves, as the keeper of customer secrets, the holder of trust, the first line of defense when issues arise, and often the owner of the last chance at retention.
