Everyone has had a bad experience with customer service. Whether it’s being held in a phone queue forever or trying to get a not-so-smart chatbot to understand what you need, the frustration of not having your situation simply and speedily resolved is relatable.

Thankfully, technology is advancing to make the automated customer service experience a pain-free and, potentially, even enjoyable one.

“We launched this solution called TrueServe as of this week, which is really a multimodal solution that is built with preconceived notions of technologies and libraries where we can then be industry agnostic and be able to deliver those experiences to our clients based on whatever vertical or industry they’re in,” said Arte Merritt (pictured, left), global segment leader for conversational artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services Inc.

Merritt and Manoj Suvarna (pictured, right), managing director of artificial intelligence ecosystems at Deloitte LLP, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier at Amazon re:MARS 2022, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Deloitte and AWS are strategically collaborating to transform the customer service experience. (* Disclosure below.)

Providing true empathy and building trust via advanced contextual algorithms

Repeat business is built more on the customer’s experience than either product quality or price point, according to Suvarna.

“[The] first experience, whether it’s through a chat or a virtual assistant or a phone call is going to determine the longevity of that customer with you as a vendor,” he stated.

Citing statistics that less than 10% of the data collected by the average call center is analyzed, Suvarna emphasized the “critical importance” of TrueServe’s advanced analytics. By including contextual data, such as the reasons people are calling, in alongside more common metrics, such as length of calls and deflections, TrueServe is able to provide rich insights that are valuable to a company.

Linguistics experts and conversation designers have helped make sure that automated responses are not only accurate, but use culturally appropriate language based on knowledge of the customer. The solution also adheres to a framework established by AWS “where there are multiple pillars of trust, bias, privacy and security that companies and organizations need to think about,” Suvarna stated.

Along with Deloitte’s transformation expertise and AWS’ cloud services prowess, TrueServe also integrates functionality from vendors such as conversational AI solution OneReach.ai and personalization platform Salesforce Inc. This gives it the ability to orchestrate across different contextual datasets, with the main chatbot able to “marshal users across different sub-chatbots based on the use-case persona or even language,” Merritt stated.

The first customer use cases show the solution’s promise. One example comes from an insurance company that integrated intelligent document processing into its chatbot.

“You can take a photo of your existing insurance policy, and it’ll extract that information to build the new insurance policy. So, folks get excited about that,” Merritt said.

Multimodal interfaces are another feature TrueServe makes possible. An example of this is where a customer initiates a conversation through an interactive voice response system and are sent a link to a website or mobile app where they can interact both through voice and visually. This is very helpful when making location sensitive purchases, such as seats for events or flights.

“When you think about the continuum of possibilities of what we can bring together from a tools, technology, services perspective, the sky is the limit in terms of delivering these real experiences to our clients,” Suvarna said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Amazon re:MARS event:

(* Disclosure: Deloitte LLP sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Deloitte nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE