LogMeIn Bold360 CX tool adds AI features for bots, human agents
LogMeIn bundled together Bold360 customer service tools as a single CX platform underpinned by its AI technology by rebranding some pieces and introducing some others.
BOSTON -- The LogMeIn Bold360 customer experience support platform expanded its omnichannel offerings today with Bold360 Service, which more closely integrates chatbots and human agents, and Bold360 Advise, a contact center agent-assist tool to help customer service agents more quickly solve customer issues on voice and chat channels.
The company said Bold360 Acquire is on the horizon, an AI tool that personalizes customer experiences through chatbot interactions before the sale as they research, select products and check out. Together, LogMeIn Bold360 Service, Advise and Acquire represent a complete customer experience (CX) suite built on an underlying AI platform.
If Bold360 Service looks familiar to users, it is. The service is a retooling of the original stand-alone Bold360 software, introduced in 2017. Ryan Lester, senior director of customer experience technologies at LogMeIn, based in Boston, said the company hopes to woo service-oriented CX teams to their platform by creating closer integrations between automated and human customer service streams.
"It's harmony between the AI, the customer and the agent," Lester said, discussing how CX companies like LogMeIn add functionality that's missing from foundational customer support platforms, such as Mitel, Avaya and Genesys, that excel at ticketing and routing customer issues, but have yet to evolve their chatbots and tracking thereof.
"If a bot starts a conversation, and it's handed over to an agent, the agent sees all that interaction and can hand it back to the bot. It's all one continuous conversation, versus the bot having its own window. And when that ends, it's all lost -- and the agent says, 'How may I help you?' From a customer perspective, how maddening is that? Now, you're restating everything you just stated to get to that agent."
Presale support: The new CX frontier
If the buying journey is a bad experience, it impacts the overall experience delivered.
Kate LeggettAnalyst at Forrester
Presale customer self-service tools are becoming a crucial component of successful customer experience teams, said Forrester analyst Kate Leggett. LogMeIn Bold360 Acquire looks to be a tool to help make it happen on the customer's preferred channel, while keeping the customer data generated through such engagements on a single platform for future use.
"If the buying journey is a bad experience, it impacts the overall experience delivered," Leggett said. "[Bold360] is an integrated, all-in-one [system] that allows customers to be able to get help wherever they are in their journey. [Customers can get answers to] questions to help figure out what product they need, help explaining features and functions of a product before they purchase or, after the sale, getting help during the onboarding or support phases."
LogMeIn Bold 360 AI tools not only enable customer self-service, Leggett said, but help the human agents, too. The tools help with not only simple and recurring customer questions -- examples of which include asking if a product is in stock, what time a flight takes off or to give a user their boarding pass -- but also by helping agents locate answers more quickly during live conversations.
AI for customer experience evolving
The platform demonstrates how AI in general is evolving for brands that use the technology to enhance the CX. Rules-based reactive chat is the most basic of chatbot systems, she said, which many contact center platforms offer.
Next-generation AI tools can better see context in conversations and offer a richer automated customer engagement, where the bot can examine a customer's record and make personalized suggestions based prior activity of the customer or customers like them.
While chatbots still can't compare to their human counterparts for anything but rudimentary tasks, they're improving.
"Customers expect engagement, when they need it, in the context of what they do," Leggett said. "E-commerce companies that want to engage with the customer at the time that they are showing hesitation on a website when they're looking for a product to buy or are hesitating during the checkout process -- to be able to understand that point of friction and to engage with the right information ... LogMeIn gives you that last mile."
