Omnichannel, multimodal, customizable
We don’t need to tell technology brands how important omnichannel experiences are. But even the biggest brands in the world are struggling to maintain consistency across their customer-facing channels.
Just think of the ads you see on TV or online. They’re designed to emotionally grip the audience. But then when a potential customer goes to their website, how many website experiences can hold that grip of emotional engagement?
Not many. The customer is left to find their own answers and educate themselves. You may feel the same about your own website resources. They may speak to your chatbot, browse your landing pages or fill out an online form. But are those touchpoints as engaging as their first?
Digital humans are designed to maintain an emotionally engaging experience throughout. Not by simulating the look and feel of a fantastic ad, but by putting the human experience back into the user experience.
Digital humans can live across any and all of your customer touchpoints. They can interact with users on your website, they can live within mobile apps, software or platforms, and they can manage customer support requests – all using the human face, voice and body language customers have always enjoyed.
Recreating human connection through a trusted UI
We like to think of the human face as the most time-tested and universal interface that’s ever existed. As people, we use speech to convey meaning, and things like tone of voice and facial expressions to improve understanding and create deeper connections. Think of receiving a smile when something good happens in a conversation, or empathetic gestures when things don’t quite go right.
For millennia we’ve used our sophisticated human interfaces and evolved because of them; so why not use these in the digital world, too?
Technology companies have spent significant amounts of time, money and effort making user design, experience and interaction a priority. But the level of interaction we enjoy as humans has largely been absent from the equation.
Digital humans recreate interpersonal connections. Through CGI and AI automation, they display situational-appropriate emotions like empathy, warmth and friendliness – digitally – while using the conversation design provided by a chatbot or NLP.
To create deeper levels of understanding and support, they can use voice, text, animation and interactive on-screen elements to interact with people on their terms. If you’re a visual learner, you have a visual medium. If you learn best through doing, you’re part of an active conversation.
These are all parts of VARK learning methodology (visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinaesthetic learning) that determines how people best understand information presented to them.
And, like we do as real people, they can deliver the personalized experience most marketing functions are lacking. Customers are seen, heard and validated – a digital human can even remember their name or use other data fields from knowledge bases or CRMs to offer deep personalization.
Digital in the best possible way
Like all the best digital technologies, digital humans are available 24/7, 365 days a year. They scale in ways people simply cannot. That means, whenever a customer wishes to interact with somebody, they have a face-to-face conversation always at hand, even if human customer support is unavailable.
They’re also plugged into the latest data sources, meaning they can provide accurate answers right away. Users don’t have to “go on hold” while a customer service rep finds the answer. The digital brain of a digital human can search, find and provide an answer in milliseconds.
Similarly, our digital human APIs allow conversational AI interfaces like these to be plugged into virtually any product or service, software or platform, so interactions happen natively in your technology
Digital humans also benefit from being not human. People are less concerned about asking questions they think they should know the answers to. We’ve seen this historically in everything from finance – where people are too afraid to ask about basic money matters – to healthcare, where people feel too embarrassed to talk to a human specialist.
Technology companies, by their very nature, struggle with some of the same product or service education problems. But some of the most valuable users are the ones you’ve taken the time to educate. Digital humans offer a personal interface to learn from, without the fear of judgement.
A brand ambassador you can rely on
From television ads, blogs, videos, social media, email automation and how-to guides, brands have gotten very good at talking at their customers, rather than with them. When there is a two-way conversation, it almost never takes place in real time, and with a person users can connect with in any meaningful way.
And let’s be clear, no one is forming an emotional connection to your chatbot.
Yet emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable than even “highly satisfied customers”, Harvard Business Review found. These emotionally charged brand experiences can, HBR discovered, lead customers to buying more of your products and services, exhibiting less price sensitivity, recommending you more, visiting your website more often, engaging more with your communications and following your advice to a greater degree.
This is ultimately what digital humans aim to solve for, as highly engaging, interactive and emotive user experiences. They solve users’ problems with their IQ, offer deeper emotional engagement with their EQ, and do so with a defined personality that’s an embodiment of your brand.
They never have a bad day, act inappropriately or even show up late for an appointment. As brand representatives, they’ll never go off-script at the most imperfect moment.
This is a new territory in branding. So a good place to start when thinking about embodied brand interactions is by imagining what your brand would look and sound like if it were a person. What its principles would be, its personality, its character.
Designing your digital human’s personality is a core part of the overall project, and an exciting one at that, given what’s now at stake when building emotional connections to your brand.
Improving your chatbot for the modern user
Chatbots have their place in the digital workforce. They’re often the quickest way for users to get a response online. For instance, GGS found that 29% of people prefer chat interfaces for their quick and simple questions. That’s potentially a lot of people helped, without having to burden a live in-person chat service with low-touch responses.
But chatbots are limited. Put it this way: when was the last time a chatbot made you smile – let alone laugh or tell a friend how good the experience was? If you are relying on your chatbot to create digital engagement and valuable emotional connection, you may find yourself disappointed.
For one, chatbot fatigue is very real. More than four in five people now say they prefer human interaction, even as chatbot technology becomes more popular, PwC discovered. GGS also found that 71% of people are unlikely to turn to a brand that didn’t offer a form of human customer support.
So the issues with chatbot engagement are well known. Our own research shows that 42% of brands today are looking to add more of a “human experience” into their chatbots as a matter of priority.
But your chatbot still has a place in your digital workforce. And importantly, if you’re looking at digital human innovation, all the time, work and money you’ve put into your chatbot hasn’t been wasted – but it can be upgraded.
A digital human works with the same conversational framework as your chatbot. Our digital human platform integrates with any natural language processing (NLP) tools you may already use.
And if you’re not yet using chatbot technology? Then we can help you get started by recommending NLP platforms or even partners who can help you get going. For more on how this, check out our how it works page, where we give a more thorough explanation.
We know the challenges technology companies have. We’re a technology company too, after all. We know the many parts of business that need to function, and the many priorities that can affect growth.
Focusing on user experience has always been the way great tech ideas turn into great tech businesses. We can help with that – and we’d love to show you how.
