Aruba is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven “Personal Customer Service Assistant” currently in its Beta phase. Aruba eliminates the time one spends dealing with customer service by reinventing the whole process using modern technologies including AI. We recently interviewed Filip Salamon, Chief Strategy Officer of Aruba to know more about how Aruba will reduce the time a customer spends dealing with Customer Service and also how the overall experience of a customer can be made hasslefree.
Aruba has plans to disrupt the way Customer Service works in its current form and is currently in its Beta Phase. Tell us more about your launch.
We are launching a private beta this month and we started pre-launch marketing on November 1st with our mission of ” Making Customer Service Great Again”. We are in the process of collecting emails for the beta. So far, our campaign had over 2k views in just 24 hours and it is growing rapidly. Also, we have 3 blog posts on Quora, Medium and Buzzfeed. We have around 50 website visits daily with around 2-5 percent conversion rate.
How does Aruba eliminate the time one spends dealing with customer service?
What we are building is an app with AI bot. When a Customer interacts with a bot, it processes the request and creates a ticket. The ticket is subsequently passed on to the customer service team of a company. After the Customer Service takes action, AI sends a notification to the user.
I think we all been into this. Calling a Customer Service, going through the menu, pressing all the numbers, waiting on hold endlessly and sometimes even unnecessarily. And we waste the most important and valuable thing one can have i.e. time. In the United States alone people spend more than 900 millions of hours waiting on hold each year. Yes, 900 million! That’s 3 hours per person including babies. That’s absolutely insane. The whole system needs to change. We are no longer in the 90’s. We are getting into the era of autonomous cars, we are sending people to Mars and we have technologies like Artificial intelligence at our disposal. I think the most important thing a company can do is to value its customers’ time. Otherwise, their competitors will.
Though technology has played a big role in improving how Customer service works, many complain that the quality of Customer service has declined in the last few years. What are your thoughts on this?
We are living in an “Instant world”. Almost everything you want, you can get instantly. Just tap a button and in a couple of minutes, there is a car waiting on you. Just tap a button and your groceries are on the way. The world is growing so fast that if you are not innovative enough you are out of the game. The one industry that hasn’t changed much in the last decades is the customer service. The problem is the more things you can get instantly the more complains you’ll probably have. And, in order to serve that huge amount of customer complains, companies tend to outsource their customer service departments, which may solve one problem but creates another. A customer doesn’t like when companies outsource their customer service. So what the smaller companies who can’t afford to provide such a customer experience as Amazon does? I think this is the magic circle where many companies struggle with. And that’s where Aruba comes to help.
How does Aruba incorporate Artificial Intelligence in its platform?
AI is used for processing requests from customers. Primarily for text analysis (NLP) and human-bot interactions. As explained above, we have a bot that processes information based on bot-user interaction and once we have that data we pass that to company’s customer service department. After that, they take action, AI bot will need to notify the user about the updates on their requests.
How does an end user use the technology Aruba has to offer?
It’s pretty straightforward. Everyone buys something at some point in time and may need to contact customer support. Contacting the support can be too much hassle. Through Aruba, contacting the support can be as easy as tapping a button. Also, if you are very satisfied and you want to send a feedback you can tap a button and send feedback to any company rather than sending emails.
You can Join Aruba’s Beta launch by clicking here.
