Manhattan Active Maven: Omnichannel Retail’s Superhero Sidekick

GenAI in Customer Service

Customer service automation technology is advancing by the day and customer patience is dwindling due to new GenAI capabilities that enable customer issues to be resolved fast and easily, sometimes with little to no human interaction. That’s not to say that human agents are becoming less important — quite the contrary. A recent McKinsey & Company interview on the promise and the reality of GenAI agents in the enterprise mentions “we find that customers across all age groups — even Gen Z — still prefer live phone conversations for customer help and support.”

GenAI capabilities are becoming more prevalent in contact centers due to the technology’s unique ability to understand and address conversational data. How an organization decides to leverage and utilize GenAI agents can be the differentiator from a disjointed to a seamless customer service journey.

While GenAI technology has made huge strides in its ability to digest and address conversational data, businesses should still want to provide a human touch for customers when needed. The ideal path forward is to equip customer service agents with the right GenAI tools and workflows so that by the time the customer reaches a human agent, that agent has everything they need to solve issues quickly, freeing them up for more pressing customer service tasks and interactions.

Forrester estimates that the global average customer experience will improve for the first time in three years, a key factor contributing to this being “behind-the-scenes GenAI that helps customer service agents answer questions faster and better and resolve CX (customer experience) issues on first contact, leaving customers feeling heard.”

“When we look at the best places to utilize GenAI in the customer experience, there are a few key areas we think are worth focusing on,” said Director of Product Management at Manhattan Associates Ellie Crawford. “The first is customers who want answers quickly and 24/7, in which case GenAI can be deployed in channels like chat, SMS, or email to ensure retailers can scale to meet those customer’s needs.”

“The second area worth focusing on is providing agent-facing GenAI tools, since agents deal almost exclusively with natural language in chats, emails, SMS, or phone logs. GenAI can help agents get up to speed faster on new conversations or transfers, and to help them provide better and more efficient service by composing responses or auto-drafting post-call notes.”

Manhattan Active® Maven Can Help Optimize the Associate and Customer Service Experience

Organizations can now leverage specialized GenAI assistance like never before with Manhattan Active Maven, the omnichannel retail associate’s customer service sidekick. Manhattan Active Maven is designed to handle the first point of conversation with customers and manage all the cleanup so that human agents can focus on what they do best — being human.

Post and pre-order conversations are now no longer contact agent responsibilities. Instead, customer inquiries are answered by Manhattan Active Maven, built to handle complex order questions and edits faster than an agent. Customers can ask questions about their order and get the answers they desire immediately, including:

• Can I receive a damaged item replacement?
• Can I see credit card charge statements? Or why do I have an extra charge on my credit card?
• Can I change my shipping address?
• Is this red dress available at any store in the metro area?

Manhattan Active Maven for Commerce

Manhattan Active Maven for Commerce capabilities allow retailers to fine-tune AI assistance with interaction wrap-up reports that detail interaction type, reason for interaction, order number, description of the interaction that took place with customer satisfaction level, what the end resolution was, and customer sentiment. With Manhattan Active Maven for Commerce, users can:

• Detect customer sentiment
• Summarize conversations and cases
• Receive a warm transfer from the chatbot
• Draft personalized, contextual responses
• Automate post-interaction notes

Benefits of Manhattan Active Maven for Commerce

Traditional chatbots are limited by a lack of natural-language understanding, built with complex rules in place and predefined scripts and flows which result in poor customer experience due to inflexible technology. If the customer’s question does not fit a predefined flow, that customer is often met with a dead-end message such as “I’m sorry, I can’t help with that” and the business utilizing this legacy technology is likely losing that customer due to frustration.

GenAI chatbots, on the other hand, separate themselves from the pack by enhancing the customer experience with dynamic, articulate, personalized, and contextual responses. The technology is also much easier to implement, with no complex configurations or rules required.

Manhattan Active Maven improves the customer experience by enabling meaningful, personalized digital interactions faster, better, and at scale across support channels — chat, email, SMS, social, etc. It reduces average handle time, increases agent efficiency, and makes it easier, quicker, and cheaper to implement with a turnkey chatbot with no set-up required.

“Configuring a traditional chatbot built on rules and scripts takes substantially more time and effort, and frankly delays your time to market, compared with a turnkey, GenAI-powered chatbot like Manhattan Active Maven,” said Crawford. “This is because Maven is native to Manhattan’s Active Order Management system, so it’s built on top of orders, returns, shipments, and payments and is pre-programmed to solve the most common questions and issues retail customer service organizations hear from customers.”

The results are better customer outcomes with

• more personalized customer experience
• faster responses leading to faster resolutions
• increase in Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS)

And decreased costs via

• reduced agent, emails, and text (SMS) chat volumes
• reduced handle time with warm transfers
• reduced post-interaction work

The GenAI benefits of Manhattan Active Maven estimate that an average-sized contact center team can see results that include the following:

• Reduce cost to serve by ~$164K per year by using GenAI to resolve customer questions and issues.
• Reduce post-call work by 10K hours per year by using GenAI to automate task wrap-up.
• Improve customer retention by answering customer questions effectively, freeing agents to focus on meaningful human interactions.

“While GenAI remains a relatively new technology for many of us, GenAI customer service chatbots have been proven to do the work of hundreds of agents while maintaining the same customer satisfaction score as human agents,” mentions Crawford. “Enabling customers to help themselves with a GenAI chatbot, when paired with GenAI tools to boost your agents, is a recipe for modern, personalized, and frustration-free customer service.”

Click here to learn more about Manhattan Active Maven.