Purposeful and conscious de-automation of business

Here we often talk about how cool it is to automate different things. But sometimes it is necessary to do the exact opposite process - to remove automation where it interferes. In our case, for example, where it clearly interferes with making money or communicating with the buyer.

For example, we sawed out almost the entire IVR; made a script to bypass filling the cart fields; ensured that almost everywhere there were personal contacts of employees (even a direct cell phone of a regional manager is printed on a cash receipt); put direct mailing addresses of everyone to the founder on each page of the site; threw out part of the auto-notifications and replaced them with live calls.

And in general they behaved provocatively in terms of IT.

At the same time, the amount of code, the required power and the complexity of the implementation of the processes grew. The fact is that such deautomatization requires a very strong investment in IT. Now I will explain with examples what is the matter and why we are doing such strange things.

Call center

Most of all in online stores, I hate waiting for a response from an operator and wandering around IVR. In general, I have quite a lot of hops and dislikes like “no logos on objects around”, but this thing turned out to be far from not only my personal impression.

We have an IVR. He is a worker. But we include it only in very extreme cases, when the peak load on the CC exceeds the permissible limits. In other situations, live operators respond. And fast. This is a service. It helps to sell.

At a conference about the automation of KC in retail, I somehow moderated a round table with a representative of Sportmaster. They did a titanic work so that the person left the maximum data on the site, in the application and anywhere else, but did not call or load their operators. Because the task was to reduce the cost of processing a contact. In our case, any live contact with a trained operator is a good mood of the buyer. And the product is such that a good mood directly means an increase in the average bill. And in general, until you grow to 10 thousand orders per day, a live operator increases the check very well.

While Sportmaster sawed the automation platform, we were looking for more places where, on the contrary, you can switch a person to an operator. One of these places is the shopping cart site. There is already more than two years there is a button "I'm tired of filling out, call back, I will dictate the rest." This may sound a little strange for IT people (it’s easier for us to fill out a form), but for most non-IT professionals, live contacts are much more preferable, simpler and more convenient. Therefore, after clicking on this button, the operator calls you.

A notification that an order has been received often subjectively arrives in the mail after the operator’s call. Just imagine: you leave an order and they call you right away. Well, or after 5 minutes. Many shops are able to do this, but in the same 2009, such a chip looked like a miracle. And the buyers liked it damn. We even arranged a race for orders among operators so that the return call would come as quickly as possible. No dialogue with robots. Now we call back not so instantly, but still promptly.

Naturally, there are a number of notifications that are sent out automatically. We tried to make them as human as possible. Here is the gradation:
- Soulless robot: Your order No. 12551 has been shipped.
- A living person:Hello! My name is Vasya, I collected your order No. 12551. I checked twice that everything was fine and in place, very carefully packed the cup so that our mail would not beat it. My mail here, phone here. If anything - write or call, tell me, help.
- We have a compromise option like this:Hello! I am a specially trained Mosigra robot who is responsible for sending orders. I was instructed to tell you that your order No. 12551 has just been sent by Russian post. You can track how the package is going here. The average travel time to your city is usually 5-6 days, so even if you do not receive a notification or do not see in the tracking that the package has arrived, you should call the post office - the order may be there 2-3 days earlier than the postman brings a piece of paper. If suddenly something is lost, delayed more than usual, beat, there will be some other questions or you just want to clarify something on tracking - call 8-800-NN or write, we will help you.

There were problems with this. For example, at first there was a form “Hello! Your order has been received. Here, just in case, a list of what you ordered, and here is the phone number of the head of the online store. ” It looked too humane, and people thought they were being contacted by a live operator at 2 a.m. And they were waiting for the call. I had to come to the form: “Hello, I’m a specially trained Mosigra robot in charge of new orders. Now all operators are sleeping at home, but I will definitely give them your order in the morning. In the meantime, just in case, a list of what you ordered. And here is the phone number of the head of the online store. ”

One more thing. In most cases, we will call (using the live girl method from the call center) when the package arrives at the end of the track.

Mail on each page of the site, phones on checks

Normal people know that this is absolutely impossible. They will fall asleep with spam, they will write vowels, hell and collapse will generally happen. Therefore, special automatic feedback forms are made. Especially when tens of thousands of users run through your site per day.

We also sawed out these forms.

Mail on the site - from the purchaser to the founder, all direct - for at least a year and a half, if not more. And nothing terrible has happened so far.

Plus, specifically, I (unlike the rest) still left my direct phone. Also not very scary. Plus 10-15 minutes a day for raking in new letters - and just a sea of ​​business opportunities. And also very rich and useful feedback. I’m so used to it that when a client ran into problems at Crossroads, I was almost overwhelmed by the fact that I had to look for their directors in LinkedIn to even somehow get into contact.

On checks we write the direct cell phone of the regional manager.

This all has another cool effect - when you have a problem in the store, people immediately talk about it. The seller in Uryupinsk does not want to blush in front of the founder, so the number of possible problems has decreased simply at times.

Hatching Discount Cards

The normal procedure for working with a customer’s discount card is to pass a scanner over it so that it picks up and the customer receives a discount. We have it. But more often, it is more convenient for customers to call their phone number or name instead. Because then it doesn’t matter whether you have a card, whether you gave it to a friend, whether you rummaged through the corporate network like in Yandex (we dragged a couple million rubles of purchases from this client) or simply forgotten at home. You got it once - it is.

Again, in 2015 you won’t surprise anyone with this part of deautomatization - it took IT investments to add different human-made natural interfaces besides scanning a piece of plastic, and so many do now. In 2010, this, again, caused a wild delight of buyers. Like the fact that the card was a keychain, and it read "If you found these keys, please take them to the nearest Mosigra store."

In "Tea" (we did itanti-cafe is) it was possible to use plastic cards to authorize users and calculate the time of visit. This was already market practice. So, we purposefully refused this and made boards for recording people in order to be able to greet everyone. And plus - at the end time was rounded down for 2-3 minutes, which pleased the guests. Inaccurate, a lot of human factor - but at the same time much better automation.

Fuzzy search

Buyers do not have the discipline of search and more and more corrupted by natural interfaces. This, again, smacks of almost a manual selection of synonyms in the search for the game “Jenga” to be on the request, “Scrabble” for the game “Scrabble”, and “Cheburashka” for the “Crocodile Gene” toy.

You can evaluate how much IT tools were needed to “de-automate” and simplify the search in this same topic about the mechanics of fuzzy product search. And this is far, far from the limit.

Product classification

For three years we have classified goods according to various criteria. And then someone remembered the "Psychiatric Hospital in the hands of patients" and decided to see what would happen if you made the "all goods" button. To straight meat-meat without classifiers. And you know what? She not so sharply, but increased conversion.

The mechanism of action is the same as when choosing a movie on an airplane - there are 50 of them, and it’s easier to browse the entire catalog than to guess in which category “Cards, money, two trunks” are in comedies or thrillers.

Scripting

Sellers and call center operators are usually scripted, so do not play around so that there are no surprises (for us) in the conversation. We teach these scripts and then show what to do on them is not necessary.

You can create any garbage if you have a result. The result usually does not arise.

Once upon a time, I saw a scene with a tired businessman on Prospect Mira:

- Here is my card. What's next?
Charming saleswoman in a sweet voice:
- Next? Then I have to chop off your finger.
A man slowly raises his head, shakes his head, leaves his tack, looks at her smile and also begins to smile.

Such moments are the most important thing in the work of the store.

Every time I think about it when I meet human robots from call centers. In one shoe store I once could not understand until about the fifth phrase whether a person is calling me or IVR. It turned out to be a man extremely tortured by the script at the end of the shift.

More points

Forms (except for the most important one with customer contacts) do not contain required fields. Phone and mail are not checked for “no typos” standards - this is especially true after the messages “I am deaf and dumb, please only mail”, “7905-123-45-67, please do not call between 11:30 and 12:30 ", left by regional numbers, numbers with additional digits and even one American number with letters (in the Russian online store). In the backend, we try to normalize all this and record it in the database. But if something goes wrong, the live operator in CRM will see what the robot steaming phones does not like, and he will figure out the situation. Our task is to accept the order. And robots should not get in the way of the buyer.

In general, we are constantly looking for such places and try to make the interface natural. Deautomatization applies only to those parts where it is more convenient for a person (buyer) to work in a natural environment. Now we are still redoing the basket, sawing through a fully automated gallery from the product pages (it turned out - it’s much more convenient and practical to show all the pictures right in the description with a scroll column), we are doing a bunch of different things. Recently, they included in the update plan to remove all mails of the noreply type - ofigeli themselves that they did not do this right away.

The general principle of our actions is as follows:

• There are many obvious and ready-made things like IVR, which automate the processes, but at the same time a little interfere with the same service.
• When we do something new, we use the “standard configuration”, that is, how, in theory, this is usually done.
• Then we approach with our own standards and evaluate what is changing. For example, in the case of the same IVR, we change the number of operators in the shift to an instant human response.
• We determine whether it is worth it or not. Suppose in the example they decide what it costs.
• We prescribe a new process, more “manual”, methods and conditions for switching back to “safe” automation (all lines in normal operation should not be busy, IVR is turned on when everything is busy, for example, at peak).
• We prescribe backend automation for the “manual” process - in the example, new calculations of operator shifts, refinement of the call routing system, and so on will be required.
• We roll out into test operation and see what changes. Sometimes our feeling of what we are doing is right and good, but more often numerical indicators appear.

Naturally, in those places where automation does not conflict with the service and is really needed (almost all logistics, a commercial backend, and so on) we do everything so that robots help people in every possible way. And do not offend them.