Annette Franz is founder and CEO (Chief Experience Officer, of course!) of CX Journey Inc. She's got 25 years of experience in both helping companies understand their employees and customers and identifying what drives retention, satisfaction, engagement, and the overall experience.

So you’ve decided that conversational marketing is right for your business, and you’re planning on implementing an AI chatbot. What are your first steps? How do you get started?

On this episode of Solving for CX, we jump right into a chat with Connor Cirillo, Conversational Marketing Manager at Hubspot. Connor discusses how artificial intelligence and AI chatbots can be set up to drive the success of an organization.

Allison Smith is a noted voice actor who specializes in voicing telephone systems. Allison is an authority on IVR best practices to ensure your phone system accurately reflects your brand and offers the ideal customer experience. Learn how to leverage the potential benefits of Interactive Voice Response, or an IVR system, as Allison discusses her work with companies from small businesses like spas, to Fortune 500 organizations, reviewing trends and best practices.

Daniel Hong of Forrester Research, award-winning CX specialist Micah Solomon, and Opus Research Analyst, Mitch Lieberman huddle up to demystify the top CX and Conversational Commerce trends. The panel shares everything you need to know about the latest technology being adopted by customer service leaders.

"It's not just about 'let's throw something up on Facebook Messenger,' it really is about the linkage of all these items together."

Art Schoeller of Forrester Research is back for another episode, this time with some compelling stats around conversational commerce and digital personalization.

"Retail ISN'T dying. Boring retail is dying."

Charles Dimov loves retail, growing businesses, optimizing marketing to drive sales, and launching new products and he joins Solving For CX to share how adding AI to your buyer's journey can add value for the customer AND prompt them to take action faster.

"If you look at the next ten to fifteen years, probably the biggest shifts will be based around automation and artificial intelligence and how they change the way we live and work."

Brett King is a world-renowned futurist and speaker, an International Bestselling Author, and a media personality who covers the future of business, technology and society.

"The benefit of blending a chatbot and human agent experience is that you really get a smart online engagement for your customers."

Ramesh Kumar is head of Customer Success at [24]7.ai and has nearly 25 Years of experience in the Customer Life Cycle verticals spanning customer acquisitions, customer care and retention.

"What you're really trying to do is optimize the buyer's journey."

Vijai Shankar is head of product marketing at Xactly Corp, and is an executive with a proven track record in all facets of marketing including: product marketing, sales enablement, lead generation, press/analyst relations, evangelism and branding.

Any time of fast-paced change is accompanied by plenty of conjecture as to what the impact of the new technology will be on the lives of humans.  Today’s emerging AI chatbot technologies are no exception, in fact, there is plenty of “chat” about whether these virtual agents will completely displace humans in customer support roles in the near future.  Art Schoeller figures it’s more about learning how to blend human agents and chatbots to enhance your customers’ experience with your brand...