Ziang Xie, Author at Sapling

In Essays

Conversational Insights: Knowledge

November 13, 2020 6 Mins Read

This is a series of blog posts that we at Sapling are composing on meaningful conversational insights into customer support conversations. For more, please subscribe below. Knowledge workers—such as support agents and inside sales representatives—need onboarding and training so that they can best respond to customers. Even with the best training and learning management systems, however, agents will still often need to sift through the company knowledge base in order to determine the best response…

Top Customer Support Metrics

July 2, 2020 9 Mins Read

“What gets measured, gets managed.”— Peter Drucker Great products and great marketing attract customers. However, no matter how good a product is, the journey of the customer is often full of hiccups and misunderstandings. Customer support must then help the user — to keep them using the product, to retain them as a paying customer, and to encourage them to become evangelists for the product. This is especially true for competitive markets, products with significant onboarding commitments, and…

The Case for Human-in-the-Loop AI for Customer Conversations

July 2, 2020 10 Mins Read

Interactive Voice Response has existed since the 1970s. Autonomous cars using neural networks were first developed in the 1980s. When will conversational chatbots deliver? This post discusses old and recent AI developments and makes the case for human-in-the-loop AI for customer conversations from the perspectives of technology development, user experience, and business learnings. Motivation/Context In recent years, automation has been a trending topic. With advances in artificial intelligence, particularly in a subfield of machine learning termed…