You want to help your customers as best you can. If the need is high, they still prefer to use the phone. A telephone operator can solve many inconveniences for your customers. But sometimes, miscommunication may lead to irritation. To help prevent this, we are assisting in the development of VERA.

VERA recognizes emotions

VERA recognizes your customer’s emotions and informs the operator of this through a dashboard. During a conversation, the emotional state may easily change. Just think about having to call a customer service yourself. Often the conversation starts in a slightly annoyed mood. That is not surprising as the customer has a problem; otherwise they had no need to call. During the conversation, the mood of a customer may change regularly. Knowing the emotional state of your customer allows an operator to have more control of the conversation. This ensures that a satisfied customer will leave the conversation.

Better understand your customers

The potential value of VERA lies in better understanding your customers. VERA goes beyond just recognizing emotions. VERA learns from the conversations through machine learning and artificial intelligence. After a series of conversations, VERA can show how an operator responds to certain situations and why this response works out well, or why it does not. In this way, the operator can improve their interaction with your customers. Good for them, but even more so for your customers, and therefore for your company.

Collaboration on smart services campus

VERA is still in its infancy. It is an initiative of various parties from the Heerlen Smart Services Campus. The project team consists of professors and students from Maastricht University and specialists from companies such as APG, PGGM, and of course Cebiq. Thanks to the scrum approach, we were able to take major steps immediately in the first phase of software development. We are now proceeding to the experimental phase, in which we will make the first prototype of the dashboard. We will return to this later.