SOLUTION
A digital human is an avatar capable of showing facial expressions and body language, focused on emotion and empathy. Running on top of conversational systems like chatbots, digital humans can respond in an appropriate non-verbal way that is aligned with the topic and sentiment of the conversation.
This makes Digital Humans a very powerful tool that open up an additional layer of emotional connection with your customers. This emotional connection allows you to influence the most important part of communication that cannot be achieved with words alone. The feeling and trust that are created will enhance the effectiveness of a dialog and enable you to leave an unprecedented impression of your brand, leading to higher sales and loyalty.
This customer experience goes far beyond what text-based systems can do and deeply touches on empathy and providing an authentic experience. People will feel less lonely when interacting with a digital human, or better understood, or are more easily persuaded depending on how you want to use them.
There is a high level of freedom to decide how your Digital Human will look. Things like gender, ethnicity, hair and eyes can often be modified using an existing model as the basis, or you build your digital human from scratch. Digital Humans are levering an underlaying conversational platform for Natural Language Understanding, Speech to Text and Text to Speech. This can be your existing solution like Google Dialogflow, AWS, Nuance Mix, Microsoft, or any preferred combination.
BENEFITS
Using a digital Human in your communication with customers has a few clear benefits that apply to every situation.
By adding emotions and gestures, Digital Humans leave an impression instead of only sharing an expression.
Only 7% of our communication is made up of the words we say, The other 93% consists of our tone of voice and body language. Digital Humans solely focus on this 93%, making it far more effective compared to text or voice only communication, because they make a true connection and emotionally touch your customers.
From: ‘Silent Messages’ by Albert Mehrabian
Digital Humans transform communication from effective into affective.
When describing Digital Humans you will often hear words like empathy, animation, emotion, engaging, react to environment, soul of a brand, personality etc. I’ll bet you have never heard these words in relation to the existing systems like virtual assistants, voicebots and smart speakers. Imagine all this is within control when using a Digital Human.
Your Digital Human has some excellent company.
Big tech companies like Meta. Google and Microsoft have announced giant steps into the Metaverse. This 3D version of the internet is powered by avatars and digital humans. This will – without a doubt – drive the general adoption of interactions with these digital humans. Your customers will soon expect the same from your brand.
Detractors will turn into promotors of your brand.
This figure shows the percentage of Gen Z consumers (white) versus the general population who are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. This relates to loyalty, and it proves that an outstanding experience drives customer loyalty. The opposite has been proven by this research as well. Customers are likely to leave your brand after an unpleasant experience. Digital Humans will contribute to a positive experience as they offer conversations that are far more engaging and appealing.
From: ‘Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right ’ by PwC
IMPLEMENTATION
No two projects are the same, but this timeline will give you an overview of what to expect when implementing a Digital Human.
Set your goals
First it is important to find out what you want to achieve by implementing a digital human and when this is considered successful. Do you want to be ahead of your competition, do you want to show you’re innovative, or do you have more specific goals like increase NPS, a lower drop-out rate in chatbot conversions, sell more on your website etc. The goal always determines the journey, so it is important to take some time for this first step.
Define your scope
Based on your goals you should consider the scope for your digital human implementation. In this phase you chose the use cases do you want to include, but also things like language, channel (website, mobile, kiosk, etc.), allowing spoken and/or written input are choices to make.
Design your Digital Human
And finally, the fun part! You can start designing your Digital Human’s appearance and its personality. Male or female, skin tone and texture, eye colour, hair, clothes, voice, tone of voice and many more details are configurable. All of this is driven by the way you want your Digital Human to be perceived. Do you want it to be formal, informal or maybe funny? Should it be older than, younger or match your target audience?
Build Conversations and add Digital Human ‘controls’
In order for your Digital Human to have actual conversations with your customers, it should be connected to your conversational platform of choice. Once that is done, you can start building the conversations that you want your digital human to cover and you can add the specific controls for the Digital Human in order for it to move, smile, frown, wink or laugh.
Integrate Digital Human on your website
When all the groundwork has been done, it is time to deploy the Digital Human on your channel of choice. This can usually be done by only adding a few lines of code but it will mark an important milestone in the project as your Digital Humane is now accessible for your audience!
Improve your Digital Human
Last but not least ongoing optimisation needs to be applied to improve the Digital Human’s behaviour. What gazes or movements are most effective and what is not working at all? Based on analytics data and customer surveys your Digital Human will be tuned in a way to align with the goals you have set in the first step.
USE CASES
The most obvious use cases for Digital Humans will be on websites and in mobile apps,
but also in other situations you will be able to successfully deploy a Digital Human for a whole different customer experience.
