Tag: smart technology

Navigating Your Way Past The “Trough Of Disillusionment” For Artificial Intelligence In Customer Experience

Posted on by David Dinh

Guest blog by Steve Nuttall

The hype around Artificial Intelligence technologies is at its peak. According to the 2017 Gartner Hype Cycle, emerging technologies such as deep learning, machine learning and virtual assistants are at the “peak of inflated expectation”. Cognitive expert advisors have passed this peak and are now descending towards the “trough of disillusionment”. This occurs when interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver.

emerging technology hype cycle gartner 2017

The benefits of AI for customer experience management are potentially game changing. AI has the capability to analyse vast amounts of data in real time from various sources, including human behaviours and emotions. Expectations are high because this capability can then be used to create seamless and personalised customer experiences that are optimised to the device and channel of choice.

Pragmatists and battle hardened cynics will recall that when automation was first introduced into customer service channels, the results were often spectacularly underwhelming. So, is the application of AI to customer experiences destined to fall into the trough of disillusionment before climbing the slope of enlightenment? Or is there a path to follow to avoid the pitfalls of unmet expectations?

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Intelligently using Artificial Intelligence for Customer Experience

In order to find out whether the application of AI to your business’ customer experience will take a downturn, it is necessary to first ask yourself: What is driving your organisation’s AI strategy? Is it because:

  • AI is all the rage in your industry and your organisation is fearful of being left behind?
  • If you take the lead in implementing AI, it will make you look smarter/cooler than your colleagues?
  • It sounds like a cool and fun toy to experiment with?
  • Your organisation needs to catch up with your competitors who have been early adopters of AI?
  • AI is a great opportunity to reduce the cost to serve our customers?

If the answer to any of the above is Yes, then the trough of disillusionment beckons.

Alternatively, if you are deploying or considering AI because…

AI can enable your people and optimise your processes to operate more intelligently and efficiently, in order to provide individualised and predictive experiences for your customers at scale

…..then a brighter future awaits.

For these technologies to have any chance of success you should have a clear sense of purpose of how to you intend to deploy AI to drive CX in your business. Here are three ways you can use AI in a purposeful way to create meaningful customer experiences.

1. Use AI to Enhance your Knowledge of the Customer

Customer Connection Web Diagram

An example would be using data analytics to anticipate the needs of individual customers at each moment of truth and key stage of their journey. Some specific examples oh how businesses are using AI to enhance customer knowledge:

2. Use AI to create stronger emotional connections with your customers

Using AI to recognise a customer’s emotional state helps agents better respond to the customer during an interaction, thereby creating stronger emotional connections.

3. Use AI to empower your service agents

artificial-intelligence-robot

Not only can AI empower agents with emotional intelligence to reply appropriately to customers, it can be used as a tool to connect service agents with the right information in the organisation’s knowledge base in real time. Examples of why this can be powerful to a business: 

A recent study Fifth Quadrant CX undertook for Oracle showed that CX leaders acknowledge the potential of AI and are more advanced in trialling and implementing these emerging technologies to enable better customer experiences. AI is being used to combine data from multiple sources to create individual profiles for each customer, enabling agents to take immediate action on what customers want. Consequently, CX Leaders are outperforming their counterparts by creating emotional connections with their customers through more predictive and personalised customer experiences.

As a result, nearly two thirds of CX leaders say their organisation’s revenue growth outperforms their industry counterparts, compared with only a quarter of CX laggards. The proof is therefore clearly in the pudding: when applied in a purposeful and meaningful way, AI technology can enable organisations to increase agility and overcome competitive threats and leverage this advantage to drive acquisition.

Steve Nuttal fifth quadrant customer experience head of researchWritten by Dr Steve Nuttall – Head Of CX Research, Fifth Quadrant. Steve has worked in various leadership roles as a market research insights professional for over twenty years in Europe, Asia and Australia. He leads Fifth Quadrant’s program of CX strategy research and is an international speaker and presenter on best practice customer experience. Steve assists organisations to deliver their customer-centric strategies and business performance goals including designing and implementing programs to help optimise the customer experience.

Smart Technology Around You

Posted on by David Dinh

Smart technology is what makes up the future, where electronic device usage is concerned. What started with the smart phone, at least on the consumer level, has now progressed to smart entertainment systems, smart vehicles, and even smart industrial as well as healthcare technologies. Even the elderly care sector has benefitted to some extent, from the advent of smart technology, which is an incredible precedent, to be used in the favour of technologies of the future.

However, with better technology and smarter machines and devices, comes the question of whether or not we should depend on this technology for our daily tasks and guidance, as well as whether the technology you are about to purchase, in order to make your life more convenient, is right for you or not. The ideal answer to this is explained in the following paragraphs, after being broken down into some aspects of your life where you might use smart technology.

Smart Technology – It’s All Around You

1. Fitness and Sport

The fitness world has always been a very precise one, at least at the higher levels, where individuals train for months and months to shave off those fractions of a second that mean the difference between victory and losing. Even for those concerned about general fitness, tracking the body’s performance over a given period of time has become something of paramount importance. The measuring of steps is done religiously, and each calorie is melted off with hard work and determination, while the person is busy tracking the progress.

Smart technologies have made their market in the fitness world through the advent of wristbands and other equipment that track the progress of your body while performing whatever exercise you choose. A great many athletes and fitness enthusiasts swear by these technologies, as they have proven quite effective in the field. However, at the same time, there are some that regard smart fitness gadgets to be nothing more than accessories, and not viable purchases at all.

This is where the conflict lies on this front, as wearable gadgets have proven to be necessary to determine the performance of athletes in the higher echelons. However, the question of whether they are viable for the casual fitness enthusiast is still unanswered. It can be safely said though, that smart technology presents an edge, a slight advantage, where performance tracking is concerned.

2. Health and Longevity

Technology can aid in the promotion and development of longevity in individuals; that much has been proven over time. Be it the invention of smart new vaccines that combat an ever-increasing number of diseases and afflictions, to implants that monitor health and send out alerts whenever there is any major deviation from the normal; technology has contributed tremendously towards general health.

In recent times, technology, and more specifically smart technology, has proven to be invaluable in the race to prolong life and maintain good health for longer. This is an endeavour that is being taken at a national level in Australia and various other countries across the world, that are realising that smart technology is the way to go when it comes to advanced health and longevity management, for both the young and more specifically, the elderly.

This proves that it is of vital importance to bring more smart technology into the fields of health and longevity promotion for the elderly.

3. Home Improvement and Security

home-improvement-security-smart-technology

Home automation systems are already a major presence on the market, with offerings from some of the biggest tech giants, such as Amazon, Microsoft and Apple already making waves everywhere. As a whole, they have proven to be exciting additions to homes everywhere, and have already made their place in the homes where they have been installed. However, as beneficial as they are, the general public still seems averse to the idea of having a relatively expensive device that simply aids in a few tasks that can very easily be performed by the individual themselves.

Realistically however, if we look at all the benefits that smart technology provides in this regard, there should be no doubt that it is advantageous, and will continue to be increasingly so, since the technology, despite having been on the market for some years now, is still not very mature in terms of seamless home improvement and security.

Security is one area where smart technology can be actually beneficial. Advanced security cameras with instantaneous high-speed streaming and all-encompassing vision, motion, heat and expression tracking systems, are all viable applications of smart technology in the home security field.

All in all, smart technology has been found to be massively beneficial, when it has been released after considerable research and development. For now, the technology is still in the development phase across the world, although the future does look incredibly bright for advanced technologies.