Artificial Intelligence Archives - Page 2 of 2

May 18, 2017May 18, 2017

Are CX pros guilty of brain hacking?

If you have a smartphone, laptop, tablet, or all of the above, it’s no longer a question if you’re addicted to being online, it’s a question if you recognize the problem and are in control of it. And if you don’t have any of these devices, I’d love to meet you and even shake your hand (since you’ll actually have one free) – before you become extinct that is, since your breed is already on the brink.

Why are we so addicted to technology? Perhaps there isn’t one simple answer, but an emerging hypothesis mainstreamed recently when CBS ran a segment on 60 minutes titled “Brain Hacking.” If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a watch. Not surprisingly, yet ironically, to get to the replay, CBS forces you to watch ads.

In the segment, Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, refers to our digital devices as slot machines, and in a recent blog claims, “…technology hijacks people’s minds.” Ramsey Brown, co-founder of Dopamine Labs, calls the developers responsible for making the apps we use everyday “brain hackers” – essentially meaning they employ techniques designed to get us hooked and to alter our behavior. Arguably, these ubiquitous methods have already succeeded in causing habitual behavior. And if you’re not convinced, unglue your eyes for a moment from your device du jour, peer up, and notice everyone else’s heads buried in digital appliances, and how antsy they’ll get when unplugged for only a few minutes.

Essentially in concept, it’s similar to a virus invading the body (hence the hacking metaphor), with its mission to reprogram us to crave constant online activity. Behind each antigen are hackers, engaged in a form of biological warfare, engineering their payloads to infect our brains to crave more activity – on their sites and apps. Though it’s debatable how much of the altered conduct can be directly attributed to just a few hackers, the pervasiveness of the behavior is indisputable.

Race to the bottom of the brain stem

Tristan refers to this battle as a “race to the bottom of the brain stem,” implying these cerebral hackers are sparring for our attention, and will do anything to get more of it by appealing to a range of our human needs, even the most primitive ones.

So, are all CX pros guilty of this practice, or just a select few in Silicon Valley? In terms of marketing techniques, is this something new or merely old methods with new names?

Perhaps guilty isn’t the fairest word (with its implication of wrongdoing), but I’ll posit the first answer is yes, most professionals tasked with generating demand are trying to do this – with the huge caveat that some think (operative word “think”) they are close to solving an ageless puzzle of how each human mind operates and how to manipulate it. Further, it’s not the impact of a few, but instead the collective efforts of many demand generators, as well as our growing dependence on technology, that’s contributing to our hyperactive online behavior.

Nevertheless, today only a few dominant firms enjoy the majority of the economic rewards, since users spend the majority of their online time in select applications such as Facebook and Google. Call this the tech titan factor, a few gargantuan companies controlling the vast majority of user interactions that attract eyeballs to digital advertisements.

As for the novelty of this approach, the core practice is actually as old as direct marketing itself. Like doctors, trained direct marketers learn early on that diagnosis, problem understanding, and treatments followed by continuous application of test & learn methodology, are time-honored principles proven to attract attention and optimize engagement. What’s changed are the tools CX pros have to administer continuous and tailored therapies (see my article on the use of Prescriptive AI in CX), and as consumers how we’ve unknowingly given up more data about ourselves and increased the quantity of our online intake. Further, this medication being administered to us comes with no warning labels or explicit documentation as to the harmful side effects.

In terms of affecting consumer consciousness and behavior, marketers have again followed long-standing hard and fast principles. Take Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

The reward consumers get from checking their devices depends on the individual’s specific needs. For instance, one person may be in the pursuit of self-actualization, and as such may be constantly using a gadget for educational discovery. Another may be in search of esteem, and becomes hooked on social media in a constant quest for recognition. No matter the reason for being online, advertisers track, analyze, and subsequently prescribe remedies squarely aimed at selling us goods and services they’ve ascertained we need.

Moreover, take the streaks tactic that Snapchat uses. This is simply age-old marketing gamification at work. It’s true today’s games are digital, more dynamic, mobile, and played by all ages, but S&H had consumers playing very similar marketing games in the 1930’s, with the goal of creating green stamp junkies.

Whether a modern game, or a game from the 1930’s, the basics of this approach are similar. Entice someone to play but don’t let them win out (making the game incremental – in this case the increment is days), luring them back in, and make the game length seemingly infinite (e.g., collect stamps; cash them in; collect more).

The persuasive fight for our attention

Have newly minted CX pros devised new sinister methods of mind control? Has a new economy suddenly emerged centered on getting attention at all costs, hooking people into using products? I don’t think so.

As far back as the 1950’s, fears about mind control perpetrated by marketers were already spreading, and various theories, many of them hoaxes, began to crop up. And the commercialization of everything, from historical sites to holidays, can be traced back to right after the American Civil War.

In the late 1950’s, rumors abounded such as stories of theaters lacing film with stealthily implanted single frames of subliminal messages such as “Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coke” supposedly engineered to stimulate instantaneous demand for these products. In 1957, Vance Packard wrote a groundbreaking novel titled, “The Hidden Persuaders,” making an original argument that organizations are born to manipulate, and had moved from overt tactics to clandestine ones, with hired agencies as the evil genius behind it all. Quite possibly the only difference today is that we carry around in our pockets millions of commercials, and check in constantly, making us continuous targets for impressions. Unscrupulous marketers, as well as those with shreds of decency, have existed side by side since the dawn of time. They simply have more access (by virtue of over 150 years of marketing, commercial, and technological evolution) to more minutes of our waking attention, and will always vie for a slice of that bandwidth with newfangled material engineered to break through the clutter.

When you reflect on it, marketers seek attention and puff their wares – it’s what they do. How and where they’ve sought it and how much they’ve puffed has always defined the extent to which they further commercialize our environment and how far they push ethical and legal boundaries.

This fight to own a share of our precious attention itself contributes to a further lack of focus and increased distraction. I wrote a related piece on this (Contextual Incremental Marketing), from the point of view of the marketer, at the time not fully grasping that my tips about the phenomena were in fact recursive, that is, further reinforcing and encouraging the behaviors that I suggested were simply a facet of the modern world.

In a sense, it’s a vicious circle, but not a new one: CX pros stalking consumers, contending for their attention via an ever-exploding channel continuum, employing any means to engage their reptilian brain and interrupt them, persuade them, adding to attention deficit disorder. For consumers, the antidote is the same as it ever was – common sense, education (with reliable and readily available sources of accurate information), balance and moderation, free will, and self-control.

The surveillance economy

Like crime scene investigators (for more on this, read my blog: The CSI Guy – Customer Success Investigator), CX pros seek clues to solve the mysteries of making best guesses about the likely behavior, needs, and actions of customers.

Those involved in pure acquisition have little to go by, and as such, stretch for data and surveillance methods, test data privacy, ethical, and permission boundaries, and often still miss the relevance mark. In many respects, they are like matchmakers, casting a wide net, and hoping to bring in a few choice prospects. Those tasked with building on relationships, often called relationship or loyalty marketers, have it easier, with a treasure trove of owned media behavior data at their fingertips collected by modern digital tracking sensors. In either case, it should come as no surprise that gathering evidence is a top priority.

In 1992, Eric Lawson wrote a book called “The Naked Consumer.” It was an excellent account of the growing problem at the time of personal data sold as a commodity on the open market, and its lessons and conclusions are as germane as ever.

So what should we do?

Like any history, there always seems to be the appearance of it repeating itself, but invariably with evolving twists. In this case, some of the twists are:

We can take devices with games and reinforcements anywhere, and often do. Mobility means more chances to be online. In contrast, when TVs first appeared, they were stationary. And radios were too bulky to carry, until transistors transformed them into the iPod of the 50’s.

Because this digital drug is available constantly, and there are no official regulators, many of us are unconsciously overindulging. Like any addiction, step one is problem recognition, and for most of us, we haven’t admitted there’s a problem, let alone embarked on a recovery journey.

For digital natives (those who have grown up with smartphones and social media), there are new pressures and social dynamics many of us that are older can’t fully appreciate. This has resulted in massive numbers of teens afflicted with anxiety and depression (see this Time Magazine article for an in-depth look). That’s sad. There’s no easy answers, as these issues are rooted not only in technological realities, but interwoven with deep seeded tribal sociological phenomena.

Impatience thresholds are down to seconds, partly due to the availability of technology itself and our dependence on it, and on industrial productivity pressures.

What should CX pros do?

There’s no disputing that businesses need customers and have to make money to survive. How they play the game, the rules they follow, and the cultural approach they use defines both their character and destiny. When plotting how to engage customers with artificial intelligence and automation technology, consider the following:

Those who play the long game win the long game. If the ultimate goal is improving customer experience, then factor customer quality of life into the long-term value equation. Depending on the definition and time horizon for winning, chances are good consumers will recognize (and reward) you for considering their best interests.

Regulate, or be regulated. Incidentally, industry in general doesn’t have a great track record for self-regulation, so prepare eventually for some regulations in this area to emerge.

What should consumers do?

Throughout recorded history, hucksters have been selling unsuspecting consumers products they really didn’t need. That doesn’t mean every modern day CX pro inherits the label of huckster.

Quite the contrary, those who exchange value with consumers, and provide them with solid recommendations of products well suited to their requirements are effectively service providers. Those taking the easy path and simply pushing and deceiving others toward a clever sale, will rightfully earn the dubious timeworn label.

Consumers need to:

Shop around. Although it can be a hassle, weigh the pros & cons of moving to another provider, versus amassing more points or transactions with a single provider. Be sure, nonetheless, to factor in all switching costs, including your time.

When you shop, think outside the box to get a list of alternatives. The path of least resistance these days is to search on Google, but that list of both the paid results as well as the first page of organic ones is a limited (and often highly biased) set.

Take occasional breaks from technology – Simply put, you don’t need to be online every minute. Don’t expect to completely kick the habit, same as you can’t stop eating food altogether. Research already shows, however, you should use technology in moderation or your long-term health may be at stake. A recent survey of 3500 adults shows stress levels likely rise when alerts go off, such as new emails or text messages. Like getting adequate sleep is necessary for good health, you’ll probably be more productive (and live a longer, heathier life) if you’re offline periodically.

March 6, 2017July 15, 2018

Customer Engagement – From BI Guesswork to Prescriptive AI

Customer Engagement approaches, and the technology used to enable them, have evolved immensely over the last 25 years. Two distinct eras define this period, as well as a major technological shift to real-time systems with AI feedback loops.

The BI Guesswork Era

During the advent of the Business Intelligence (BI), Marketing Technology and Campaign Management era (circa 1990), marketers had limited predictive powers. In many cases, when it came to what individuals really needed, they resorted to guesswork. They channeled their energy to perfect efficiencies in targeting and automation. Their main emphasis was finding an approximate audience for products so they designed promotions for large segments of the population. They fixated on finding segments that fit into certain “likelihood to respond” buckets, and then repeatedly tested timing, messages, and creative content by peppering those segments with treatments. In other words, they identified massive groups, matched offers to these groups, and then used technology to systematize their marketing.

Although some of those marketers drew on basic models (such as RFM – Recency, Frequency, Monetary), which provided rough guidance on how deep to mail into a file, most didn’t even do this. Typical response rates were 0.5% at best. During this period, the average adult was receiving about 50 pounds of junk mail a year – coined junk mail because the promotions were irrelevant 99.5% of the time. Thus, the majority viewed this activity as frivolous, mocking it with nicknames and jokes. Regardless, marketers were unrelenting as they continually carpet-bombed until consumers either responded or learned how to opt-out.

Their tools of choice were crude in nature. They were slow, not fine-grained, and certainly not customer-centric. Usually, the campaign flowcharts they devised utilized basic analytics where deterministic queries ran against databases returning huge customer lists called segments. If there was any further segment refinement, they relied on business intelligence technologies like OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) and dashboards to support their intuition. Even as some of the more sophisticated marketers attempted predictions, providing those models with feedback was nearly impossible due to the batch processing nature of the flows and platforms they employed. As shown in Figure 1, although some crept up the analytics value chain toward being predictive and answering the question “What will happen?” most fell short.

Figure 1:

Source: http://www.bi-bestpractices.com/view-articles/5642

Using a backward approach, engineers pre-developed the product, and marketers wrangled the packaging, promotions, and messaging to the audience – again using more guesswork than analytics. It was difficult to react contextually, at scale, to actual individual needs, so instead they focused on groups of customers.

And so they executed bulk outbound communications at scale. With promotional ammunition in hand, readily available data afforded them reasonable targeting coordinates, and computers and devices served as the delivery mechanisms. The marketplace and emerging technology supported a numbers game and rewarded short-term economic gains. Longer-term loyalty and longitudinal effects took a back seat.

By the turn of the century, direct marketers were plodding ahead using ever-richer consumer profiles that enabled them to focus promotions on increasingly smaller segments. And even though in 1995, Peppers & Rogers had coined the term “1:1 marketing,” enterprise marketers were no where near direct conversations with individual consumers. Still constrained by scale, they were stuck communicating to segments, albeit smaller and smaller ones. What they didn’t realize was they were about to hit a wall (Figure 2)

Figure 2:

By 2005, marketers had the tools to perform hyper-targeting. They aggressively tested different incentives, creative elements, and fine tuned things based on response metrics. Scoring models were refined, though the expense was large, and the iterations long. The results didn’t so much alter someone’s behavior, but more provided alternatives to consider, often ones that still had borderline relevance to a current need.

Often the goal, instead of steadfast loyalty, was simply to increase immediate purchases with minimal marketing waste. In theory, if targets responded and steadily purchased, no matter the purchase, more purchases should follow. Supposedly then, over the long haul, the business accomplished its goal of capturing more share of wallet.

Around 2010, some leading edge marketers who realized the value of a real-time approach, began hitting that wall. The foundation of the system they had spent 15 years building was the wrong foundation. It was a platform built for segmentation, and it supported the wrong approach. They needed a “Real-time 1:1” platform, customer-centric prescriptions, and a more dynamic feedback loop.

Enter the Prescriptive AI Era

Good marketers have always been similar to psychologists in that they study consumer behavior. With today’s data and technology, it’s possible to take engagements one-step further – diagnosing, and treating those customers to alter their behavior methodically over time. Stealing a page from the broadcast advertisers’ playbook – who use “subliminal seduction” – many marketers are marching toward implementing systems that use incremental and proactive drip therapy to persuade inner minds toward brand myopia.

The only piece missing from the puzzle is a real-time platform. Traces of this began appearing in 2010, as big data systems, parallel computing, solid-state storage, and other technology advances drove computing costs radically down, and speeds up.

Today the pieces are in place, and more are climbing aboard, as real-time platforms have fully emerged and are cheaper and more reliable. It’s now feasible to use customer-centric prescriptive tactics at scale and get huge lift over baseline approaches. Models can predict behavior to an amazing degree of accuracy. The artificial intelligence (AI) models both diagnose and – using Decision Management – proactively prescribe next-best-action engagement treatments.

Figure 3:

Everyone knows engagement professionals today have more channels. They’re no longer constrained to broadcast media delivery systems (that lack dynamic feedback loops), and can now use digital response media and even physical surveillance. And with this plethora of channels, they can administer and perfect personalized, contiguous, and hypersonic stimuli-response strategies. Essentially, they can employ an always-on brain, powered by rich consumer data, advanced machine learning algorithms, and a 24 x 7 continuous learning loop.

What’s more, these machine learning technologies and embedded predictive algorithms can work in a very deliberate and intelligent way, dynamically creating conditional content and promotions, each time consumers reengage on a digital channel. Incremental repeated responses (or lack thereof) allow these models to learn, tune themselves, and in essence direct and alter the future – programming individual behavior. Customers are enticed to reveal ever-increasing amounts of personal information, in exchange for points or some privilege, trusting the exchange is amenable, and the information use one-dimensional.

All of this behavioral activity – social, purchase, demographic, and so forth – is recorded, with the aim of feeding it back into those same algorithms that iterate to find new patterns, refine predictions, and subsequently inform Decision Strategies that recommend the next series of treatments. In some cases, these systems can even run autonomously, using advanced data science techniques such as genetic algorithms, game theory, and reinforcement learning. System designers seed the rules of the game, configure the objective function and constraints, and then push “Go.” The designers and their business counterparts peer in on occasion to monitor whether goals, such as higher loyalty and profit, are trending in the right direction.

Figure 4:

Although this suggests overt manipulation, it’s not necessarily malevolent. Provided customers have choice (and are well informed and discriminate), and businesses operate ethically (on a level playing field), the economic scales can still balance, and brands that provide products and experiences with the best value can still prevail, and consumers get a fair exchange of value. You may have noticed, however, a few important “ifs” in this last statement.

Whether we like it or not, we now live in the Prescriptive Era, where the mission of brands is to get to know us, maybe even better than we actually know ourselves. That might sound crazy, but consider this statement from a recent article, “The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine” [i] where an analytics firm compiled data on Facebook likes and built millions of consumer behavior profiles, subsequently fed into an AI political campaigning machine:

“With 300 likes, Kosinski’s machine could predict a subject’s behavior better than their partner. With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves.”

Whether you buy this or not, the fact remains that consumer profiles are becoming richer and consumer behavior predictions more accurate. Data are exploding, as are the algorithms voraciously feeding on them.

Brands compiling this data and wielding their algorithms do it because they say they want to know us better. Presumably, this enables them to continuously add value, deliver insights, help automate our lives, and make attractive recommendations.

Ostensibly then, for consumers, it comes down to a few simple questions:

How much is our data worth to us?
What’s the value of the insights that brands provide when they use our data?
Are we getting an equitable exchange?
Can we trust brands to honor their commitments regarding the use of our data?
Do we understand the fine print in those agreements?

Consider the mission statement for Datacoup, a data company based in New York, who have gone one step further and are trying to make a marketplace where consumer’s have a more direct exchange of value for their data:

“Our mission is to help people unlock the value of their personal data. Almost every link in the economic chain has their hand in our collective data pocket. Data brokers in the US alone account for a $15bn industry, yet they have zero relationship with the consumers whose data they harvest and sell. They offer no discernible benefit back to the producers of this great data asset – you.”[ii]

So are you getting value for the data you’re giving up? Are the “Prescriptions” you get in return an equitable exchange? Are you aware of what happens to your data after you release it?

A Day in the Life of Your Data

We all joke about the eye-glazing 56 page “Terms and Conditions” from Apple that we always accept and never read. We want the free software, and don’t worry about the consequences. However, if you use that approach for everything you do online, that mindset is dangerous.

Consider this for a moment. Most firms have language that allows them to send your data to affiliates, which is a fancy word for other companies. Once floating in the ecosystem, it’s grinded, distilled, and appended to other copies, until records of your preferences, habits, and behavioral are expressed in 5,000 or more different ways. If it’s wrong, it doesn’t matter, because you don’t own it, don’t have access to it, and can’t change it. In many ways, it’s another version of you, right or wrong.

Is Prescriptive AI Working?

So back to the question of whether it’s helping. It’s fair to say there are cases where it adds value. Here are some examples:

You decide you aren’t satisfied with your telecommunication services. You’ve made it obvious (with various signals) you’re considering other alternatives. Your current provider prescribes an attractive bundle that satisfies your needs. You get a better bundle of services, and your provider retains you. The bundle is custom tailored for you, using AI.
You have investments with a firm. You provide additional data on your financial goals, risk tolerance, and other investments, and they provide advice (prescriptions) on how to achieve your goals over time, within the parameters you set. They provide various alternatives and education that prove useful to your financial planning. Presumably, some of those alternatives include additional investments with them, and turn out to be good choices.
Your health plan suggests meaningful diet, exercise, and other tips that promote a healthy lifestyle. They are custom tailored to you, based on your family history, age, and other personal data you provide. They reward you with lower premiums or credits.

These are just a few examples, and many more exist across industries such as travel and leisure, automotive, insurance, and retail. And while good exchanges do exist, there are plenty of examples where the prescription doesn’t justify the information surrendered because the value exchange is unbalanced, or the prescriptions are ineffective.

Final Thoughts

In her book, “Weapons of Math Destruction[iii],” Cathy O’Neil writes:

“Many of these models, like some of the WMDs we’ve discussed, will arrive with the best intentions. But they must also deliver transparency, disclosing the input data they’re using as well as the results of their targeting. And they must be open to audits. These are powerful engines, after all. We must keep our eyes on them.”

She highlights important considerations we must heed. I’m not convinced we’re spiraling toward a dystopian society regarding the use of prescriptive AI for customer engagement, but I do believe a balance is necessary between efficacy of these systems and fairness. As responsible marketers, we should be mindful of the ramifications of the models we use for prescriptive purposes, and as consumers, it’s our job to demand transparency, choice, and a level playing field.

[i] Anderson And Horvath, https://scout.ai/story/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-propaganda-machine, January 2017

[ii] Datacoup, https://datacoup.com/docs#faq, February 2017

[iii] Cathy O’Neil, 1^st edition, Weapons of Math Destruction (New York: Crown), 2016.

February 17, 2017

3 Tips to Drive Business Value with CX – Fortified with REAL AI

With a first name of “Artificial,” AI has certainly entertained us with its virtual possibilities. Stories of wholesale disruption by robots and fully automated lives make for good movie material, but as of yet, AI hasn’t dominated the marketplace, consumer experiences, or business applications in a monumental way. AI has the potential to change our daily lives, yet for most, its impact so far has been nominal.

As a businessperson concerned with driving better customer engagement, you’re no doubt interested in this topic, yet probably carry some healthy skepticism about the potential for return from your AI investments, and the risk of them failing.

Congratulations! Your suspicion is not only natural, it’s warranted. Here are three tips for how to maximize value from your AI investments, and minimize any risk of disillusionment.

1. Provide predictions about Customer Intent

No doubt, you have scores of business intelligence systems that compile and codify data. They provide customer profiles, program dashboards, and other scorecard reporting of historical results. Although informative, these systems aren’t predicting anything. As such, they are rear view mirrors, providing a view of the past, but not anticipating and generating ideas regarding courses of action that may lead to more optimal outcomes.

Any investment in AI aimed at improving customer engagement must include capabilities to predict customer motivation. Why are they calling? Are they already upset? Are they highly likely to be shopping for another provider? What product or service best suits their true needs? How valuable is this customer over their projected lifetime?

Answers to these questions are always guesses, yet pragmatic AI systems today use proven statistical methods to minimize errors in predictions, calibrate themselves with feedback loops, and provide confidence intervals so users understand their range of applicability.

For example, it’s feasible today to have a portal providing your marketing employees with accurate predictions such as:

Customer value
Churn likelihood
Loyalty to brand

For service agents, predictions like:

Customer sentiment
Reason for calling
Nature of problem

For sales personnel:

Price sensitivity
Available budget
Perception of value

Effective AI has to improve your ability to understand what impels your customers to behave the way they do, or the way they may act in the near future. Work backward from these insights, and demand that your AI systems and vendors can prove they have experience extracting insights from available data, and in predicting and surfacing these items.

2. Make dynamic suggestions to better serve the Customer

Consumers do business with brands that provide repeatable value. That value comes from not just positive product use, but also from an enjoyable and smooth buying process, a friendly and efficient on-boarding experience, and stellar service.

As consumers experience a brand during those journeys, they rack up the score, keeping tally of the relevance and effectiveness of the systems and people they encounter along the way.

Any AI system worth its salt should provide ranked suggestions either directly to customers, or to customer facing employees such as:

Next Best Offer: The most relevant product needed, and an individualized incentive on it that will be both compelling, yet still economically affordable to the business.

Next Best Service Action: The best thing an agent can do next to maximize the chance of reaching an effective and efficient solution to the service problem at hand.

Next Best Sales Activity: The best action for a salesperson given available leads, accounts, contacts, and opportunities.

For the marketers responsible for providing next best offers, AI systems should help them recognize buying patterns, automatically perform tests, filter out offers that don’t apply, and statistically rank the best content & promotions for the right individuals. AI should even suggest the best timing for those recommendations.

For service workers, AI should deflect routine service requests to automated or self-service channels, guide agents on complex service cases, surface potential solutions to issues, and help gauge the sentiment of the customer during the process.

For salespeople, AI should predict the best contacts to engage with in an account, the activities most likely to move an opportunity to the next sales stage, and which accounts to spend energy on to maximize close rates and quota attainment.

3. Install a system that learns in Real-Time

Your world changes every day. As a professional, you wake up every day to news of competitive threats, new opportunities, and market conditions that vary the effectiveness of the strategies you employed yesterday.

If you were slow to react, or simply ignored these factors, you’d fully expect your overall business performance to degrade, so you listen carefully to these environmental conditions, and you adjust accordingly.

Think about your AI systems the same way. They must include adaptive mechanisms, where recommendations made are monitored, in real-time, and dispositions are fed back into the machine, so it can learn from its success and mistakes. Marketing, service, and sales systems receive feedback constantly in the form of customers either ignoring your treatments, or responding to them, so ensure your AI system uses them. Your AI system should rapidly improve its performance, as it’s fed more data, and as it tunes itself. If it’s not, after a short trial period, start asking some hard questions to your provider.

Make sure your results (even if delayed), are monitored, measured, and understood. An accurate measurement of the real business value from AI comes when you understand the baseline, and can measure the lift you get when you employ the insights and recommendations delivered by AI.

Track response rates, conversion rates, incremental revenue, return on investment, and compare to what your vendor promised, what you expected, and what you need to achieve.

AI is a broad topic, yet to improve customer engagement and your outcomes, boil it down to these 3 things; understand customer intent, make relevant suggestions, and learn in real-time so your performance improves over time. If you do these, you will realize REAL value from AI.

January 27, 2017July 15, 2018

AI in CX: Real or Superficial Intelligence?

By all accounts, 2017 has ushered in the dawn of the newest Artificial Intelligence (AI) era. Most technology hype cycles follow typical paths, quickly shooting up, often followed predictably thereafter by a meteoric reentry to reality. Typically, the entire flight takes place over a decade or so, as the fuel of inflated hype burns out, and the gravity of commercial application pulls down on its excitement to test its true value.

AI, however, seems different. It has appeared, drew much fanfare, and then disappeared several times already – more akin to a comet, flaring a tail of excitement with each new orbit. As it reemerges, nearing the heat of expectation once again, it lights up with a spectacular plume, flung into space for another long dark hiatus.

AI history suggests five such orbits already – so is it destined for cold dark space soon?

Superficial AI

Regardless of the metaphor du jour, what we must inspect is the true value returned today, not the imagined expectations of tomorrow. The best test of commercial viability is not an intelligence test; it’s whether consumers are getting more value, and if the business offering the products & services are using AI technology as leverage, providing those things with higher margins.

For example, my mobile device is now my phone, my Garmin, my camera, my alarm clock, my digital assistant, my video recorder, my dictation device, my virtual reality device, and so forth. 20 years ago, it might have cost me $5,000 for these services. Today, I get it all for $500 – $700.

We’re all under pressure to do more in the same amount of time. To that end, these devices have become indispensable – they are essential to modern day survival – adapt to them, use them efficiently, or you’re passed by.

Therefore, by some measures and definitions, AI has delivered this time around. Personally, I don’t care when a big company announces their sixth AI acquisition, or what their advertisements or creative animations say. In my view, the proof is if customers are buying, are satisfied with those purchases, and are reporting their lives are easier, more productive, and more enjoyable.

Businesspeople must apply the same tests. Can they deliver better customer experience with AI? Are their product & services measurably smarter and more efficient?

If they aren’t passing those tests, then it’s just superficial AI.

Real AI Value in CX

As we all admire the latest bright tail of inflated expectation, let’s study what AI has really contributed to delivering better customer experience (CX) this time around.

For starters, look again at that magical device, the smartphone. It streams location data, activity levels, browsing preferences, timing behavior, and the like. Businesses consume this contextual data, and use decision hubs infused with AI algorithms that in less than a second calculate a next best action or insight. That’s real! Big banks, telecommunication / technology firms, and retailers are doing this today to improve acquisition, on-boarding, cross selling, and retention rates.

For consumers, the insights automatically delivered include recommended products, drive time estimates, calendar reminders, and service alarms. Alerts & notifications remind when bills are due, when fraud occurs, or when more exercise is required to meet goals. Cars drive & park themselves, thermostats learn, and media services understand consumer preferences. Customers can interact with machines by simply speaking to them.

For the marketers responsible for engagement strategies, AI now recognizes buying patterns, automatically performs A/B and multi-variate tests, which ranks the best content & promotions for the right individuals, and even suggests the best timing for those recommendations. For salespeople, AI predicts the best contacts, opportunities, and accounts to spend energy on to maximize close rates. For service workers, AI deflects simple service requests, and guides agents on complex service processes to improve time to resolution, ultimately improving customer satisfaction.

Simply put, there can be little argument that AI has delivered value during this orbit, much of it in the form of automation as opposed to higher-level intelligence. Fewer marketers deliver more relevant and better-timed tactics. AI assisted sales means higher quality pipeline with sharper close rates. Contact center managers relish shorter handle times and more efficient call resolution with less staff, and consumers enjoy shorter wait times and voice / bot-assisted service. For those using AI, NPS and customer satisfaction scores are on the rise.

All of these outcomes are commercially feasible. Every business (not just the avant-garde) must rapidly incorporate these proven technological capabilities. Hesitate, and the likely result will be eventual irrelevance.

What’s next – In my lifetime?

With all this said it’s back to our question. Can AI keep delivering, or is it bound to let us down soon?

As humans, we love to dream. That’s important. In fact, regardless of how fast machines move forward, it’s still something that separates us from them. We envision a fanciful future, and plot our course toward it. Along the way, we stumble, get humbled, get up, and plot again. This is our nature. Each step along this evolutionary path, we create and refine machines that help us achieve our dreams.

Our vision seems unchanged. We long to make life easier and more enjoyable for more of us. To do this, we must continue to refine our existing tools, and invent new ones that assist us, and make up for our physical and human limitations. No different from our first instruments, modern day smart tools take over tasks we were never very good at, or simply couldn’t do. They help feed us, optimize our resource consumption, and make our very survival possible. We are already dependent on them, and there is no turning back.

This is also true for customer experience tools. Our expectations are high and climbing. We expect to interact with brands that listen, understand our preferences, react accordingly, and when something goes wrong, can turn on a dime and make things right instantly.

When I enter a website, I expect the search to be intelligent, the user experience to be delightful, and the checkout process to be flawless. If I chose to do all this while mobile, I expect the same experience on my smartphone. If I need help, my first reaction is, “why did things go wrong in the first place…how could this have been prevented,” and then I test if resolution comes fast with low effort – and does the business learn from the mishap.

This is the new normal. Unfortunately, many brands today are not delivering on this type of customer experience. The bar is high, but the elevation of game is not so much a demand from technology as from organizational re-tooling and reorganization to accommodate for technologies already commercially available.

Technological advancements will continue to accelerate. Smarts will show up in more devices. We will demand our machines become more human, especially in delivering customer service and better experiences. As humans, we love a personal touch, a social exchange, a sense of community and belonging. So far, machines have not been able to deliver on any of these aspects. That’s changing.

Presently, there is very interesting research going on to bring more human-like aspects to machine interactions. Google’s DeepMind research lab has made impressive gains in speech synthesis (text-to-speech) in a project known as “WaveNet” where robotic voices are becoming a lot less robotic. Similar advances in Chabot research is leading to smarter bots able to remember details, learn right from wrong answers, and hold basic conversations. You can try one of the better ones at http://www.mitsuku.com/

These developments are exciting. The possibilities are enormous. Yet until these become commercially viable and noticeably better with true customer engagements, you should train your eyes on what is real in AI today. For now, focus your investments and efforts on delivering real CRM value from AI tech today in the form of things like simple service request deflections, intelligent routing to the right agent, relevant product recommendations & next best offers (based on individual behavior profiles), and guiding salespeople with next best activities.

Meanwhile, keep close tabs on these other AI CX innovations as they progress, take some calculated risks on a few promising areas, and prepare for the next revolution of AI. The AI comet will be back shortly.