Cognitive Customer Experience

Customer Experience or CRM solutions have been evolving from time to time. At the very early stages we saw on-premise solutions with very standard GUI’s and then with the whole cloud transformation we saw not only CRM solutions but all on premise software applications such as ERP, HCM moving in to the cloud. All most every software company is now a saas cloud provider.

But if you look at the CRM solutions then and now it pretty much has the same rules, flows, fields & forms for each business process. For an example, like the sales force automation process or the complaint management process, same set of fields, same set of business rules, yes ! but obviously things have got smarter with BI intelligence and better looking interactive user interfaces, but the main core remains the same.

The CRM applications still relies mostly on manual data entry that users fill through forms and fields. CRM solution providers would sell their solutions by claiming its equipped with customer 360-degree views and all the fancy jargon’s but end of the day when you log into the application you will find a screen with a bunch of fields that users have to fill in data, yes this is the harsh reality.

But what we can see is that there is a tremendous amount of data that can be captured to the CRM solutions using cognitive services. The future of CRM solutions would have cognitive components integrated by collecting & pumping in Real time data about customer’s engagements and behaviors.

What are cognitive solutions? cognitive solutions belong to the family of Artificial intelligence where it gives human like capabilities for computers such as voice recognition, image recognition, Natural Language understanding, etc.

The recent google duplex demo not only amazed everyone but it showed the true power of conversational Ai with voice and it took voice recognition to a whole new level. (if you haven’t watched the duplex demo, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08). 

This is one good example on how cognitive services such as voice recognition & conversational Ai will be used for customer experience and interactions. So, let’s take a look at some of the example use cases that I am currently working on in my respective organization and also some from industry leaders as well.

Conversational Ai & Natural Language processing

Natural language processing or NLP has come along way. NLP is all about what computers can understand in textual conversations which humans have on digital channels such as social media, chat applications and so on. We all know that businesses and its customers interact digitally through various platforms. 

This seems all great, but it becomes extremely challenging for businesses to identify, control and respond to these conversations effectively. This is because they don’t have any control of these channels & the amount of conversations are too high. So, this is where conversational Ai & NLP comes into play. We all have heard about Ai chat bots (you probably might be thinking “oh no! not another chat bot blog), it’s one of the most spoke about topics and some say it’s going to be revolutionary. 

The technology is still evolving, but the use cases and the future is promising. Using conversational AI & NLP, businesses can now deploy chat bots to interact with customers. Ideally a chat bot can interact with any number of customers at the same time and provide useful information and suggestions about a businesses product and services. Normally these engagements hit the call center agents, but businesses are now able to direct these engagements through the chat bot and reduce the stress it has on the organization. Using integrations, the chat bot can even perform certain tasks, such as checking an account balance, transferring credit or even placing an order, the use cases are endless. 

As long as you have creative ideas you can do magic with this technology. So coming back to our CRM solutions, We can integrate the chat bots to the CRM, so that the chat bot can engage with the customers without any human intervention and then provide valuable insights and analytics to the business through the CRM applications. Chat bots would be able to identify potential leads or opportunities and then redirect them and notify the sales guys to work on them. Chat bots would also be able to handle complains and inquiries, what we analyzed with some of our chat bot deployments is that more than 30% of calls which hit the call center agents are repetitive. These repetitive task can be automated via a chat bot (example : checking an account balance). This would not only help the organization to reduce its workforce for handling calls, email etc, but also will provide a super customer experience 24*7, Yes ! the bots don’t sleep ! they work 24*7. 

Conversational Ai and Voice Recognition

Amazon Alexa, google home, if you still think these are just child’s play devices you will be surprised to see the future ahead. These devices have opened up an entire new eco system for businesses to interact with their customers. Both amazon and google have built personal assistants which are pretty smart. They have launched skill development engines so that anyone or any business can create their own set of skills other than the built-in ones.

Building skills with amazon alexa : https://developer.amazon.com/docs/ask-overviews/build-skills-with-the-alexa-skills-kit.html

Building skills with google home : https://developers.google.com/actions/

Many companies have already created their custom skills on these platforms. For an example, you now are able to order a cab by just talking to alexa using the uber skills.

Check the video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o26xCTP6n2Q

Businesses can leverage these technologies to automate customer engagements through voice interactions. This is an ideal use case for modern self-service. Just take the below example where even financial institutes such as banks are using this technology to empower their customer experience and take it to the next level. In this use case the customer’s of the bank would be able to check their transaction history, balances and perform other tasks as well through amazon alexa.

Check it out : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0uRok35EF8

The voice recognition engines could also be integrated to the crm applications. Using speech to text & text to speech, the engine could pull & push information from the CRM when needed. By this the voice recognition engine would be able to connect to the existing knowledge base of the CRM application & engage and interact with the customers. Personally, I think in the next 10 years or even may be lesser, we would be able to completely replace the first level of interaction of customers with conversational Ai & voice recognition applications such as the above. 

Image recognition

Image recognition has also come along way. We are now in an era where we could simply unlock our phones with face recognition. This would have been science fiction about 10 years back. So how can image recognition be used for customer experience? Many retails stores are using image recognition to track the demographics of the customers who enter the store. And also, they track on what products that customers spend time looking at (hot spots) and they will then use these data & analytics to track down product popularity and trends.

Below is a real world use case:

 https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/23/facial-recognition-is-tracking-customers-as-they-shop-in-stores-tech-company-says.html

Many banks around the world are using facial recognition to identify VIP customers when they enter a branch. The facial recognition engine would identify the customer and then would send notifications to the agent via the CRM about the customers profile and interactions. Facial recognition is also used to identify how the customer service representatives are handling the customers. Using face emotion matching algorithms, the engines would be able to track the customers emotions when engaging with an agent and this would give valuable insights to the organization to identify how well each branch handles their customers.

Check this video :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMTdNxpXPbs

Face recognition is also used for KYC process. Many banks have implemented e-wallets or mobile applications so that their customers could do all transactions & tasks via the mobile app without visiting or contacting the bank. The KYC process is an important task for both profiling the customer as well as providing a security assessment. Banks have now been able to use face recognition technology to facilitate this requirement and speed up the on boarding process and authentication.

Check this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQe8ylFPkXI

So as we can see cognitive technology is picking up and is been continuously used to improve the customer experience as well as open up new insights to businesses. The core CRM functionality and business process will remain the same, this is needed and a must for any business. What is evolving is the interactions on top of the CRM layer and the insights that are been pumped with technologies such as cognitive & even machine learning. 

Calvin Hindle