by Arunlal Soman –
Nothing is more important to the welfare of any company than the quality of the relationship it maintains with its customers. Happy customers are long-term customers — perhaps even lifetime customers. Happy customers are evangelists for your brand. Happy customers can spell the difference between a successful brand and a soon-forgotten failure. As Walter Landor famously stated, “Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.” But making customers happy, and keeping them happy, is quite the challenge. It’s a complex challenge. It requires that you’re able to always present your enterprise’s best face to your customers. And it requires the efficient gathering, mining, and analyzing of massive amounts of data that can guide you in your efforts to more effectively please your customers. And, to be blunt, your human employees are no longer the best option available for performing many of the tasks that help to keep your customers happy.
The Age of the AI Bot is NOW
Automated bots powered by artificial intelligence have long been projected as the future of company-customer interactions. But that’s no longer true; the future has arrived. 2018, in fact, was declared the year of the bots2. Well-designed AI bots are currently capable of delivering an impressive range of business benefits, including:
- Slashed Costs-of-Operation: AI bots can be deployed to perform many of the tasks that human employees currently perform. Unlike its human counterpart, a bot will tirelessly work 24×7, year in and year out. The bot never gets tired and cranky. Never has sick days. Never goes on vacation. Never wastes countless hours engaging in watercooler banter. The automation that modern AI bots are able to provide is stable, efficient, and requires minimum maintenance support. And yet an AI bot platform can effectively and realistically mimic its human counterpart in interfacing with customers. Whether deployed short-term or long-term, AI bots can offer both performance and economic advantages over human employees performing the same tasks.
- Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: How many times have you, as a customer, engaged with a brand’s representative that proved to be incompetent, surly, or just completely uninterested in helping you? Unfortunately, just about everyone has had that unpleasant experience. Won’t happen when you’re engaging with AI bots, though. Modern AI bots are capable of engaging and serving customers at a high level of sophistication, providing each customer with a satisfying and pleasant experience that meets and even exceeds customer expectations. And, with lightning speed, bots can research the purchase history, preferences, and interests of a customer within the framework of each customer interaction. That ability to call-up and analyze the customer’s relevant data, real-time, helps ensure customer satisfaction. And satisfied customers remain customers, and help to ensure lots of future business.
- Boosted Brand Value: Every satisfied, well-served customer boosts your brand’s value. Conversely, every dissatisfied customer erodes your brand’s value. AI bots are far more capable than human employees of ensuring that every interaction consistently leads to a customer experience that enhances your brand’s value.
- Improved Marketing Strategy: AI bots’ ability to gather and process data can form the basis of a superb business intelligence platform. It’s a platform that can help enterprises to identify those products that are likely to perform well going forward, and those that are likely to flop. It can help to identify customer interests and match those interests to current product offerings. In short, AI bots can significantly boost any company’s ability to competitively market its products and services.
Introducing the Maybe* Custom AI Bot
Maybe Solutions Ltd.2 uses AI in benchmarking the social media performance of client companies. For each client, the Maybe* platform helps turn what customers are saying into quantifiably improved results. The Maybe* team wanted an AI bot that automates and improves the customer interface, and that streamlines the process of analyzing customer sentiment more effectively. Several of the must-have capabilities of the new Maybe* AI bot included:
- A bot with the adaptability to work anywhere, including eCommerce websites and Facebook messenger
- A bot capable of creating and managing flows of human-like conversations with users
- A bot able to track all statistical data relevant to each conversational flow: the title of the flow; when it was sent; the number of people it was sent to, the number that opened it, the number that clicked the link
- A bot that could provide a detailed profile of all users that interact with the bot
RCG Global Services developed the Maybe* AI bot. It’s a powerful bot based on predictive analysis, and powered by Amazon Lex and Comprehend. The bot utilizes IBM Watson API services to find sentiments of user comments. The Maybe* AI bot is a data harvesting and mining platform that can independently make decisions based on collected data. The RCG Intelligent Innovation™ team in India developed the bot as a simple plug-and-play script that can be embedded in any website, to be displayed as a chatbot, interacting with users and collecting customer data. The Maybe* AI bot will provide business users with a clear picture of customer attitudes and purchasing trends. It will analyze what customers have to say about the company on social media platforms. And it will generate analytic reports that will make it easy to identify high-performing products and flag products that are performing poorly. Ultimately, the Maybe* AI bot will make it easy for businesses to identify problem areas in the customer relationship, and to capitalize on a more thorough understanding of customer interests and current marketing trends.
Nothing ‘Artificial’ About the Potential of AI
Physicist Stephen Hawking once stated3 that AI will be “either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity.” Imagine the massive potential of artificial intelligence to have inspired such a statement! Advanced applications of AI, like the Maybe* bot developed by RCG, provides business with a here-and-now way to tap into the unprecedented potential of AI. And applications such as the Maybe* bot will provide far-sighted and fast-acting companies with an incredible competitive advantage as we advance further into the age of AI.
Works Cited
1. Forbes (2018, Dec 9) "120 AI Predictions For 2019" Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2018/12/09/120-ai-predictions-for-2019/?sh=3ea56fa688cd
2. Mabye* https://www.maybetech.com/
3. The Guardian "Stephen Hawking: AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity" Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/19/stephen-hawking-ai-best-or-worst-thing-for-humanity-cambridge
