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A Digital Transformation Driven by Artificial Intelligence

digital transformation
Archives, Global Trade Daily, International Trade, Special Reports

A Digital Transformation Driven by Artificial Intelligence

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Digital transformation is one of the most important drivers of how businesses deliver value to their customers in a competitive, fast-changing business environment. The process aims to leverage digital technologies to create or modify user experiences and business processes, thus meeting users’ changing needs and the market.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now recognized as one of the main enablers of digital transformation in multiple industries. AI can help companies become more innovative, flexible and adaptive than ever before. Many think of it as a future or visionary technology, but the opposite is true. AI is already being cost-effectively deployed in numerous companies, accelerating productivity and competitiveness, while helping speed digital transformation.

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is a set of processes, tools, and methodologies used by businesses to optimize their operational activities, such as offering differentiated service, increasing performance and expanding their reach. More than a concept, digital transformation is a dynamic movement; it attracts organizations looking to review processes, innovate and gain competitiveness with the help of technology. Artificial intelligence is a critical strategic factor for businesses to expand their impact.

AI and Digital Transformation

Digital transformation took a big step forward when AI and machine learning became part of business strategy. Aside from boosting productivity, these technologies are essential because they enable better use of the data collected by a company. With useful data, businesses can expand, improve their current products and services, and create innovative strategies.

Here are three examples of how digital transformation coupled with AI can deliver top results:

1. 360-Degree View of Customers

AI helps businesses, especially their marketing sector, understand customer needs and preferences. Every digital transformation success depends on gaining accurate buyer personas and audience discovery. It is crucial to gain a comprehensive understanding of the customer at the beginning of the digital transformation, and AI is ideally suited to this mission.

AI helps reveal consumer behavior trends, purchasing history and digital channel engagement to create a buyer’s detailed view. Today, buyers expect personalized experiences along their journey. AI is essential to quickly unlocking consumer insights to create and reinforce those personalized experiences. This way, companies can gain a competitive advantage through higher customer satisfaction, increased customer loyalty and more effective marketing campaigns.

2. Dynamic Analytics

As already mentioned, collecting useful data is essential to digital transformation strategy. But what powers the success of the strategy is how that data is capitalized. AI processes thousands of data points to gather insights and identify trends in real time. This is how companies can accurately pre-empt consumer needs rather than react to consumer actions. With these insights, companies can create highly personalized experiences for their buyers and make data-driven decisions to develop more effective marketing campaigns. Success is reflected in significant savings across budget allocation and in more cost-effective media and advertising purchases.

3. Growth and Profitability

AI helps businesses profit through their digital transformation by increasing operational efficiency, mitigating risks and accelerating growth and innovation. For business leaders, marketing, sales and customer service are the top three areas where AI can make the most impact. According to Accenture, AI can increase profitability in multiple industries by an average of 38 percent by 2035. By that same year, AI will boost additional revenue by $14 trillion!

AI-Driven Automation for Customer Service 

Digital transformation that incorporates AI is redefining and revolutionizing the end-user experience in countless ways for both B2B and B2C organizations. The new capabilities offered by AI-driven Conversational RPA for Customer Service can auto-resolve 65 percent of user requests and reduce issue resolution time by 90 percent—improving customer satisfaction scores by 80 percent. Sophisticated workflow automation integrates AI and RPA to automate customer workflows across product support, upgrades, troubleshooting, case management and more. The horizon for new revenue streams, cost-savings, and productivity is nearly unlimited.

Redefine your employee and customer experience with the world’s first AI-driven service desk: Visit Aisera to learn more or request a demo.

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Archives, Global Trade Daily, Software

Harnessing Workflow Automation for IT Services

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Even before the coronavirus pandemic made our lives more complex and spurred the growing remote workplace trend, automation was already transforming IT service delivery and support. When done well, workflow automation can reduce incident queues and streamline processes, saving time and money, while improving the user experience. Now more than ever, as the world adjusts to the new normal, there is an opportunity for the IT service desk to further accelerate the adoption of workflow automation or Conversational RPA. Here are three ways Conversational RPA can support your IT services:

1. Workflow automation for self-service and self-help immediacy

If your company doesn’t use a self-service portal or self-help system, then you’re creating more work for yourself and your IT department. Self-service helps users to quickly troubleshoot and problem-solve—dramatically reducing the contact volume for the IT service desk. While in most cases, a good agent conversation might gain higher user satisfaction, being forced to contact the service desk for every issue or piece of information is tedious. Workflow Automation is also practical because, unlike humans, AI-powered systems don’t need breaks and are available 24/7, saving time and enabling users to autonomously resolve their issues or get accurate answers quickly.

2. Conversational RPA improves agent productivity

Repetition is a severe problem for every service desk or customer support center. Monotonous tasks can weigh down agents, making them lose interest and lowering job satisfaction. Imagine giving the same answer to every caller multiple times a day. It is not productive, nor does it put the training and skills of support agents to optimal use.

Conversational RPA can address this monotony in many ways. For one, Conversational RPA reduces ticket volume, since the user won’t need to register a ticket. Automating the handling of typical service desk contacts such as account lockouts, employee onboarding, or password resets can free up agents to focus on more critical and challenging IT problems. With a large remote workforce urgently requiring support for routine processes, self-service powered by Conversational RPA can make a vast difference in cost-savings, timeliness, and user satisfaction.

However, reducing agent workload is only the first step. With more free time on their hands, agents can focus on performing tasks that add value to both company and end-users. Most importantly, agents can now have more impactful and higher-value conversations with users.

3. Service desk automation reduces costs and overhead

Dedicating trained agents to answering repetitive calls creates additional operating expenses in two ways:

-The first is when rising ticket volume leads your company to hire more agents to undertake the extra work.

-The second is through employee attrition because of job dissatisfaction, resulting in the need to hire new employees, with consequent added training costs.

Automation of internal and external service desks saves the time and money you would have to spend on recruitment and training. By resolving user requests autonomously through the omnichannel (web portal, chat, email, voice and mobile app) companies can reach 65-80 percent self-service resolutions, with 30-50 second mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR). This can increase customer satisfaction scores by as much as 85 percent and cut related costs by up to 90 percent.

Service desk automation is a vital step in giving users a platform to become self-sufficient. It improves the service experience for users who have both simple and complex issues: simple problems are resolved with automation, while agents reserve time and energy to tackle complex issues.

Redefine your employee and customer experience with the world’s first AI-driven service desk. Aisera’s AI Service Management (AISM) solutions provide immersive, engaging user experiences with full omnichannel support.

Visit Aisera to learn more or request a demo.

ITSM
Archives, Global Trade Daily, Software

The 5 No’s of Buying Artificial Intelligence for ITSM

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Virtual assistants, driverless cars, and robots are just some of the devices that are powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The AI technology that makes these devices work can include Voice Assistants, Natural Language Processing (NLP), or Machine Learning (ML). These technologies are no longer a hype but a reality today for many IT organizations. Unfortunately, there is an unfounded opinion on the market that deploying AI for ITSM is a difficult task. However, there is no need for resources or clean data, mainly because of Unsupervised AI.

In reality, IT Service Management (ITSM) has huge potential to benefit from AI as ITSM service desk agents perform a variety of transactional tasks. AI also helps IT meet the growing expectations of users in terms of faster and more efficient service with the latest technology. So, let’s discuss the common misbeliefs and why they are wrong.

1. You need to invest in long ITSM integration efforts and data cleansing cycles before adopting conversational AI. FALSE. Advanced conversational AI solutions tackle both of these challenges by showcasing the benefits of the latest transfer learning AI technologies, which reduce training times from hours to minutes and require very little data from the organization itself.

2. You need large upfront investments in resources and personnel. FALSE. Cloud computing has emerged to tackle this problem and allow a business of any size to be infrastructure-ready and adopt all the latest technologies and solutions. Conversational AI is delivered to companies as SaaS (software as a service). It requires no infrastructure to get up and running and can be quickly implemented and customized for any business. Managing such a solution doesn’t demand a large personnel commitment. Typically, companies need to commit no more than one-half, or one fully dedicated resource.

3. You need to bring data scientists on staff. FALSE. Contrary to the supervised learning AI model, conversational AI gets powered by more complex and advanced unsupervised learning techniques. With unsupervised learning, models automatically learn by themselves and extract relevant information. Closely-looped automation ensures that models get regularly refreshed to incorporate new knowledge, and with time, models grow smarter and operate with fresh/updated information. Therefore, no data scientist is needed.

4. You need to train AI models. FALSE. Today, reinforcement learning techniques in conjunction with unsupervised machine learning techniques are applied. With such a method, an AI agent employs trial and error to find a solution to any given model task. To allow the model to learn what the user would want it to, the AI agent gets rewards or penalties for performing actions. With this approach, the model adapts based on what the user acknowledges as a ‘good action’.

5. Continuous real-time learning is not possible. FALSE. A major weakness of most market-available conversational AI solutions is their inability to learn new knowledge during the conversation. In contrast, intelligent conversational AI solutions are equipped with sophisticated algorithms and job automation, enabling the system to learn and become more knowledgeable interactively. And the process never stops!

Conclusion

We hope we helped clarify the misunderstandings and false beliefs that deploying AI for ITSM takes a tremendous amount of effort, time, and resources.

Our AI-driven, cloud-based AI Service Desk solution will modernize your operations and your service desks, all the while scaling with you through digitally transforming your business to provide autonomous self-service resolutions to digital users across your organization.

_______________________________________________________________

 Kim del Fierro is the VP of Marketing at Aisera. 

If you want to learn more about our AI Service Desk solution, feel free to request a demo.

customer service
Archives, Global Trade Daily, Special Reports

The No. 1 Question the Customer Service Industry Should Be Asking

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The year 2020 has been a remarkable one for many reasons, but in the world of business and information technology, it’s likely to be remembered as the year that artificial intelligence went from a luxury to a necessity. At the beginning of the year, only one in five online retailers was using virtual customer service agents, according to IBM. The corporation now forecasts that, over the next few years, nearly every online retailer will use virtual assistants.

The reasons for this transformation are rooted in consumer shopping patterns. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, consumers are moving their purchasing power online. This shift in demand places a real strain on customer service resources. When combined with the work-from-home revolution sparked by the Coronavirus, it’s easy to see why International Data Corporation believes that the development of virtual assistants will grow 30 percent a year every year through 2023.

More than ever, AI virtual assistants will be called on to answer basic consumer questions and encourage specific consumer behaviors. In the process, these virtual assistants will free up their human counterparts to handle more difficult customer service issues. The end results include a better work experience for employees and millions of satisfied customers.

It’s no question that AI solutions are now a technological necessity for organizations driven by success. The only question is “build or buy?” Drawing up cost-benefit analyses for build-or-buy conversational platforms is one of the first things a company should do when considering the implementation of conversational solutions for core operations.

Gartner weighs in on this question by acknowledging that 90 percent of DIY conversational platforms fail within six months to one year. This is an incredibly high failure rate; however, 100 percent of enterprises with failed conversational DIY projects still want to pursue conversational platforms because of the value and benefits virtual assistants supply.

A Shift from Build to Buy

At Aisera, we’re seeing a huge shift among enterprise customers away from DIY projects. In 2019, 40 percent of enterprise customers tried DIY conversational platforms. Thus far in 2020, only 10 percent of enterprise customers are trying DIY conversational solutions.

Big digital transformation projects like conversational solutions can make or break an organization. Careful and strategic planning is crucial to ensuring success. Conversational solutions are a pivotal area for organizations; however, these DIY projects are prone to failure.

Regardless of whether your organization has chosen to build or buy your conversational platform, or even if you’re still deciding, it’s important to understand the patterns in the marketplace. At Aisera, we’re continuously curious about the ongoing changes in artificial intelligence strategies. We think any company considering a move into AI-driven customer service should ask themselves the following questions:

-Why have some built their own?

-Why have others bought?

-Why have the DIY projects failed?

-What can we do about it?

These are all questions you’ve probably thought of already. We’re curious too–that’s why we’re asking you and other leaders for your feedback!

Join the Conversation

We’ve created a survey to gather industry insights on “Build vs Buy” strategies for conversational platforms. Want to see how others in your industry are answering? Fill out the survey, and you’ll be able to compare notes with your peers when we report on the results, which will be shared with all survey participants. To join anonymously and collaborate with your peers, start by answering our build vs buy survey here.

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How Is Customer Service AI Improving Work for Employees?

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Customer service is an area that always needs attention and often needs improvement. No matter how strong your systems and your personnel, smart organizations are looking for a competitive edge in this field. Therefore, the work your employees perform in the customer service department is a critical focus for any successful business.

With that in mind, we wanted to take a closer look at how Customer Service AI is making some significant improvements in this area. By heeding the advice and explanations we give you here, your employees will be able to provide a more thorough and effective service to your customers. In turn, the number of satisfied customers will increase significantly, and you won’t have to emphasize the search for new customers anymore.

What’s more, the overall loyalty to your brand will increase, as well as the reputation your brand has among consumers and competitors.

Ways AI Is Improving Customer Service Work

First of all, it’s important to understand that AI is not about replacing your employees in any way. When you deploy Customer Service AI solutions to your customer service sector smartly and efficiently, your employees gain the support they need to perform their jobs much better than they ever could before. That’s precisely where the main benefit of AI lies – in human-AI collaboration.

The most obvious example of this is the use of chatbots in customer service. AI-powered chatbots are now capable of performing many tasks when it comes to the relationship between your company and your customers. They can handle specific repetitive tasks and even resolve simpler issues your customers have. By doing that, your employees are left to work on more complex issues, without having to waste time giving the same answers and dealing with the same problems that tend to repeat themselves within most companies.

What’s more, AI-powered chatbots are available 24/7, so you don’t have to worry about overstretching your employees through several shifts or hiring more people to handle more demands. AI chatbots become the frontline of your customer service, providing the answers to the questions your employees don’t have to worry about anymore. Beyond chatbots, AI can also ensure the organization within the customer service department is at its most efficient and that no unnecessary errors occur.

Chatbots will know when complex issues arise and will seamlessly transfer those requests to human employees who will handle the problem more effectively. This becomes a symbiosis when quality solutions are implemented, and the customer never notices the transition.

As you can already assume, all of this improves the overall satisfaction of your customers, as they no longer have to wait hours for a dedicated agent to give them a response.

The Bottom Line

In essence, AI is not just improving the customer service industry and the work employees do there, it’s revolutionizing it. If you want to be part of that revolution, your organization needs to seriously consider implementing a quality AI-driven service desk that will completely alter the work your employees perform and the service your customers receive.

Aisera offers that kind of solution, and you can test it out to see how it works right now by requesting a personalized demo from us.