Welcome to the electrifying March edition of foreSIGHTS 2024! This month, we’re buzzing with excitement to unveil some groundbreaking advancements at the forefront of data analytics. Buckle up, because you’re about to witness the future of making informed decisions!
What’s trending? Meet Devin, Your AI Software programmer!
Did you know that geniFLASH has many things in common with IPL?
Partner Enablement Program: Tech and Sales
geniFLASH’S Feature >> Stunning New UI/UX is Coming!
Upcoming Webinar >> Your journey to data driven excellence!
We hope you find this edition informative, and we look forward to connecting with you soon!
Best Regards, Team geniSIGHTS
Meet Devin, Your AI Software programmer!
Remember those nail-biting Terminator movies where AI became self-aware and almost wiped out humanity? (Shudders) Well, fear not! The future of AI is looking a lot brighter, thanks to Devin.
That’s right, Devin isn’t here to conquer us – it’s here to help us be way more productive. This AI software engineer is like your ultimate coding buddy, able to write code, fix bugs, and even learn and adapt on its own.
Imagine: no more late nights wrestling with a stubborn line of code. Devin can tackle those headaches while you focus on the bigger picture.
Think of Devin as your personal coding sidekick, ready to work tirelessly by your side or independently complete tasks you can review later. Pretty cool, right?
The world of work is changing, and Devin is here to usher in a new era of AI-powered productivity. So, buckle up and get ready to see what the future holds! Read more @ https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-sci-tech/meet-devin-ai-first-autonomous-ai-software-engineer-9212537/
Did you know that geniFLASH has many things in common with IPL?
“Cricket is a religion in India, and the IPL is its grand festival, where players become warriors, stadiums turn into battlegrounds, and fans unite in a chorus of cheers and emotions.” – MS Dhoni
Here are 5 things common between IPL and geniFLASH.
Are you ready to unlock the power of AI-driven insights for your customers? Join our thrilling Partner Enablement Program and let’s embark on a journey of success together!
Offer your customers our innovative AI platform that generates automated, actionable insights tailored to their unique needs. With comprehensive technical and sales support, you’ll be equipped to navigate the world of AI and data analytics with confidence.
Elevate your customer experience, unlock new revenue streams, and redefine what’s possible. Embrace the future of AI-driven insights and watch your business soar.
Contact us today to learn more about this thrilling partnership opportunity! Request for meeting at https://lnkd.in/gajZW4tB
geniFlash’s Stunning New UI/UX is Coming!
Thanks to valuable feedback, our design team has crafted a visually captivating yet highly functional interface. On April 30th, experience AI-driven insights like never before with polished aesthetics, streamlined workflows, and optimized features that will revolutionize how you interact with data.
Get ready to be wowed by a sleek, modern UI that seamlessly blends form and function. This redesign is a game-changer, elevating your productivity and decision-making capabilities.
Mark your calendars and prepare for an extraordinary journey as geniFlash ushers in an exciting era of cutting-edge design meets data analytics.
Upcoming Webinar >> Your journey to data driven excellence!
We’re excited to announce that our upcoming webinar on geniFLASH, the revolutionary AI-powered analytics platform, is being planned for next month!
In this webinar, you’ll learn how geniFLASH can transform your business intelligence by providing:
Personalized Insights: Get tailored analysis and recommendations based on your specific role and goals.
Conversational Interface: Ask questions and receive clear, actionable answers from your data.
Improved User Adoption: Stop struggling with static reports – geniFLASH makes data analysis easy and engaging.
Exact Date to be Confirmed Soon:
We’re finalizing the details and will share the exact date and registration link closer to the event. Stay tuned for further updates!
Let’s understand how a conversational AI can help connect the problems to the solutions effectively in real-time. Take an instance where there is a conversation between a customer care executive of a fashion store and a customer that is effectively solved with the help of a conversational AI.
The conversational AI uses sentiment analysis to understand the customers’ state of mind, makes recommendations to the executive for better solutions, and quick recommendations related to the offers of the brands the customer liked or has in their wishlist increases the overall satisfaction of the customer.
This is how conversational AI helps in solving customers’ issues in real-time. Many contact centers are already infusing AI into their operations and help desk tasks. Although AI is not going to eliminate the staff, it is going to aid a huge scale-up of the help desk services.
Are you a contact center organization looking for real-time & customized analytics solutions for your business?
You would have learned how Advanced Analytics aids the contact centers to enhance the customer experience thereby converting contact centers to revenue centers. Our Conversational AI product FLASH comes in handy providing meaningful insights in just a matter of seconds.
Conversational AI-led analytics is indeed the game-changer for contact centers was a 3 part blog. The part 1 concentrated on the problems faced by the contact centers which was followed by the solutions conversational AI could offer in part 2 and how the conversational AI solved the problems in real-time in part 3 of the blog.
Organizations have lots of data, reports, and insightful dashboards but are they actionable? How easy for the organization to leverage insights from Dashboards?
Max is disappointed with the insights provided by Julie. Alex said he will talk to the Dashview team to build the reports quickly.
The Dashview needs 2 more days to build the reports.
Alex volunteers to fix the meeting with the FLASH team the next day.
Team FLASH demonstrated FLASH to Max and his team. Max was stunned to see that FLASH not only generated the insights quickly but the insights are real-time insights.
We feature Mr. Dorai Thodla in our monthly Feature corner, He’s Founder of Technology Strategies LLC and iMorph Innovation Center Pvt. Ltd. this month. He has co-founded 4 software companies – two in India and two in the USA. Mr. J. S. Sridharan, our Co-Founder, and Senior Vice President ask a few questions to Mr. Dorai Thodla. You may follow Dorai on Twitter (@dorait) and LinkedIn.
He helps organizations leverage emerging technologies for building skills and creating innovative products. His companies build Information Assistants, a collection of tools for gathering and analyzing information.
He considers the ability to do informal research and tracking technology trends as important skills for the future of work.
Sridharan – With reference to the informal research process, could you tell us more about which areas this would apply to?
Dorai – There are a few areas where quick informal research can help.
1. A product team trying to validate a set of ideas. They may need to know what already exists and whether they should build a product.
2. A startup with reasons similar to product groups, but may need additional information about the market size, how the market is growing, current players, and whether there is a viable business model.
3. Finding gaps and opportunities in emerging technology trends. Inferring latent needs from discussions and analyzing competitive market spaces.
Sridharan – Why do you think organizations would undertake informal research and at what level?
Dorai – It depends on the size of the organization. Small to medium organizations may use it at a tactical level. For example, a small product group may use it to do competitive analysis, opportunity analysis for product extensions, etc.
Sridharan – We know that we can leverage Twitter as a tool for any informal research. Can you share insights on how twitter hashtags will help organizations in this research?How can we leverage LinkedIn for this? What are some other tools we could use for doing this informal research?
Dorai – Hashtag’s usage is not uniform. Some of the most influential tweeters (like Paul Graham) do not use hashtags at all. An analysis of hashtags shows that they are used when you want to join conversations or when you are in a conference or other similar events.
Linkedin
Twitter is a broad platform serving a wide variety of people. You can see authors, journalists, news organizations, technology people from the small, medium, and large organizations. LinkedIn is different. It started serving the needs of HR and recruiters. For a while, now LinkedIn is broadening the base but the type and quality of conversations are very different. It is easier to find influencers and people from large organizations. The profiles on LinkedIn are much richer.
The major problem with LinkedIn is a highly restricted API. So gathering information using automated tools is a bigger challenge.
With respect to other tools, If you cannot afford to subscribe to expensive research resources from experts in the field (students and startups have this problem), there are many tools you can cobble together to do your own research. You can call this DIY Research or Informal research. These tools include:
– Search engines
– Blogs and syndicated feeds
– News sources (both raw and aggregated)
– Websites and Portals
– Social media tools like Twitter but also LinkedIn and to some extent Facebook
– Wikis including Wikipedia and its properties
– Trade and Research publications
– Data and Scholarly search engines
Sridharan – How can startups leverage social media for tracking technology trends?
Dorai – If you want to speak the language of your customers, you need to use the vocabulary of your market place. These include idioms, phrases, and memes in those places. For example, tl;dr (too long did not read) is a common term among software developers. Other terms include “code smells”, “tech debt” etc. You can gather tweets of developers, do a frequency analysis of the terms to understand the terms of the group.
The importance of understanding the vocabulary of users may be much fold. If you want to use content marketing, you may want to use that language in your content.
There are a few ways. The more open the social media, the better. That is why Search and Twitter are our primary tools of choice.
1. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter will provide you data about the size of a specific niche audience.
2. The search parts of Google, Twitter, and others will provide discovery tools. I prefer tools that provide good APIs. These tools make data-driven decisions easier. For example, on Twitter, I can type a search, find popular hashtags, lists, and mentions, and can mine them for more information. This is not so easy to do for example in LinkedIn (despite their having an API) and Quora. So people resort to using scrapers and RPA (robotic process
automation) tools.
3. Blog searches or Feed Searches
4. Job searches – for certain types of research jobs are a leading indicator
5. Conferences, meetups, and discussion forums are useful tools for identifying watch signals.
6. Funding patterns, especially Angel-funding are leading indicators. You can also track other rounds of funding and private equity to understand the market space.
7. Books and articles are mostly lagging indicators but they are good sources to track the popularity of certain technologies.
Sridharan – How can start-ups and organizations leverage this informal research for new product markets and finding new opportunities?
Dorai – There are several stages for a product startup. Let us look at the needs at each stage.
1. You come up with an idea for a product. You need to find out whether products similar to yours are there already and what are the pros and cons of each product (an analysis of alternative solutions). Having some competition validates that there are a problem and the need for a solution. But a lot depends on how established the competition is. At the end of this research, you identify a niche and some potential early adopters.
2. You build a prototype or a minimum viable product. You do this in stages. Once you have a proof-of-concept prototype or a functional, usable prototype, you need to validate that it solves the problem. You need research to identify these users, ways to reach them, and interact with them.
3. Once you have a few users using your product, you need to expand the number and also identify paying customers. You need research to go from 100s of users to thousands or tens of thousands of users.
4. Once you have sufficient users to feel comfortable with your validation, you need to price the product. If similar products exist, you need to research their pricing models. If there are no similar products but the market is being served by services, you need to research those pricing models.
As the number of users and types of users grows, you need more research to get to the next stage. Most of this research is not available in the market. Even if available, it may not be current.
Sridharan – Could you elaborate on some new research methodologies that can help startups?
Dorai – Startups have several free and paid resources for product discovery, content discovery, keyword discovery, and competitive analysis. Informal research strings together available tools to create your own Research Assistants. I see this as a multi-stage process.
– Info tools – tools to gather data from a variety of sources – Web, RSS feeds, Tweets, Posts, Discussion boards, Forums, and Blogs.
– Analyzers – Analyze information gathered via info tools – segment/cluster, discover topics, mine entities, derive the vocabulary of conversations, etc. The analyzers use Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, semantic tagging, and other emerging techniques.
Sridharan – With reference to businesses tracking technology trends, how do you think digital analytics help track the trends?
Dorai – Data gatherers will bring in a lot of data in various digital forms – text, images, speech (podcasts), videos. You need analytics for different levels of filtering. The first level simple analytics are early filters to separate signal from noise. Next level analytics provide good inputs for inference and prediction.
Sridharan – To understand customers and market size, which tools or platforms to look for?
Dorai – We can start with some of the available free tools. These include search engines, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. They help you understand the market sizes since they need to know it to guide you in advertising. For example, using Facebook or Google ad products you can understand the size of a reachable market.
Using product hunt, beta list, and other similar services you can identify similar products. But nothing beats search. You can come up with a list of key terms that describe your product and try searches and analyze the results. Google provides a search API that you can use to automate this process.
You can use services like angel list to locate startups. You can use search to locate directories, professional associations in your product or technology space.
Twitter is becoming a great resource for discovery. Twitter APIs allow you to automate searches. Using Twitter you can find companies, products, trends, research reports, influencers, and discussions. You can create lists to manage the vast amount of information, retrieve tweets and links, and analyze the results.
Sridharan – How does text analytics help organizations in the changing business landscape?
Dorai – The outcome of searches (web search, Twitter search, Blog Search, Product Search, etc.) is short documents.
You need to text analysis to mine useful information from documents. Let us take an example of a blog comparing several products. You can use topic and keyword extraction techniques to derive useful information. You can use entity extraction to identify companies, products, and events mentioned in the article.
How automation can help you to run your business BETTER?
“Automation” or “automatic control” is a technology by which a process or procedure is performed with minimal or no humane assistance. Automation covers applications ranging from an electric fuse to a self-driving car, but massive usage of automation can be seen in traditional manual systems like customer care, IT support, or other mundane/repetitive work.
Automation can handle analytics reporting, ticket handling, scoring leads, shooting mails, and publishing on social media channels.
For implementing automation in business it will require a standardization of business processes and a bit of human intervention for setting up the whole process. Business must smartly choose the area and tasks which can be automated. Once this automation set-up is done it can benefit the organization in the following ways:
Meet market demands: Automation gives you the power to meet market demands and agility to handle changes in changing market conditions. You don’t have to hire more employees to handle fluctuation in customer demand, order volume, manage inventory, process orders, and payments.
Increase marketing ROI: It helps you retain leads more efficiently by quickly responding to a query(email or chat), automate a mail for a new customer pitch based on customer behavior, follow -up with connections, transfer a contact form from business card to a CRM tool, etc
Social media posts: We can save a lot of time in digital marketing on social media, highlight your business by scheduling posts, manage multiple social media accounts and boost your feeds, posts, and blogs using social media automation. You can now attend to queries on your handles and respond to prospective customers with information without error.
What’s more! Never miss birthdays of your followers and social media friends, you can also send birthday messages to your contact lists.
Computer backups: Always stay safe with all your data backed-up. With automation, you can schedule computer backups automatically. This way you will never forget to backup and lose valuable data. You can also back up the types and volume of inquiry received over a period of time to study how the mood of customers changes in a specific season or festive season.
Error-free operation: The automation process eliminates mistakes. Sometimes these mistakes can be very expensive and can lead to false analytics and poor decision making. You get high precision in your operations.
40% of large businesses automate at least one business process, while 25% of small business owners report using automation. According to MARKETSANDMARKETS, the global digital process automation market is projected to grow from USD 6.77 billion in 2018 to USD 12.61 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 13.3% from 2018 to 2023.
(source: MARKESTANDMAREKTS)
Automation is capable of going well beyond to enhance your customers’ experience by performing day by day repetitive undertakings. Automation can widely be utilized for meeting short-term profit demands. It can majorly help companies cut down human asset-related costs: low human mistake, comparatively less inefficient working hours, decreased training costs, negligible odds of hands-on wounds, and so on. But the advantages stretch out past improving financial wellbeing. According to Deloitte, “the adoption of automation in organizations is expected to increase to 72% in the next two years. And the organizations that have already adopted automation expected to significantly increase their investment in automation throughout the following 3 years. If this proceeds at its current level, RPA will have accomplished near-universal adoption within the next 5 years”.
There is more to applications of automation past performing the physical tasks. It’s equipped for handling big data both structured and unstructured data right from its ingestion to developing meaningful intelligent insights for actionable decision-making. Automation can upgrade profitability and improve work processes in all cases at organizations all things considered.
If you are a business owner or decision-maker looking to run business faster and better, automation is the answer, allowing repetitive tasks to be performed with ease. It increases marketing ROI by improving the lead generation process but also enhances customer support. Advanced AI systems are capable of merging the benefits of automation by gathering data and using it to streamline processes and ensure you don’t lose critical data by creating automated backups.
As an AI company, we have automated several processes and clearly reaping the benefits of informed decision making as a result of this process. Are you thinking about adding automation to your business? Want to know how automation can fuel your growth, write to us @ info@genisights.com
With huge quantities of data generated every day, and sophisticated algorithms fuelling data modeling, we look at the scope of the expanding AI market in North America. In our monthly Feature corner, our Co-Founder and Senior Vice President, Mr. J. S. Sridharan asks a few questions to Mr. Pat Krishnan, a seasoned C Level executive, from Bay Area, California, who has worked with leading organizations with disruptive technologies and has also provided strategic direction and leadership to various organizations in India and the US.
Sridharan – Having worked in AI, cybersecurity, analytics, and various other innovative ideas, please tell us how the pre-COVID and future priorities are changing for organizations in terms of adopting technologies like AI.
Pat Krishnan – AI as one knows is the “mantra” for every organization and every domain such as healthcare, cybersecurity, retail, financial to name a few. I think the market has been growing regardless of the COVID situation as far as AI goes. With COVID-19 and scientific community still trying to understand the nature of this RNA genome, AI and mathematical models come in very handy to provide more insights into this Coronavirus. The models can get very advanced once they decipher the pattern and I personally think that we will be able to predict the future mutations of this SARS COV 2. This is a prediction with some level of certainty that is only possible with AI models.
Sridharan – What are the problem areas you think AI can solve in the coming 3 to 5 years for these organizations?
Pat Krishnan – With COVID 19, new normal is happening and it will only be time before we get adapted to this. That said, Pharma (drug development), healthcare, retail, financial, insurance, real estate, entertainment, and food industries will go through a massive transformation and their reliance on AI and machine learning models will increase monumentally to an extent where vital decisions will be taken using data and technology. Problem areas AI can solve are InSilico drug modeling and profiling, Telemedicine, Disease mgmt such as Diabetes (CGM) and terminal illness, Money movement and payments, Insurance Risk and underwriting, Food deliveries, and Online Retail merchandise (from groceries to apparel and the likes).
Sridharan – With more conversational agents like Alexa and Echo, and while reports state that 70% of the total US smart speaker owners will continue to use an Amazon Echo device, tell us more about the adoption of conversation AI and how conversational AI is seen as the next paradigm shift in the AI technology in the North American market?
Pat Krishnan – I consider the consumer-driven lifestyle type applications such as Alexa, Ok Google is the guinea pig for the Conversational AI technology which is about to invade into enterprises. Increasing working patterns like WFH have pushed the envelope to adopt Conversational AI in call centers and contact centers. According to reports, Conversational AI can save the industry $150 billion by eliminating the drudgery of communication and enhancing the customer experience in leaps which will benefit the business. The next 5 years will see a lot of growth in conversational AI and related technologies in enterprises.
Sridharan – What according to you, are the areas organizations -small and big can supercharge customer engagement with the help of virtual agents and intelligent automation tools?
Pat Krishnan – Telehealth and continuous monitoring use cases, disease management are plum for engaging virtual agents and tools. Where there is a need for continuous engagement with the customer, automation tools will come in handy. The beauty of virtual agents stems from the fact that the back end Ai engine does the heavy lifting converting the customer queries and intent to tangible actions. The day will not be far off when most of the invasive questions are answered by virtual agents themselves.
Sridharan – How do you think organizations can leverage AI for higher levels of stakeholder engagement?
Pat Krishnan – Stakeholders live and die by making decisions that are important for the company be it operational or strategic level. AI is so democratic and objective that it does not differentiate any area of specialization. Where there is data, there possibly could be a need. Stakeholders should engage with AI service providers and work closely to close the gap that exists between science and technology. It will become increasingly necessary for stakeholders to come up to speed on the science aspect of AI which can help implement effective AI systems and platforms in the organization. Operationally the IT organization in the company should get aligned with the stakeholder and service provider.
Sridharan – What do stakeholders need to do to jumpstart their conversational AI journey?
Pat Krishnan – Stakeholders should start engaging with AI vendors and get the problem statement clearly laid out. This cannot happen in a silo and AI vendors should handhold the execs and help refine the problem. This is key to the successful implementation of an AI solution. This calls for stakeholders like the C suite giving enough time to go thru the implementation process which alone will pay rich dividends in the future.
Connect to us at info@genisights.com if you are looking at jumpstarting your AI journey
With the recent technology advancements in Artificial intelligence (AI), neuro-linguistic programming, machine learning, the internet of things (IoT), and web speech APIs, it is now possible to streamline interactions between computer and human languages more effectively. Every day practically we see Google Home or Alexa ads on social media and on television.
We dig deeper into the world of chatbots in this interesting series on
Conversation AI: Chatbot Series- understanding chatbot -part 1 of 2
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is a service that people interact with via a chat interface. You can ask questions using your voice or by typing in the same way you would ask a person. The chatbot will usually respond in a conversational style, and it may carry out actions in response to your conversation. It answers your question, rather than directing you to a website.
Chatbots are great conversational assistants for businesses. From simple conversation to complex transactions, a chatbot can perform everything. AI technologies like Machine learning, RPA, and NLP can take chatbots to the next level with intuitive capabilities.
Chatbot Adoption
Chatbot adoption is happening across all industries and functions because of its scalability and assistance capabilities. Chatbots live inside instant messaging apps such as website chatbots, dashboard chatbots, and integrated into third-party applications, with which users interact daily. This enables businesses to leverage the digital spaces that are already growing.
These messaging platforms which support AI chatbots are a more socially acceptable form of personal interactions than social networks. While social networks still connect users with brands, messaging platforms via personalized offers, photos, videos, GIFs, memes, links, and documents create one-on-one interaction between brands and users.
AI chatbot solutions have the transformative power to provide end-to-end services ensuring the business objectives of different industry sectors. Whether it is retail, customer service, or hospitality, AI-powered chatbots are building a vast channel ecosystem. Today’s chatbots are powerful personal assistants. They can call a Cab, place a lunch order, make a hotel reservation, order office supplies when you get low, and even help manage your calendar.
Broadly Chatbots powered with AI can be used for two purposes:
For Enterprise – In the last few years, the e-commerce market has grown a lot, so does the chatbot market. Businesses are inclining towards bots for jobs like order tracking, delivery confirmation, customer support, feedback & reviews, and surveys.
Undoubtedly, the applications of chatbots are also benefiting the education sector. Enterprises can automate their admission registration system, provide virtual assistants to their staff for decreasing their workload, and enable parents to connect with teachers in real-time with chatbots
For Consumers – Chatbots provide better service to users. Mainly in these following ways:
Quick Response time – Compared to a human being, a smart computer program will answer queries much quicker. This, coupled with an AI chatbot’s machine learning and multitasking abilities makes it a highly efficient virtual assistant that can revolutionize customer interaction metrics.
Improved Conversions – Chatbots can study past search data and offer more personalized shopping options via retargeting. The AI is constantly learning, and it can pull up multiple options that will be more appealing to the user based on their search history and captured data points. This can lead to increased conversions for you in the long term.
The demand for chatbots is increasing at a tremendous pace across verticals. In a recent survey, Gartner predicted that 85% of their engagement with businesses will be done without interacting with another human by 2020. Instead, we’ll be using self-service options and chatbots.
Chatbots are being adopted to automate processes like voice-driven assistants, sales, marketing, lead generation, and customer service. During this survey, 42% of participants responded that automation technologies in these areas will improve the customer experience. 48% said that they already use automation technology for various business functions, and the other 40% said they are planning to implement some form of automated technology by 2020.
The shift towards intelligent assistants
The massive adoption of AI in the user’s everyday lives and businesses is fuelling the shift towards voice applications and conversational agents.
Powered by Conversational AI platforms, chatbots are becoming smarter and more human-like in engaging customers with smooth, conversational messages. Conversational interfaces are not limited to chatbots. With the rapid developments in voice technology that converts speech to text capabilities, businesses can build applications that can engage in voice-based conversations. Voice-enabled assistants will be the drivers for improving customer engagement for organizations and value to customers. Voice-enabled applications can not only accurately understand the requirements, but can also understand the intent or the context in which they are said.
There are a lot of opportunities for much deeper conversational experiences with customers with the evolving technology space.
We uncover advanced AI-powered chatbot applications in part 2 of this series. So watch this space for our next article on chatbots.
If you are willing to score in on the opportunities in the world of conversational businesses, connect with us for a chatbot or voice-enabled assistant experience at info@genisights.com.
Digital technologies have been helping banks and financial institutions to seize new markets, grow the business, and cut costs by providing a competitive advantage. We see tremendous changes in the banking and financial services industry impact businesses and in an attempt to seek insights from business leaders from the industry, our Co-Founder and SVP Mr. Sridharan J. S has a conversation with Mr. Palani Balasubramanyam Nama, Head of Open Innovation and Digital Transformation, Societe Generale, who has over 21 years of experience working with Innovation & IT divisions of Investment Banks, Financial Institutions and European/American Multinationals, about the state of AI and other technologies in banking, in our exclusive ‘Feature Corner’. As the Head of Trade Execution, Palani is also accountable for the IT & OPS team ensuring on-time and secure trade execution across global exchanges, efficiently from India.
Sridharan – Being in the banking industry for more than a decade, tell us how banks fostered innovation before COVID and how the perspective has changed during this situation?
Palani – Pre COVID-19, innovation in banking was more focused on internal optimization, focused increasing digital footprint for efficiency, or improving customer journeys.
COVID has compelled to accelerate the adoption of contactless service delivery for customers, at a rapid pace. This constraint forced banks to partner with external eco-system for rapid transformation, to provide neo banks equivalent digital experience for customers. Apart from service channels, there is quite a bit of investment being done on employee experience, like enabling them to work from home, across multiple secure digital channels and collaboration tools.
Sridharan – Approximately what percentage of spend, do you know of, that banks spend on IT costs annually?
Palani – Large banks spend between 5 to 10%, small & medium banks spend between 20 to 30% of their total spend on IT costs.
Sridharan – Approximately What percentage of banks’ transactions or what areas are automated?
Palani – Above 70% of P2P transactions are automated, however, B2B transactions hover between 30 to 40%. B2B transaction STP % is catching up in the recent past with the evolution of Machine Learning & Smart Automation.
Sridharan – As more devices connect to the internet and the concept of the Internet of Things gaining rapid momentum, what are the preparations banks are involved in the rapid increase in equipping themselves with the huge amount of data generated from the devices?
Palani – BFSI has been slow in the adoption of IoT before COVID, given security threats and central bank regulations. However, post-pandemic, banks are more open to adopting digital channels to deliver contactless & remote client experience.
This unprecedented disruption has increased data volumes multifold. Most of the banks have established internal data analytics teams to address basic data processing needs. Despite interest in partnering with external partners, there are roadblocks to be addressed before it can become reality, especially around secure data sharing, multiparty computation & adherence to regulatory norms (GDPR).
Sridharan – Data, being the most important factor for the digital transformation for banks, what technologies are used to leverage data to meaningful insights for smarter decisions?
Palani – Large BFSI enterprises have multiple tech stacks based on needs. However, they have well defined IS strategies guiding the usage of tech stacks based on problem patterns being addressed.
While exploring partnerships with tech giants like ORACLE, Teradata, or IBM, there is an intrinsic push to adopt opensource tech stacks, to ensure open standards and cost optimization.
Sridharan – Do you think banks are struggling with the rapidly changing technological landscape in terms of which technologies to adopt and which ones not to?
Palani – It is a challenge to keep up with fast-paced Technology landscape evolution for any organization. It is more complex in BFSI given constraints around tech choices to be made keeping in mind the security and reliability of services. In BFSI, business capabilities and security take precedence over technology grandeur.
There are few instances of large banks partnering with external partners to disruptive technology transformation, however, results so far haven’t been very encouraging. BFSI transformations demand as business acumen and technology expertise. External partners tend to be good at technology expertise, however most of the time they lack business acumen.
Sridharan – AI has been long seen as the next big thing in the banking and financial industry be it in the area of planning, cost-saving, customer experience, fraud prevention, or anti-money laundering. What do you see as the future of banking given the exponential growth in IoT devices, cloud computing with Artificial intelligence capabilities?
Palani – AI, so far has been capable of helping in raising proactive alerts, simplifying decision making, and processing of large datasets. however, it is far from autonomous process execution or decision making, which limits the full-scale unsupervised deployment of AI-driven process flows, which in turn would help increase the straight-through processing rate.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Pandemic has increased BFSI’s appetite to adopt technologies like IoT, Cloud computing, and AI. The exponential growth of these technologies should be complemented by the rapid hardening of enterprise cybersecurity strategies, without which, banks may be hesitant to leverage the full potential of emerging technologies.
The lack of access to physical stores due to the pandemic has increased the traffic for contact centres worldwide. Contact centres are bridging the gap to communicate with customers, emergency helplines, on-call services, and inquiries. Even before contact centre agents were required to work from remote locations,Cisco’s 2020 survey revealed that 62% of decision-makers plan to implement a cloud contact centre in the coming year. 93% agree that technology is very important in creating a better customer experience. Contact centres are a treasure of data waiting to be discovered. They have data acquired through daily processes like telesales, telemarketing, customer surveys, collections by means of outbound services and customer services, emergency response past inbound services. Analyzing contact centre data can help not only the customers but the contact centre decision-makers as well, to improve service and increase efficiency. Artificial Intelligence-based software improves the customer experience by monitoring key phrases and then prompting the agent in giving proactive responses. They can identify challenging calls for agents to handle and route the calls depending on complexity. AI is also gaining popularity through chatbots and solving issues without the need for agent interference. Chatbots need to understand the tone of the customer and respond accordingly. A healthy Contact Centre must conserve excellent hardware and software solutions providing a direct impact on quality assurance/success metrics, call statistics, customer implementation, and proficient Contact Centre agents. Contact centres today can answer more than just calls. Let us look at what other questions can be unraveled through analyzing contact centre data.
1. Is the Customer Satisfied?
According to a 2019 survey byDeloitte Digital, Customer experience or CX is a high priority (57%) among the surveyed centers.Harvard Business Review found in a study that a focus on increasing (Customer Satisfaction) CSAT will help businesses retain 74% of customers for another year leading to a substantial increase in revenue. We can increase customer lifetime value by looking after the key determinants like customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer margin. IVR (Interactive Voice Recording) Systems have been in use recently to reduce the number of calls reaching an actual agent. Valuable insights on the reason for the call, the caller, Opt-out Rate, self-Services rates, and incorrect routes can be evaluated through IVR data.
Representative customer satisfaction metrics from FLASH, the analytical dashboard
2. Is your Product facing a regular or common problem?
Collating and categorizing issues is a great way to understand the product. A repeated complaint of the product needs to be fixed for future versions so that customers do not engage in expressing distress and reducing brand value. Categorizing these issues also helps in creating a common answer pool for contact centre employees. AI can be used to direct the calls to Subject Matter Experts to handle issues. This will reduce escalations and help employees with better ways to tackle problems. We can also perform sentiment mining to analyze the sentiment of the customers on service level parameters such as resolution effectiveness, feature variety, etc. by leveraging social media sentiments of the public on various products or services of clients for improved business services.
3. Is your Contact Centre Efficient?
First call resolution (FCR) is an important metric that measures the efficiency of the contact centre to solve issues in the first call. A long waiting time is another factor for low customer satisfaction. Measuring the average delay of calls or the call abandon rate or the response time will give us an idea about the need for more staffing to handle the surge in calls. Response time metrics and call resolution metrics are indicators of efficiency(image below depicts metrics from an AI-driven dashboard, FLASH). Customer Effort Analysis can be performed to measure the efforts spent by customers to get various services rendered through various touchpoints. Customer journey analysis can be used to identify the pain points that customers face while traversing channels for a specific purpose. Path analysis can help identify the patterns in the menu/caller path in a time slot. All metric dimensions can then be evaluated to arrive at actionable insights about the customer segment in qualifying dominant paths, dependent paths, and average time spent on the path, etc.
4. Is your Employee productive?
Average Sales per Agent is the measure of sales that an agent closes within a time period. We can use this metric to award agents performing well and provide targets for employees to work towards. An agent’s Utilization and Average Handle Time are two primary contact centre metrics to focus on when trying to measure an agent’s productivity. We must also be careful of the escalations that an agent faces and train employees who need to improve performance.
5. How many Customers at risk of attrition?
According to contactcenterpipeline.com, Attrition is considered the No. 1 challenge 27% (up from 19.2%) for contact centres in 2020. Measuring the Net Promoter Score or NPS of customers helps us to plan a better approach for managing customers who are at risk of attrition. Predicting churn rate qualifies the steady-state level of customers at any point in the network.
6. Are there any opportunities for Upsell and cross-sell?
Affinity analysis/association rules of mining are used to analyze the co-occurrence of relationships among activities performed by customers and discover the cross-sell/up-sell opportunities accordingly. Recommendation Systems help identify products customers need and help contact centres create personalized offers based on purchase history and products commonly bought together. Use of Uplift Modelling can be used to identify the right set of customers(the persuadable) to be targeted for marketing campaigns.
7. Can your competitor be a reason for low sales?
As contact centres are a hub of engagement, customers often give honest feedback on products. You also find that many potential clients are already using your competitor products. Employee engagement plays an important role in analyzing these potential risks to the business. Predicting the customer churn rate helps to identify the customers who are likely to leave the network.
Contact Centres are now moving into a space of self-service where customers are adapting to emerging artificial intelligence software and chatbots. Customers today do not like waiting for calls to be answered, they would rather finish queries through chatbots that do not consume time. IVR systems are slowly being replaced by intelligent assistants that provide human-like interactions. Having an advanced chatbot and analyzing its response can help you understand your customers. With these forms of service, direct calling and email, data is being collected from multiple sources. Decision-makers need regular reports to keep track of their performance. While automating this data is now a necessity, the use of AI to analyze this data is a competitive advantage. AI-based dashboards give you the insights needed to understand your data. They highlight possible improvements and forecast staffing depending on query traffic. They group dissatisfaction and anger sentiments and analyze agents who deal better with these emotions. Customer sentiments change with time, people are more impatient and now more sensitive due to long hours indoors. Many factors can be associated with good or bad performance and identifying these factors can be tricky for decision-makers. AI learning, analyses your data in real-time and helps you get a holistic view of your business. Analyzing and processing this data turns your contact center into an answering hub. Companies that ignore customer service face an inevitable fate of resentment and destroyed brand image. FLASH, a product by geniSIGHTS ensures your contact centre does more than just calls. FLASH is a one of a kind voice-powered AI tool that gives your contact centre the power to stay ahead of the competition and give highly efficient results. Our solution uses advanced analytical techniques through various statistical models and machine learning algorithms to qualify underlying patterns and mine hidden insights from data. It is lightweight and cloud-based, facilitating analysis at your fingertips even as you sit at home during this lockdown. Contact us at https://flash.genisights.com/ for a demo today.
