Maximising Productivity with AI

Tuesday 15^th May 2018 – A Great afternoon at the Brewery in London as Rebecca Lawrence and Kerry Gidziewicz attended the CCMA Seminar “Maximising Productivity with AI Solutions”, ahead of the evenings UK National Contact Centre Awards hosted by Ann-Marie Stagg.

Key speakers:

Ann Marie Stagg, CEO of the CCMA, Matthew Chatterton, Director and Head of B2B Customer Experience Ipsos MORI, Sue Preston, Director of Solution Sales at Microsoft, Mark Foyster, VP World Wide Sales and MD UK, VeriPark and Rishi Srivastava, Executive Digital Strategy Advisor at Microsoft.

Ipsos MORI talked about what the public thinks about AI and what that means for brands. Microsoft talked about what we are thinking and how AI is evolving for consumers and for our industry. eBECS talked about how a seamless customer experience can be achieved across channels and VeriPark discussed how AI is delivering ‘Next Best Activity’ solutions to maximise effectiveness and efficiency.

Ipsos’s Matthew Chatterton, shared where the public’s head is at with AI, which is wondering if 15-20 million jobs will be affected?

The statistics show that there seems to be an even split on the benefits outweighing the risks, however, only 16% of people are comfortable with AI making decisions and 58% disagree.

There are pragmatic considerations to determine attitudes:

1. Intention
2. Benefit
3. Necessity
4. Appropriateness
5. Autonomy

Questions the public are asking are:

• Will AI replace me….The short answer is NO!

• Could this technology harm me, replace me, depersonalise me, restrict me?
• Could it, benefit me / others, save a lot of time, give me better choices?

How will AI impact on trust? Here’s the percentage of people agreeing they trust businesses to:

Innovate -72%

Economic Growth – 59%

Deliver the standard of products – 58%

Treat employees well – 39%

Communicate frequently and honestly – 34%

Data is the fundamental fuel of AI.  42% of people think that businesses should continue to develop and use AI and Robotics to automate work, where 15% disagree.

32% of people think the organisation that the operator or machine works for is at blame if it goes wrong. So, what can organisations and brands do? They can integrate AI within the customer journey so that it enhances the experience and reassures customers. It will help customers understand and ensure that AI aligns with and supports factors that build trusted relationships.

On another recent study, 72% think that customer service is getting too automated and is impersonal.

Sue Preston, Director of Microsoft quoted Theresa May “The UK is ready for AI” and how companies in the FMCG market have seen the full benefit of this intelligence.

38% of UK CEO’s are exploring the benefits of humans vs machines compared to 52% globally.

Rishi Srivastava from Microsoft talked about how our world is changing, technology gives us joy, a chance to be silly, a chance to be nuts, helps us to share, helps us to chat etc. AI can translate languages in real-time across countries.

Our world is transforming:

• Decentralisation
• Automation
• Trust
• Immersion

From 2016 to today, we have seen advancements in object recognition to human parity, speech recognition to human parity, machine reading comprehension and machine translation.

Life is complicated, how do we use AI to simplify it? One example is Google maps which is Artificial Intelligence.

The UK (38%) are behind the rest of the world (52%) when it comes to exploring the benefits of humans and machines working together. We are only at the beginning of what AI could achieve, in the UK, a new AI start-up is created every week.

It is estimated that $1.2 Trillion of additional revenue / shifting revenue will be driven by AI in 3 years. It is predicted that 85% of people will be using it by 2020.

Rishi talked about what we are thinking and how AI is evolving for consumers and for our industry.

Microsoft has had a breakthrough with AI after 25 years of AI developments. Speech recognition beats human parity. The AI transformation, Digital agents, this will transform your engagement with customers and employees.

It is predicted that 95% of customer interactions will be powered by AI bots including telephone and online by 2025. Business processes will also see an increase with 85% using AI on at least one process by 2020.

The business challenges for implementing Artificial Intelligence is –

• High Cost
• Long time to market
• High cost of acquisition
• High cost / income ratio for servicing

It seems that the public are not sure that AI is the way forward to surely further testing is needed before throwing robots at the most valuable – the customer. Trial it with your back office first.

Next to talk was Melanie Andrews from EBECs and who spoke about Cognitive CRM and the Seamless Customer Experience and how this can retain and grow business.  Melanie was joined by Mark Foyster at Veripark UK who spoke about the typical challenge in modern Contact Centres and how the omnichannel function is the evolution of multichannel, allowing customers to start with one device and finish on another – Mark spoke about the famous 3 click solution; statistics show that 80% of people interact with BOTS in the evening.

Mark Billingham from Shop Direct spoke about self-service and robotics with questions flowing from the audience at the event.

Ann- Marie Stagg questioned – ‘if customers are our most valued asset, why are we risking their customer experience to explore this intelligence, where it can be explored first within HR or Finance Departments before exposing the customer, our finest asset?’

Ultimately it comes down to is giving the Customer the CHOICE of communication

It was a very insightful and interesting seminar and it showed us that we have some exciting times ahead.

Rebecca Lawrence and Kerry Gidziewicz