As an industry, we are on the cusp of a new frontier that pairs the power of natural human language with advanced machine intelligence—Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft said at Build 2016.*
The recent launch of Google Allo ushers in an age of chatbots, where companies will increasingly rely on AI-based technologies for providing a seamless and personalized customer service experience. Will bot technology be at the forefront of the AI revolution globally?
Artificial Intelligence (AI), today, is receiving more traction than ever before, especially the field of conversational bots that has grown exponentially. The definition of bot stays simple—it is a software entity that converses with humans using AI. But with the advancements in AI, bots today have become more human-like and are being applied in a variety of applications.
For a long time, AI bots were unheard of and were mostly portrayed in sci-fi movies as super-intelligent entities that either help save the world or take over it.
It all changed when big corporations announced their investment plans in AI—Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have dived into AI-powered bot technologies and are investing huge chunks of money and time in developing AI. It is the recent involvement of these companies that has brought bots into the limelight. With the arrival of Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant, it is pretty clear as to how much the ‘bot’ buzzword has caught on and where this trend is going to take the world in the coming years.
Advantages
No matter which vertical a business operates in, it is imperative for it to see the rise of bots as a great opportunity—to connect with their customers at a whole new level that helps not only enhance customer-brand relationships but also personalize the customer service experience. Your customers do not have to download any special app to get connected, instead all they need to do is to open their favorite messaging app to start conversing with your bot.
Bots provide a highly personalized experience by filtering out user needs in chat sessions that can last for a minute or two. It is this aspect of personalization that is inspiring major ecommerce players to build bots that help their customers decide better on online purchases.
Esta historia es de la edición November-December 2016 de The Smart Manager.
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Esta historia es de la edición November-December 2016 de The Smart Manager.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
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Building A Quality Culture
A strong company culture defined by its values, beliefs, and behaviors, has a profound impact on its products and services. More so in today’s VUCA world, where to stay relevant and maintain a competitive edge, it is critical for organizations to build a culture that focuses on quality. Suresh Lulla, author of Quality Fables, elucidates through significant examples how creating a culture of quality is imperative to driving success and productivity.
Customers For Life
The history of General Motors in India can be traced back to the 1920s, when it became the first automotive company to set up an assembly plant in the country. The relationship since then has not been as fruitful as GM would have hoped. GM’s flagship brand, Chevrolet, was introduced in India to build upon the success of the popular Opel marque. However, success has been fleeting at best—an issue that GM India is determined to rectify. It aims to do so by adopting a two-pronged approach: using customer feedback to influence product development, and delivering a superior sales-to-service experience.
The Digital Shift
… technology will radically disrupt HR in the near future. Indeed, it is already changing the way HR works and the role it plays and opening the door to a new type of “digital HR” function.1 The rise of digital and social media is changing the dynamics of HR and creating new ways of hiring, engaging, and retaining employees.
The Story Of Telling
“The best brands are built on great stories,”* this remark by Ian Rowden best captures the strategy of diligent brand building. Much more than attractive logos or the products themselves, what builds a brand is how successfully a story is woven around it. Brand marketers have to be good storytellers indeed.
Complexity Is Simpler Than You Think
Kay Kendall and Glenn Bodinson, authors of Leading the Malcolm Baldrige Way, shatter myths about excellence models such as Baldrige and EFQM.
Proponents of Isolation Never Become Victors
Multilateralism in the political and economic space has always led to frameworks that favor the mighty. WTO was no exception. With agriculture kept out of its purview, it could never become a truly fair and free trading system. China was the only large emerging economy that exploited relative openness in low-cost manufactured goods to take full advantage of the system. Other emerging economies could at best garner minor gains.
A History Lesson (From Year One) for Trump and the Brexit Crowd: Isolationism Has Never Worked!
Professor Stephane Garelli on growing isolationism.
A Win-Win Game
Business is not a sport where some stakeholder has to lose or fare badly for others to do well. Building an atmosphere of trust and transparency between all stakeholders will help companies retain them even during adverse times.
A Sustainable Model
With a total market value of $4.3 trillion and an employment base of at least 1.3 million direct employees and millions of others indirectly employed, platforms have become an important economic force.*Companies today are constantly looking for ways to build platforms—Infosys Ltd announced its plans of monetizing its platforms to make them a $2 billion business by March 2021. But are all platform businesses successful?
Custom Made
…three in four consumers said they receive too many emails from brands, and one-fifth said they could not handle the current volume…69 per cent have ‘unfollowed’ brands on social media, closed their accounts or cancelled subscriptions.*In these times, when the market is flooded with products and services, the most efficent way to engage customers is to offer them customized content. To achieve this, brands need to focus on observing the nuances of individual preferences.
