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Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

Search

Latest

\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

Search

Latest

\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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\n

\u201cALYSIA does not replace songwriters, it just makes them better at what they do,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. This statement points to what she feels is the real power of AI; the ability to empower people to do more. She compares the future of AI-assisted songwriting to the rise in consumer photography via smartphones. In the same way smartphone cameras made everyone an amateur photographer, so will ALYSIA make everyone an amateur songwriter. This alludes to a future where people will be skilled at operating AI that performs tasks that the operators may not be good at. \u201cRoles may change as technology progresses,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman, \u201cbut computers will not overtake us as humans. Instead, they will only get more useful to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

Search

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\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cALYSIA does not replace songwriters, it just makes them better at what they do,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. This statement points to what she feels is the real power of AI; the ability to empower people to do more. She compares the future of AI-assisted songwriting to the rise in consumer photography via smartphones. In the same way smartphone cameras made everyone an amateur photographer, so will ALYSIA make everyone an amateur songwriter. This alludes to a future where people will be skilled at operating AI that performs tasks that the operators may not be good at. \u201cRoles may change as technology progresses,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman, \u201cbut computers will not overtake us as humans. Instead, they will only get more useful to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

Search

Latest

\n

As AI advances, she points out; there needs to be in place social and political structures in place that allow society to participate in defining and determining the future of AI. This way, such powerful tools will be developed to benefit humanity and not just a few. Such a forum will also ensure that the limits of AI applications are set in preference of society. As such, AI applications will not be developed and deployed in an abrupt manner that would shatter society through job losses and autonomous AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cALYSIA does not replace songwriters, it just makes them better at what they do,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. This statement points to what she feels is the real power of AI; the ability to empower people to do more. She compares the future of AI-assisted songwriting to the rise in consumer photography via smartphones. In the same way smartphone cameras made everyone an amateur photographer, so will ALYSIA make everyone an amateur songwriter. This alludes to a future where people will be skilled at operating AI that performs tasks that the operators may not be good at. \u201cRoles may change as technology progresses,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman, \u201cbut computers will not overtake us as humans. Instead, they will only get more useful to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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\n

\u201cSocial impact is always an issue when it comes to technology,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. She explains that some of the issues that AI is raising have to do with social issues like job security, warfare and other sectors of society. \u201cAI must be approached from a humanistic perspective, with emphasis on what implications the applications have on society and humanity,\u201d she continues. She points out that while technology can have multiple applications, it should be focused on providing humans with greater freedom, empowerment, and capabilities, things that will not detract from humanity but enhance humanity\u2019s options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As AI advances, she points out; there needs to be in place social and political structures in place that allow society to participate in defining and determining the future of AI. This way, such powerful tools will be developed to benefit humanity and not just a few. Such a forum will also ensure that the limits of AI applications are set in preference of society. As such, AI applications will not be developed and deployed in an abrupt manner that would shatter society through job losses and autonomous AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cALYSIA does not replace songwriters, it just makes them better at what they do,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. This statement points to what she feels is the real power of AI; the ability to empower people to do more. She compares the future of AI-assisted songwriting to the rise in consumer photography via smartphones. In the same way smartphone cameras made everyone an amateur photographer, so will ALYSIA make everyone an amateur songwriter. This alludes to a future where people will be skilled at operating AI that performs tasks that the operators may not be good at. \u201cRoles may change as technology progresses,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman, \u201cbut computers will not overtake us as humans. Instead, they will only get more useful to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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Latest

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Social Structures<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSocial impact is always an issue when it comes to technology,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. She explains that some of the issues that AI is raising have to do with social issues like job security, warfare and other sectors of society. \u201cAI must be approached from a humanistic perspective, with emphasis on what implications the applications have on society and humanity,\u201d she continues. She points out that while technology can have multiple applications, it should be focused on providing humans with greater freedom, empowerment, and capabilities, things that will not detract from humanity but enhance humanity\u2019s options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As AI advances, she points out; there needs to be in place social and political structures in place that allow society to participate in defining and determining the future of AI. This way, such powerful tools will be developed to benefit humanity and not just a few. Such a forum will also ensure that the limits of AI applications are set in preference of society. As such, AI applications will not be developed and deployed in an abrupt manner that would shatter society through job losses and autonomous AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cALYSIA does not replace songwriters, it just makes them better at what they do,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. This statement points to what she feels is the real power of AI; the ability to empower people to do more. She compares the future of AI-assisted songwriting to the rise in consumer photography via smartphones. In the same way smartphone cameras made everyone an amateur photographer, so will ALYSIA make everyone an amateur songwriter. This alludes to a future where people will be skilled at operating AI that performs tasks that the operators may not be good at. \u201cRoles may change as technology progresses,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman, \u201cbut computers will not overtake us as humans. Instead, they will only get more useful to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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\n

\u201cMachines are extremely good at creating options,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. However, she says that what machines are not very good at is choosing, something that humans are very good at doing. If you ask anyone to pick between two paintings, they will be able to do so, no matter whether they can create similar paintings or not. What she sees from this bifurcation of skills is an opportunity to collaborate in the creative process. With AI providing options and humans acting as a filter making choices, there can exist a symbiotic relationship between AI and humans, allowing humans to create ever faster, more accurately and more creatively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social Structures<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSocial impact is always an issue when it comes to technology,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. She explains that some of the issues that AI is raising have to do with social issues like job security, warfare and other sectors of society. \u201cAI must be approached from a humanistic perspective, with emphasis on what implications the applications have on society and humanity,\u201d she continues. She points out that while technology can have multiple applications, it should be focused on providing humans with greater freedom, empowerment, and capabilities, things that will not detract from humanity but enhance humanity\u2019s options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As AI advances, she points out; there needs to be in place social and political structures in place that allow society to participate in defining and determining the future of AI. This way, such powerful tools will be developed to benefit humanity and not just a few. Such a forum will also ensure that the limits of AI applications are set in preference of society. As such, AI applications will not be developed and deployed in an abrupt manner that would shatter society through job losses and autonomous AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cALYSIA does not replace songwriters, it just makes them better at what they do,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. This statement points to what she feels is the real power of AI; the ability to empower people to do more. She compares the future of AI-assisted songwriting to the rise in consumer photography via smartphones. In the same way smartphone cameras made everyone an amateur photographer, so will ALYSIA make everyone an amateur songwriter. This alludes to a future where people will be skilled at operating AI that performs tasks that the operators may not be good at. \u201cRoles may change as technology progresses,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman, \u201cbut computers will not overtake us as humans. Instead, they will only get more useful to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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\n

In Japan, there is a cultural trend that is catching on where musical concerts have hologram performers and machine-synthesized songs. While there are humans behind these events, the entire performance is conducted without any humans in sight. \u201cWhile computers can be taught to simulate emotion, they cannot spontaneously create genuine emotions,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. \u201cThis is an important aspect about AI in that it cannot replace the connections that humans have with each other.\u201d While a time will come when such performances may pass the Turing Test, she says, the human factor will still be the main thing that differentiates humans from machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMachines are extremely good at creating options,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. However, she says that what machines are not very good at is choosing, something that humans are very good at doing. If you ask anyone to pick between two paintings, they will be able to do so, no matter whether they can create similar paintings or not. What she sees from this bifurcation of skills is an opportunity to collaborate in the creative process. With AI providing options and humans acting as a filter making choices, there can exist a symbiotic relationship between AI and humans, allowing humans to create ever faster, more accurately and more creatively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social Structures<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSocial impact is always an issue when it comes to technology,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. She explains that some of the issues that AI is raising have to do with social issues like job security, warfare and other sectors of society. \u201cAI must be approached from a humanistic perspective, with emphasis on what implications the applications have on society and humanity,\u201d she continues. She points out that while technology can have multiple applications, it should be focused on providing humans with greater freedom, empowerment, and capabilities, things that will not detract from humanity but enhance humanity\u2019s options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As AI advances, she points out; there needs to be in place social and political structures in place that allow society to participate in defining and determining the future of AI. This way, such powerful tools will be developed to benefit humanity and not just a few. Such a forum will also ensure that the limits of AI applications are set in preference of society. As such, AI applications will not be developed and deployed in an abrupt manner that would shatter society through job losses and autonomous AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cALYSIA does not replace songwriters, it just makes them better at what they do,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. This statement points to what she feels is the real power of AI; the ability to empower people to do more. She compares the future of AI-assisted songwriting to the rise in consumer photography via smartphones. In the same way smartphone cameras made everyone an amateur photographer, so will ALYSIA make everyone an amateur songwriter. This alludes to a future where people will be skilled at operating AI that performs tasks that the operators may not be good at. \u201cRoles may change as technology progresses,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman, \u201cbut computers will not overtake us as humans. Instead, they will only get more useful to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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Latest

\n

The Human Factor<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In Japan, there is a cultural trend that is catching on where musical concerts have hologram performers and machine-synthesized songs. While there are humans behind these events, the entire performance is conducted without any humans in sight. \u201cWhile computers can be taught to simulate emotion, they cannot spontaneously create genuine emotions,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. \u201cThis is an important aspect about AI in that it cannot replace the connections that humans have with each other.\u201d While a time will come when such performances may pass the Turing Test, she says, the human factor will still be the main thing that differentiates humans from machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMachines are extremely good at creating options,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. However, she says that what machines are not very good at is choosing, something that humans are very good at doing. If you ask anyone to pick between two paintings, they will be able to do so, no matter whether they can create similar paintings or not. What she sees from this bifurcation of skills is an opportunity to collaborate in the creative process. With AI providing options and humans acting as a filter making choices, there can exist a symbiotic relationship between AI and humans, allowing humans to create ever faster, more accurately and more creatively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social Structures<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSocial impact is always an issue when it comes to technology,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. She explains that some of the issues that AI is raising have to do with social issues like job security, warfare and other sectors of society. \u201cAI must be approached from a humanistic perspective, with emphasis on what implications the applications have on society and humanity,\u201d she continues. She points out that while technology can have multiple applications, it should be focused on providing humans with greater freedom, empowerment, and capabilities, things that will not detract from humanity but enhance humanity\u2019s options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As AI advances, she points out; there needs to be in place social and political structures in place that allow society to participate in defining and determining the future of AI. This way, such powerful tools will be developed to benefit humanity and not just a few. Such a forum will also ensure that the limits of AI applications are set in preference of society. As such, AI applications will not be developed and deployed in an abrupt manner that would shatter society through job losses and autonomous AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cALYSIA does not replace songwriters, it just makes them better at what they do,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. This statement points to what she feels is the real power of AI; the ability to empower people to do more. She compares the future of AI-assisted songwriting to the rise in consumer photography via smartphones. In the same way smartphone cameras made everyone an amateur photographer, so will ALYSIA make everyone an amateur songwriter. This alludes to a future where people will be skilled at operating AI that performs tasks that the operators may not be good at. \u201cRoles may change as technology progresses,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman, \u201cbut computers will not overtake us as humans. Instead, they will only get more useful to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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\n

\u201cThe definition of intelligence is closely tied to what makes us human, hence the changes over time,\u201d suggests Dr. Ackerman. She points out that when the definition of human intelligence begins to become conflated with that of machine intelligence, it affects the very essence of who we are as humans, a situation that creates a sense of anxiety around AI. However, referring to ALYSIA, Dr. Ackerman points out that AI\u2019s real utility is as a tool to make humans more intelligent, more powerful and able to achieve more. She clarifies that her AI platform is not built to replace human intelligence, but augment and enhance it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Human Factor<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In Japan, there is a cultural trend that is catching on where musical concerts have hologram performers and machine-synthesized songs. While there are humans behind these events, the entire performance is conducted without any humans in sight. \u201cWhile computers can be taught to simulate emotion, they cannot spontaneously create genuine emotions,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. \u201cThis is an important aspect about AI in that it cannot replace the connections that humans have with each other.\u201d While a time will come when such performances may pass the Turing Test, she says, the human factor will still be the main thing that differentiates humans from machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMachines are extremely good at creating options,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. However, she says that what machines are not very good at is choosing, something that humans are very good at doing. If you ask anyone to pick between two paintings, they will be able to do so, no matter whether they can create similar paintings or not. What she sees from this bifurcation of skills is an opportunity to collaborate in the creative process. With AI providing options and humans acting as a filter making choices, there can exist a symbiotic relationship between AI and humans, allowing humans to create ever faster, more accurately and more creatively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social Structures<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSocial impact is always an issue when it comes to technology,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. She explains that some of the issues that AI is raising have to do with social issues like job security, warfare and other sectors of society. \u201cAI must be approached from a humanistic perspective, with emphasis on what implications the applications have on society and humanity,\u201d she continues. She points out that while technology can have multiple applications, it should be focused on providing humans with greater freedom, empowerment, and capabilities, things that will not detract from humanity but enhance humanity\u2019s options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As AI advances, she points out; there needs to be in place social and political structures in place that allow society to participate in defining and determining the future of AI. This way, such powerful tools will be developed to benefit humanity and not just a few. Such a forum will also ensure that the limits of AI applications are set in preference of society. As such, AI applications will not be developed and deployed in an abrupt manner that would shatter society through job losses and autonomous AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cALYSIA does not replace songwriters, it just makes them better at what they do,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. This statement points to what she feels is the real power of AI; the ability to empower people to do more. She compares the future of AI-assisted songwriting to the rise in consumer photography via smartphones. In the same way smartphone cameras made everyone an amateur photographer, so will ALYSIA make everyone an amateur songwriter. This alludes to a future where people will be skilled at operating AI that performs tasks that the operators may not be good at. \u201cRoles may change as technology progresses,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman, \u201cbut computers will not overtake us as humans. Instead, they will only get more useful to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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\n

\u201cThe definition of intelligence has evolved,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. \u201cIn the past, intelligence was characterized by things like speed and accuracy, two things that machines excel at,\u201d she says, \u201cbut that definition has changed to refer to an ability to tackle higher-order problem solving and creativity.\u201d This definition is crucial when it comes to defining what AI can and cannot do. For instance, machines are extremely competent at doing repetitive tasks, something that may not be considered as a form of intelligence. However, at the same time, through such repetitive tasks, AI can be trained to create at a level well beyond that of human capabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe definition of intelligence is closely tied to what makes us human, hence the changes over time,\u201d suggests Dr. Ackerman. She points out that when the definition of human intelligence begins to become conflated with that of machine intelligence, it affects the very essence of who we are as humans, a situation that creates a sense of anxiety around AI. However, referring to ALYSIA, Dr. Ackerman points out that AI\u2019s real utility is as a tool to make humans more intelligent, more powerful and able to achieve more. She clarifies that her AI platform is not built to replace human intelligence, but augment and enhance it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Human Factor<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In Japan, there is a cultural trend that is catching on where musical concerts have hologram performers and machine-synthesized songs. While there are humans behind these events, the entire performance is conducted without any humans in sight. \u201cWhile computers can be taught to simulate emotion, they cannot spontaneously create genuine emotions,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. \u201cThis is an important aspect about AI in that it cannot replace the connections that humans have with each other.\u201d While a time will come when such performances may pass the Turing Test, she says, the human factor will still be the main thing that differentiates humans from machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMachines are extremely good at creating options,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. However, she says that what machines are not very good at is choosing, something that humans are very good at doing. If you ask anyone to pick between two paintings, they will be able to do so, no matter whether they can create similar paintings or not. What she sees from this bifurcation of skills is an opportunity to collaborate in the creative process. With AI providing options and humans acting as a filter making choices, there can exist a symbiotic relationship between AI and humans, allowing humans to create ever faster, more accurately and more creatively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social Structures<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSocial impact is always an issue when it comes to technology,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. She explains that some of the issues that AI is raising have to do with social issues like job security, warfare and other sectors of society. \u201cAI must be approached from a humanistic perspective, with emphasis on what implications the applications have on society and humanity,\u201d she continues. She points out that while technology can have multiple applications, it should be focused on providing humans with greater freedom, empowerment, and capabilities, things that will not detract from humanity but enhance humanity\u2019s options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As AI advances, she points out; there needs to be in place social and political structures in place that allow society to participate in defining and determining the future of AI. This way, such powerful tools will be developed to benefit humanity and not just a few. Such a forum will also ensure that the limits of AI applications are set in preference of society. As such, AI applications will not be developed and deployed in an abrupt manner that would shatter society through job losses and autonomous AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cALYSIA does not replace songwriters, it just makes them better at what they do,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. This statement points to what she feels is the real power of AI; the ability to empower people to do more. She compares the future of AI-assisted songwriting to the rise in consumer photography via smartphones. In the same way smartphone cameras made everyone an amateur photographer, so will ALYSIA make everyone an amateur songwriter. This alludes to a future where people will be skilled at operating AI that performs tasks that the operators may not be good at. \u201cRoles may change as technology progresses,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman, \u201cbut computers will not overtake us as humans. Instead, they will only get more useful to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

Search

Latest

\n

Intelligence<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe definition of intelligence has evolved,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. \u201cIn the past, intelligence was characterized by things like speed and accuracy, two things that machines excel at,\u201d she says, \u201cbut that definition has changed to refer to an ability to tackle higher-order problem solving and creativity.\u201d This definition is crucial when it comes to defining what AI can and cannot do. For instance, machines are extremely competent at doing repetitive tasks, something that may not be considered as a form of intelligence. However, at the same time, through such repetitive tasks, AI can be trained to create at a level well beyond that of human capabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe definition of intelligence is closely tied to what makes us human, hence the changes over time,\u201d suggests Dr. Ackerman. She points out that when the definition of human intelligence begins to become conflated with that of machine intelligence, it affects the very essence of who we are as humans, a situation that creates a sense of anxiety around AI. However, referring to ALYSIA, Dr. Ackerman points out that AI\u2019s real utility is as a tool to make humans more intelligent, more powerful and able to achieve more. She clarifies that her AI platform is not built to replace human intelligence, but augment and enhance it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Human Factor<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In Japan, there is a cultural trend that is catching on where musical concerts have hologram performers and machine-synthesized songs. While there are humans behind these events, the entire performance is conducted without any humans in sight. \u201cWhile computers can be taught to simulate emotion, they cannot spontaneously create genuine emotions,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. \u201cThis is an important aspect about AI in that it cannot replace the connections that humans have with each other.\u201d While a time will come when such performances may pass the Turing Test, she says, the human factor will still be the main thing that differentiates humans from machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMachines are extremely good at creating options,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. However, she says that what machines are not very good at is choosing, something that humans are very good at doing. If you ask anyone to pick between two paintings, they will be able to do so, no matter whether they can create similar paintings or not. What she sees from this bifurcation of skills is an opportunity to collaborate in the creative process. With AI providing options and humans acting as a filter making choices, there can exist a symbiotic relationship between AI and humans, allowing humans to create ever faster, more accurately and more creatively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social Structures<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSocial impact is always an issue when it comes to technology,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. She explains that some of the issues that AI is raising have to do with social issues like job security, warfare and other sectors of society. \u201cAI must be approached from a humanistic perspective, with emphasis on what implications the applications have on society and humanity,\u201d she continues. She points out that while technology can have multiple applications, it should be focused on providing humans with greater freedom, empowerment, and capabilities, things that will not detract from humanity but enhance humanity\u2019s options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As AI advances, she points out; there needs to be in place social and political structures in place that allow society to participate in defining and determining the future of AI. This way, such powerful tools will be developed to benefit humanity and not just a few. Such a forum will also ensure that the limits of AI applications are set in preference of society. As such, AI applications will not be developed and deployed in an abrupt manner that would shatter society through job losses and autonomous AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cALYSIA does not replace songwriters, it just makes them better at what they do,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. This statement points to what she feels is the real power of AI; the ability to empower people to do more. She compares the future of AI-assisted songwriting to the rise in consumer photography via smartphones. In the same way smartphone cameras made everyone an amateur photographer, so will ALYSIA make everyone an amateur songwriter. This alludes to a future where people will be skilled at operating AI that performs tasks that the operators may not be good at. \u201cRoles may change as technology progresses,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman, \u201cbut computers will not overtake us as humans. Instead, they will only get more useful to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

Search

Latest

\n

Artificial Intelligence or AI is a powerful technology that potentially has the power to create machines that can replace humans. This perception is the basis of the dread with which some consider AI and the fabled coming rise of the machines. However, AI, like any other technology, is a tool, says Dr. Maya Ackerman, founder, and CEO of AI startup WaveAI. She and her team are behind the breakthrough songwriting AI platform ALYSIA<\/a>, a platform that, in her words, can cut down songwriting from hours to just minutes. We recently caught up with Dr. Ackerman to discuss the future of AI in a world that values unique human characteristics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Intelligence<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe definition of intelligence has evolved,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. \u201cIn the past, intelligence was characterized by things like speed and accuracy, two things that machines excel at,\u201d she says, \u201cbut that definition has changed to refer to an ability to tackle higher-order problem solving and creativity.\u201d This definition is crucial when it comes to defining what AI can and cannot do. For instance, machines are extremely competent at doing repetitive tasks, something that may not be considered as a form of intelligence. However, at the same time, through such repetitive tasks, AI can be trained to create at a level well beyond that of human capabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe definition of intelligence is closely tied to what makes us human, hence the changes over time,\u201d suggests Dr. Ackerman. She points out that when the definition of human intelligence begins to become conflated with that of machine intelligence, it affects the very essence of who we are as humans, a situation that creates a sense of anxiety around AI. However, referring to ALYSIA, Dr. Ackerman points out that AI\u2019s real utility is as a tool to make humans more intelligent, more powerful and able to achieve more. She clarifies that her AI platform is not built to replace human intelligence, but augment and enhance it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Human Factor<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In Japan, there is a cultural trend that is catching on where musical concerts have hologram performers and machine-synthesized songs. While there are humans behind these events, the entire performance is conducted without any humans in sight. \u201cWhile computers can be taught to simulate emotion, they cannot spontaneously create genuine emotions,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. \u201cThis is an important aspect about AI in that it cannot replace the connections that humans have with each other.\u201d While a time will come when such performances may pass the Turing Test, she says, the human factor will still be the main thing that differentiates humans from machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMachines are extremely good at creating options,\u201d Dr. Ackerman says. However, she says that what machines are not very good at is choosing, something that humans are very good at doing. If you ask anyone to pick between two paintings, they will be able to do so, no matter whether they can create similar paintings or not. What she sees from this bifurcation of skills is an opportunity to collaborate in the creative process. With AI providing options and humans acting as a filter making choices, there can exist a symbiotic relationship between AI and humans, allowing humans to create ever faster, more accurately and more creatively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social Structures<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSocial impact is always an issue when it comes to technology,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. She explains that some of the issues that AI is raising have to do with social issues like job security, warfare and other sectors of society. \u201cAI must be approached from a humanistic perspective, with emphasis on what implications the applications have on society and humanity,\u201d she continues. She points out that while technology can have multiple applications, it should be focused on providing humans with greater freedom, empowerment, and capabilities, things that will not detract from humanity but enhance humanity\u2019s options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As AI advances, she points out; there needs to be in place social and political structures in place that allow society to participate in defining and determining the future of AI. This way, such powerful tools will be developed to benefit humanity and not just a few. Such a forum will also ensure that the limits of AI applications are set in preference of society. As such, AI applications will not be developed and deployed in an abrupt manner that would shatter society through job losses and autonomous AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cALYSIA does not replace songwriters, it just makes them better at what they do,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman. This statement points to what she feels is the real power of AI; the ability to empower people to do more. She compares the future of AI-assisted songwriting to the rise in consumer photography via smartphones. In the same way smartphone cameras made everyone an amateur photographer, so will ALYSIA make everyone an amateur songwriter. This alludes to a future where people will be skilled at operating AI that performs tasks that the operators may not be good at. \u201cRoles may change as technology progresses,\u201d says Dr. Ackerman, \u201cbut computers will not overtake us as humans. Instead, they will only get more useful to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO: Full Dr. Maya Ackerman Interview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wJr7ptLKP_8\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","post_title":"The Future of AI in a World of Irreplaceable Human Characteristics","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/the-future-of-ai-in-a-world-of-irreplaceable-human-characteristics\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":650,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-17 14:11:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-17 21:11:00","post_content":"\n

When the topic of customer centricity arises, what follows is often a conversation that is more about customer care than customer centricity. The discussion will revolve around customer care representatives, response times, call logging and other items related to customer care. However, customer centricity is an organization-wide, top-to-bottom focus on doing everything possible to make the customer happy. While customer care focuses on a department, customer centricity is a diffuse corporate culture that recruits everyone in the organization to work towards achieving the overarching objective of making and keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Zappos is perhaps the perfect example of how a small company managed to outmaneuver large retailers like Amazon and Footlocker to succeed in the hyper-competitive online retail shoe market. By embracing customer centricity as an organization-wide culture<\/a>, Zappos turned an onerous experience (buying shoes) into an enjoyable and streamlined experience. In the process, Zappos earned the trust and love of customers, resulting in such a massive competitive advantage that Amazon, anticipating imminent defeat in the retail online shoe market, ended up buying the company for $1.2 billion. This sale price was not for the inventory Zappos had, or even their technology, but rather, for the massive customer loyalty they had established by being a customer-centric company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, we highlight three digital transformation tools that can help any company become customer-centric and win the battle for customers\u2019 hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first step to achieving customer centricity is identifying customer needs. For smaller companies, this is not a major challenge as it is possible to measure customer interactions and even run in-person qualitative surveys. For large corporations with thousands of customers interacting with multiple departments, this process becomes complicated. However, there is one thing that large organizations have that can make the process of identifying and quantifying customer needs easier and faster: data. Most large organizations, especially those that have digital interactions with customers, collect mountains of data. The problem usually is that this data is in silos, abstracted, and hardly analyzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big data analytics can turn this data into actionable insights that organizations can harness to help direct their customer centricity efforts. McKinsey found<\/a> that organizations that manage to extract customer behavioral insights from data routinely outperform their peers, returning 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margins comparatively. However, organizations must be ready to break down data silos to create a single view of each customer. In this way, data collected in one department can be merged with data generated from multiple other departments to provide a holistic view of customer sentiments. To leverage big data, organizations should start by analyzing existing data to identify critical patterns, increase customer-focused productivity, identify and reward employee customer centricity efforts, and accelerate development of breakthrough solutions centered on customer centricity. Such data analysis would involve first categorizing and cleaning collected data, which would then undergo data modeling mapped onto identified business outcomes. Digital modeling tools such as Tableau, Strata, and Visio would be helpful in this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In an increasingly multi-device, customer-centric marketplace, organizations are facing a deluge of customer interactions from all directions. The average customer today has multiple communication apps on their phone, all of which they may use to reach an organization. Moreover, some of these digital channels may not directly address the organization, such as when a customer hashtag-mentions a business. This explosion in engagement channels has left organizations grappling with how to respond on all these fronts in a seamless, prompt and cost-effective manner. The answer to this challenge lies in developing a culture of customer centricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a hypothetical situation, a customer upset with a purchase angrily tweets, simultaneously @-mentioning the CEO and creating a dilemma for the company: does the CEO ask customer care to respond, or the PR department or respond personally? This dilemma happens all the time. By creating cross-channel data sharing, such an instance would instantly pull in the CEO, legal, PR and customer care to play a role in engaging the disgruntled customer, all while abstracting this process from the customer. By developing integrated and customer-aligned digital listening and interaction channels, organizations can provide faster, better quality and more personalized engagement that engenders customer loyalty while also bolstering brand equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The final piece in the puzzle is automation. With data, an organization can know what a customer needs, and with seamlessly integrated engagement channels, the organization can respond to customers using their preferred channel. Automation takes these two blocks and turns them into a repeatable and scalable formula deployable in multiple diverse scenarios. Automation tools like chatbots and AI-assisted call routing allow an organization to deploy customer centricity at scale through the rapid transformation of customer data into actionable customer-centric tactics. Through automation, employees can focus more on customer-centric tasks and less on rote, repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, Drift, a company that provides automated conversational marketing tools. The company recently launched Drift Intel<\/a>, a tool that serves up, in real time, contextual data about anonymous prospects agents are chatting with via the Drift chat application. This way, a sales agent has key details like the anonymous prospect\u2019s company, rank at the company and any other public data, enabling them to offer the prospect a better sales experience. By automating this step in the sales process, Drift Intel helps sales agents focus more on customer-centric activities such as providing data-driven solutions and less on traditional sales-related activities like prospect mining. Companies seeking to integrate, and scale customer centricity must be willing to embrace this level of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While overhauling a corporate culture takes time and requires significant political will within the organization, digital transformation affords some shortcuts to a customer-centric destination. By responsibly collecting and analyzing customer data, embracing integrated multi and cross-channel engagement and harnessing automation, organizations can compete more effectively in a market undergoing rapid digital transformation. Neglecting to do so exposes the organization to disruption by digital-first customer-centric startups focused entirely on giving customers the very experiences legacy businesses have been slow to offer.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Three Tools to Help You Build a Customer-Centric Company","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-02-11 15:36:41","post_modified_gmt":"2020-02-11 23:36:41","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/three-tools-to-help-you-build-a-customer-centric-company\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":false,"total_page":1},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"epic_block_5"};

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Blog: September 17, 2018

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