Personalised customer experience is now possible at better values. With a filtered, informed insight on consumer demands, companies may also tailor-fit their inventories, saving wasteful production costs. Efforts are optimised, and
customers are satisfied. Both parties win.
Nike, the world’s biggest and most prolific sports retail brand, has taken this personalised customer experience offering a notch higher by combining its recommendation tool with augmented reality tech. In select markets, customers may determine their shoe sizes by simply taking a photo of their feet through its mobile app. The sizes are even optimised per shoe type. A customer’s best fit may be a size nine for a Nike Pegasus but a size 8.5 for a Nike Cortez, since running shoes need more space for better cushioning.
The company’s execs say the app can determine the shoe size of a customer better as it learns over time, so if a customer buys more shoes, the app will get better in the long run. That may be more of a marketing tactic to get you to buy more shoes, but I would bet that it works.
This is just the beginning of the transformational effects of AI on businesses. According to the latest IDC survey in 2018, only 14 per cent of businesses in Southeast Asia have adopted the technology. With more embracing the tech, artificial intelligence is set to transform not just board rooms but production lines too.
In the Philippines, AI is already threatening to massively upend an entire industry—business process outsourcing. Chatbots or AI-operated assistants have proven to be the quicker and more cost-efficient responder to customer inquiries, replacing human call centre agents altogether.
Also Read: How not to build a bot: 3 steps to a cringeworthy chatbot experience
Conversational commerce
Commerce is perhaps one area where AI seems to be making the most noticeable leaps and bounds. When Siri was introduced by Apple in 2011, retailers thought customers would eventually shop for their favourite clothes or their pantry needs as easily as calling a friend through voice assistants. Almost a decade since though, the market, especially in emerging countries, is yet to embrace voice commerce. But they’ve turned to another force of conversations today to do the shopping in their stead: chat assistants.
In the Philippines, the third most visited platform is Facebook Messenger, with nine out of 10 internet users in the country utilizing the service regularly. Aware of Filipinos’ love for chat, some consumer brands, including financial services such as banks and e-wallets, have deployed highly interactive chatbots on its Facebook pages to engage with customers.
Philippine startup Aiah is one of the leading startups in the Philippines to develop interactive bots for select brands that want to participate in conversational commerce. It has automated chat conversations for brands to help them with leads generation or customer service. “For one of our clients, we have automated how the page will respond when a user clicks on their ad on Facebook, which fast-tracked the application process for the service o$ered,” Aiah co-founder Gian Paulo dela Rama said.
The chatbot, instead of just forwarding the inquiry to a human customer service officer, interacts with the user instead, asking standard questions, from requesting the applicant’s name to requesting their identification documents.
At the backend, the chatbot also simultaneously checks if that specific user’s location can be catered to by the specific service offered by Aiah’s client since it’s site-sensitive. That mere process alone has optimised the application process, enabling the company to cut it down from two weeks to two days.
An illustration by Manix Abrera, taken from the book “Ready or Not 2020: The 5 Trends Changing the Landscape of Business” by Winston Damarillo
Also Read: Ways to improve your brand awareness with chatbots
And this is just the beginning of the chatbots’ takeover. Gian has shared that in a few years’ time, chatbots will also get better at identifying the tone of the customer, so the bot can anticipate negative emotions and have better responses to prevent dissatisfaction. Chatbots can help brands provide a drastically better customer experience. Empathy can even be taught to machines.
Already, chatbots are cheaper, faster and sometimes more effective than their human counterparts. After all, chatbots don’t get exhausted from hours of responding to human inquiries. The exciting part is, chatbots are just one level of automation. The more labour-extensive work happens at the backend, which
involves another type of AI—robot process automation.
If chatbots automate responses on any messaging service, RPA (robot process automation) automates any manual work with a computer. Think of any job that involves paper, forms, or interactions. Soon, encoding work will be done by computers alone. There are computers today that can scan hundreds and thousands of forms in 24 hours. Imagine how transformative that can be to companies that still rely on human agents to manually type out written text, and encoders who sit day in and day out just transferring written text to the screen.
In the insurance technology or insurtech space, Saphron, has found a way to make the lives of their agents easier by giving them an AI-powered assistant called NAN.AI. A bot on Messenger, NAN.AI allows agents to simply upload the photo of application forms online, which then identifies the written text and enters it into the system as fully-parsed data. This cuts the onboarding process from days to mere minutes, transferring the manual work of typing out thousands of text “fields to the machine. With a faster process, Saphron is able to provide more in less time, helping not just the agent but the insured customers as well.
AI is set up to complement human work, freeing humans from simple, routine jobs, and allowing people to do more creative, stimulating tasks. Technology has always been adapted to humans, not the other way around. AI’s ability to do simple tasks at scale has also made deployment of seemingly sophisticated tasks
easier, allowing more markets to have access to better opportunities.
Also Read: Ways to improve your brand awareness with chatbots
That immense impact to markets is already felt in the fintech scene, where startups are utilising machine learning to reach unserved and underserved markets more efficiently.
The country’s leading microinsurance provider, CARD MRI, for example, now employs AI to develop a credit scoring scheme for the masses. The company feels it could provide affordable, formal loans to those at the bottom of the pyramid, where the majority of their five-million large customer base doesn’t have the documents for a traditional bank.
To do this, they are filtering their current customer dataset based on a set of criteria. The criteria would allow them to see the customers who are diligent payors, those who have good credit history and even the amounts they are paying. From just their dataset alone, CARD MRI already knows who will most likely be the best customers to provide better loan packages, without checking their documents. Suddenly, the five million customer base is down to a few hundred thousand —a customer base their agents could better focus their efforts on and help with their financial needs.
That effort would have taken months, even years, if done by a few hundred agents who will assess each loan applicant’s documents. It frees up both the company from laborious work and the customer from going through rigorous effort just to complete requirements. It all seems beneficial on paper to the loan provider, but with this kind of process, the customer is also given access to better packages with less waiting time.
That could be life-changing for the market CARD wants to serve, especially when chances are, their lives are a race against time. It could mean a student gets to pay tuition on time, or a farmer can buy the proper fertilisers for richer harvests next season. AI is now increasingly affecting everyday customers, even without their knowing.
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This story has been excerpted by courtesy of the publisher from Ready or Not 2020: The 5 Trends Changing the Landscape of Business by Winston Damarillo (Talino Venture Labs, 2020).
To purchase the book, please visit this site.
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