Conversational intelligence builds on the advancements in artificial intelligence and cognitive computing to help organisations to lower costs, lower risk, and increase value. This is achieved through a variety of outcomes, such as enhancing engagement through providing personalized understanding, scaling and elevating human expertise, infusing products and services with contextually aware knowledge, enabling automated, intelligent business process and powering the ability for disruptive data discovery and exploration that have otherwise eluded organisations for decades.
Conversations play an important role in building these relationships, but they are increasingly taking on digital forms, which are very hard to track. These conversations hold valuable information, but how can companies extract actionable insights? What role does Conversational Intelligence play?
Listen to an interview that Founder & CEO Neil Movold did with B2M's Simon Fawkes on the subject of Conversational Intelligence and the answers to these questions.
https://b2m.co.nz/conversational-intelligence/
3. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Increasing lack of actionable insights!
35% of the top 5,000 global companies
regularly fail to make insightful
decisions about significant changes in
their business and markets (source: Gartner)
65% executives agree increasingly
complex business environment has
made it more difficult to base decisions
on purely “functional” factors such as
cost, quality or efficiency (source: gyro/FORTUNE
Knowledge Group)
61% executives agree when making
decisions, human insights must
precede hard analytics (source: gyro/FORTUNE
Knowledge Group)
4. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Customer value is built on conversations
These conversations hold
invaluable insights that
traditional approaches to
managing corporate memory
cannot deal with and surface.
Conversations build the
relationships that drive
customer value and
experience.
Conversations are increasingly
taking on digital forms, such as
emails, documents, social media,
voice or video – adding more
unstructured dark data to the
growing corporate memory.
5. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Identifying emerging issues before they escalate
Companies need to leverage all their internal,
external and publicly available conversational
data to identify issues as quickly as possible to
get ahead of and avoid
o negative press,
o huge penalties by industry regulators;
and most importantly,
o to protect the safety of their customers.
Identifying emerging issues occurring within
conversations before they escalate helps protect
o reputations,
o customer loyalty and
o revenue.
6. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
The digital revolution continues globally – phone traffic drops 12%
Source: dimension data
Telephone
IVR
Automated Services
Email
Web Chat
Social Media – FB etc.
Smartphone App
SMS Text
Video Chat
Service Kiosk support
Website (peer-to-peer systems)
Customer engagement is shifting across
available channels as new technology
adoption increases and expectations evolve.
Developing models that can
reveal different and often hidden
aspects of an individual creates
insights that can be used to
o deepen relationships,
o shape initiatives; and
o drive innovation.
7. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Corporate memory is increasingly made up of conversational dark data!
BUSINESS
CRITICAL DATA
15%
REDUNDANT, OBSOLETE AND
TRIVIAL, OR
ROT DATA
DARK DATA, LURKING FAR
BENEATH THE LINE OF SIGHT
AND INCREASING 52%
48%
?
?
?
?
? ?
?
??
?
BUSINESS
CRITICAL DATA15%
REDUNDANT, OBSOLETE AND
TRIVIAL, OR
ROT DATA
DARK DATA - LURKING
FAR BENEATH THE LINE OF
SIGHT AND INCREASING! 52%
48%
Veritas: The Databerg Report 2016
seeing ALL data as a
strategic asset
?
??
8. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Corporate memory and blind spots are affecting decision making
What are your key business metrics and
where are
blind spots in making decisions
that can be better informed through
insight derived from your organisation’s
previously untapped sources of
unstructured conversational dark data
and dark knowledge (i.e. tacit knowledge)?
9. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Corporate amnesia is an increasing problem to conversational intelligence
Corporate amnesia is the loss of
accumulated corporate knowledge due to:
o employee departures
o changing workforce demands
(i.e. distributed workforce across the business including
freelance and remote work)
o a fragmented IT landscape
10. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Findability and access to all conversational knowledge is paramount!
Source: Jive Software global survey March 2017
Only 20% to 30% of all corporate memory
created is every used, creating huge risk
over time as stakeholder disconnects across
silos undermine the data’s value
11. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Humans excel at
reasoning, deep thinking, solving
complex problems
BUT…
the human ability to read, analyze,
and process huge volumes of data,
both structured and unstructured is
quite poor
and…
humans are time constrained, subject
to personal limits and limited by
unconscious biases that influence the
decisions we make
12. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Why is processing human data different?
Human data is growing 10x faster than
traditional business data.
It is mostly unstructured dark data and
knowledge made up of ideas, is diverse and
has context:
Ideas don’t exactly match like structured data
does as they generally have distance
Human information is not static – it’s dynamic
and lives everywhere
Traditional approaches (e.g. BI, analytics) fail
to process this valuable data.
cognitive approaches are needed!
14. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Enriching years of customer interaction and domain experience
Cognitive computing technology can
be used to create a customer
knowledge layer that enriches data
collected over years of customer
interaction and domain experience.
The platform combines data (e.g. CRM,
care or account management systems)
with files from various internal and
external sources.
15. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Continuously enriching and dynamically adding value
Once the information has been enriched, the
cognitive technology continuously applies
o data enrichments,
o predictive recommendation algorithms
o unsupervised semantic learning
The process is both continuous and dynamic.
16. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Every interaction educates and increases effectiveness
Unlike other predictive analytics that are
rules-based and static, cognitive technology is
o self-learning,
o real-time and
o contextual.
Every interaction and result educates the
platform, helping it become even more
effective over time.
17. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Impacting the business within weeks
Since the technology is lightweight
and quick to deploy, cognitive
computing can impact business
revenues within weeks.
This is achieved using a compressed
platform-based methodology.
18. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Ways people think and demonstrate their cognitive abilities
The scope of cognitive
computing consists of
o engagement,
o decision-making,
o and discovery.
These 3 capabilities are related
to the ways people think and
demonstrate their cognitive
abilities in everyday life.
source: IBM
19. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Extending the boundaries of human cognition rather than replace
Cognitive systems are powerful for augmenting
human intelligence by creating a new partnership
between people and intelligent computers that
o enhances,
o scales and
o accelerates
human expertise and conversational understanding.
The true value of cognitive systems is how they
augment and amplify human abilities.
Helping us think and perform our jobs better, faster,
not do it for us.
source: IBM
20. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Cognitive systems:
1) look like a tool but acts like an Assistant
Bringing the ability to mimic the human brain, to
learn, to understand in context
2) engage in a conversation: “Have you
considered this?”
Historical systems were designed to answer a
simple question that we posed directly
3) uncover relationships across all data
sources
Understanding and filtering by context to find
patterns in the data that you didn’t know existed,
new perspectives - the surprises!
4) constantly learns
From new information and new interactions – as
you use the system, it gets better
Source: Augmenting Human Intelligence,
Dr. John Kelly
In summary: helping us think and perform better, faster!
22. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Cognitive decision makers
worldwide say outcomes
from cognitive initiatives
exceed their expectations
62%
GROW
KNOWLEDGE
FROM DATA
ENHANCE
EXPERTISE
LEARN AND
ADAPT
Cognitive Business = Digital
Business + Digital Intelligence
A cognitive business is an
organization that harness cognitive
computing to create knowledge
from data to expand virtually
everyone’s expertise, continually
learning and adapting to outthink
the needs of the market.
A cognitive business is a business that thinks
source: IBM
23. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Find and understand
your structured and
unstructured data
wherever it resides
Cost
Simultaneously lower
costs, mitigate risks and
support compliance
Risk
Maximize data value
and drive better
business outcomes
Value
The cognitive business value proposition
Cognitive solutions fit best when they
align with and equally enable lowering
costs, lowering risk and increasing value.
24. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Engaging higher in the business value pyramid
A cognitive business creates new and greater value
based on four business patterns where infused
cognitive services, at key moments of processes
and decisions, can improve business outcomes:
1) improve interactions
2) better engagement
3) better advice
4) react faster
Business
Outcomes
Data
Analytics
Cognitive
Content
Search
Corpus of Records
Unstructured
Info Mgt &
Data
Gov
Systems of Records
Structured
Collective
Intelligence
Cognitive
Engagement
DATA CONTENT
25. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Scaling expertise has the biggest
return on improving the
customer experience.
It’s not just about automation for
the simple stuff - expertise is
hard to develop and retain.
Why? Expertise-driven work is
usually judgment-oriented - it
involves dealing with ambiguity,
which requires humans and
software to work together.
Smarter process infused with
cognitive is the most effective
way to scale expertise and
conversational intelligence.
Clerical
20-30%
▪ Payroll
▪ Simple procurement
▪ Billing & Collections
Transactional
40-50%
Focus on productivity
▪ Order to cash
▪ Procurement Claims
processing
▪ Supply Chain
▪ Account Opening
Expertise-driven
10-30%
Focus on Decision Support
▪ Sales & Customer Service
▪ Marketing & Promotions
▪ Investigations
▪ Financial Trading
▪ Recruiting
Business Operations by Work Type
ImpactonCustomerExperience
Improving customer experience with smarter process + cognitive
source: IBM
26. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Cognitive Computing
(e.g. Conversational
Intelligence)
Capabilities
Explore Analyze Interpret
Benefits
Reveal new opportunities
Analytics Based on
Unstructured Content
Expose actionable insights from content
Productivity
Revenue
Improve outcomes across business functions
Reduce time spent looking for info – improved productivity
Scale expertise
General “Findability” and
Unified Views
Cognitive maturity model – benefits and capabilities for businesses
28. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Key points of value include:
1) Focuses on simultaneously lowering cost, lowering risk &
increasing customer value
i. Personalizes from interactions: leverages natural language & personality insights
ii. Learns and adapts with every interaction, continually building a “relationship
memory” for each customer, creating a highly personalized relationship
2) Proactive first and reactive where appropriate
i. Identifying issues and potential future issues as they are unfolding
ii. Lower reaction based negative customer experiences and brand damage
iii. Facilitate more efficient business processes more individualized customer
experiences
3) Non-intrusive to the current business workflow / process
i. Infused inline to current workflow and use pre-built where applicable
ii. No need to build a net-new application to benefit from pragmatic CI
4) Implementation can take a staged approach to maximize ROI and
reduce time-to-value – tech is lightweight and quick to deploy
Conversational
Intelligence
Convergence of Key Enablers
The key enablers and value proposition for Conversational Intelligence
29. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Listening, learning and acting when necessary
CustomerClient Executive
Conversational
Intelligence Engine
TranscriptsTranscripts
Systems
of Record
Conversation flow (email, voice, video)
Conversational
Intelligence Tone Analyzer
Natural Language
Classifier
Natural Language
Understanding
Conversational Intelligence augments existing
business processes and workflow.
It just listens, learns, understands and acts when
necessary as any experienced human would do if
they overheard something that would undervalue
a customer experience.
30. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Trained with many skills
A Conversational Intelligence solution can be
trained to :
o Listen to both sides of a conversation
o Understand when the tone of the words used
indicate problems in the conversation
o Listen out for key words that indicate problems
arising from either side of the conversation
o Be aware of time-critical components of a
conversation
o Highlight to an individual in a position of authority /
responsibility when issues arise
o Listen to thousands of conversations while only
escalating the ones that need attention
o Be discrete – not disrupting engaged conversations
or require any special attention from the active
parties participating
31. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Use case: Insurance industry email based renewal process
Insurance companies increasingly use emails to
notify customers of upcoming insurance renewals,
often leading to a threaded conversation between
client rep and customer.
Insurance is competitive and churn is a known issue
related to human constraints influencing the
renewal process.
In this scenario, the enablers focus and provide:
o Timeline – monitoring activities and indicators to
ensure time dependent outcomes are achieved as
expected
o Relationships – monitoring and analyzing all
contextually related email conversations, individuals
and relationships involved
o Cognitive – watching for changes in the nature of the
conversation, such as an individual’s tone, that could
impact achieving a successful outcome
32. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Expiry
Customer (action with Company)
Company (waiting on Customer)
Key enabler – active timeline management
Initial renewal
email sent to
customer
2 week non-
response
notification
1 week until
cover lapses
Policy
expired!
Unhappy
customer!
Easy to use interactive
visual timeline of an
ongoing conversation
provides immediate
notification of issues
and the ability to drill
down into the details.
33. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Key enabler – cognitive assessment of natural language tone
Drilling down through the
“Unhappy customer”
notification on the interactive
timeline shows why the
critical alert was raised.
Through automated real-time
natural language tone
analysis, it is clear that the
customer is unhappy that he
finds himself currently
uninsured.
34. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Key enabler – relationships of key stakeholders
Conversations identify the
people who are an
organisation’s ultimate asset.
Also, as some customers have
multiple interactions with
your organisation, it is
invaluable to understand
these relationships to
leverage their collective value.
An interactive visual map can
be explored to understand
how customers interact with
your organisation.
billy.bob@this.com
Bo.diddly@that.com
jdb@that.com
35. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Use case summary: Insurance industry email based renewal process
By deploying a conversational intelligence solution
into the email based renewal process, the following
outcomes can be achieved:
o Common factors behind client churn become visible,
leading to remedies and improvements
o Distressed renewals are identified early and
corrective actions are applied
o Time to cash is improved
o Identifying new opportunities for personalized
service
o Relationships between the organisation and
customer improve as a result of having the proper
amount, consistency and quality of conversations
36. A COGNITIVE BUSINESS IS A THINKING BUSINESS
Conversational Intelligence built on cognitive technologies can
lower costs, lower risk and increase value by:
1) Enhancing engagement through personalized understanding
2) Scaling and elevating human expertise
3) Infusing products and services with intelligence
4) Enabling automated, intelligent business processes
5) Powering disruptive data discovery and exploration methods
Neil Movold
neil@insightng.com
+64 21 749898
Get in touch to learn more about how Conversational Intelligence can
enable better customer conversations and outcomes
Conversational
Intelligence
Thanks goes to Certus Solutions Limited for
collaborating on this solution approach