CXNext

Thinking holistically about the customer experience journey can have a huge impact on the bottom line.

Experts on the customer engagement maturity curve are 30% more likely to have double digit growth than companies with less advanced strategies.

One of the challenges that companies face in closing the customer engagement maturity gap, is silos of people and technology. That manifests itself when customers who deal with one department are transferred to another area and they have a very different experience.

Ross Haskell, Lead Evangelist, Bold360ai at LogMeIn, has a lot of expertise in helping companies deliver better customer experiences.

Amber Gregorio, Senior Product Marketing Manager at LogMeIn, has a number of years of experience in the financial services industry.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning deliver serious ROI when you're dealing with large data volume, but sometimes you need to know when a human should intervene.

There are also times when human marketers need to give up a little control to let the AI help drive the conversion process.

Finding that happy medium is an ongoing challenge according to Jaime Romero, Global Head of Marketing and Customer Delivery at MRP, a leading global predictive intelligence organization, combining cutting-edge predictive analytics with a full suite of account-based marketing services to acquire new customers, faster.

In this episode of the podcast, you'll learn:

• Quantification Challenges
• Where AI Can Lead
• Where AI Needs Your Help

How helpful are the chatbots on your website? Are they good for resetting a customer's password but not much else?

Brian Bagdasarian, Senior Manager of Digital Engagement & Conversational Marketing Strategy here at LogMeIn, was not satisfied with that kind of chatbot. That's why we brought him on to develop the conversational and digital engagement experience for each of our product families. His goal is very simple: make it simpler to start using the product and become a customer.

Because he believes it's possible to have a chatbot that can help you figure out which product is the best fit for you, what kind of plan you should be on and how to use the features in each tool. We'll, it's possible when you have the right team.

On today's episode of AI: IRL, Brian walked us through the 3 people you want on your chatbot development team.

On the latest episode of AI: In Real Life, I sat down with Yoav Barel to talk about the opportunities, challenges, and successes we're seeing in the conversational AI space.

Yoav is an industry leader who's been at the forefront of customer experience for quite some time.

From personal interactions in store, to the app revolution, to now, when conversational interactions occur through chat bots, Yoav has been there for it all. He's also the CEO and Founder of the Chatbot Summit, a community and conference series dedicated to conversational experiences.

We've all read about how Wall Street firms have invested billions in AI and machine learning. What about financial AI for people on Main Street?

To find out, I spoke with Bharath Kadaba, Chief Innovation Officer at Intuit. Intuit's brands include personal finance products like Quicken and Mint, business accounting software like Quickbooks, and TurboTax the #1 best-selling tax preparation software to file taxes online. Of course, the company is on the cutting edge of AI.

In the podcast you'll learn:

• Where AI excels.
• The future of taxes.
• Your personal virtual CFO.
• The dawn of the conversational, empathic AI.
• AI's greatest trick: Making itself disappear.

You may not think of your Human Resources department as a center of innovation but HR is using tools like AI to focus on how to develop people, acquire new talent, and other ways to better engage with employees.

To find some of the latest cutting edge insights in HR, I recently spoke with Jo Deal, the chief human resource officer at LogMeIn, a computer software company in Boston.

What if there was a way to make your retirement planning as easy as ordering an Uber?

Sunil Gangwani, co-founder and CEO of Plootus, has created this magical, machine learning app. Plootus is an AI app that offers millennials (and others) simple, automatic retirement planning. The free app is available for download on both IOS and Android.

Once you link your various accounts to it, this app looks at where you are in life, your location, your employer's retirement options, even your daily spending habits and devises a simple, automatic retirement plan.   

"We launched version 1 on Alexa. If a customer's tracking started with '1z'

They could never track their package. Alexa would look up baby onesies."

Creating chatbots is a frontier. It's new and there is a lot to consider.

Fortunately, my guest Qing Cao, in addition to being a certified Lean Six Sigma black belt, is the leader of the customer-facing, emerging technology product development team at UPS.

On this episode of AI:IRL she joins me to unpack the different ways you can build a bot to fit your situation and defining your purpose and asking guiding questions for decision-making.

We also discuss how language, platforms, and regions affect scale and team size, the importance of listening to the customer, the future of bot training with machine learning, and having a test-and-see mentality.

At this point every brand knows the power of social for brand awareness. But often the incoming data from customers and the potential it gives companies is either not known or unharnessed.

Many companies try to use the same team responsible for the outgoing messaging to handle the incoming.

But the incoming is so data heavy. AI needs to be specialized at handling that flood of information so it can maximize the talents of the human support team.

Luckily there's Tim Lopez. He's the TSIA Director of support services and social research. His company provides best practices and industry standards to brands looking to maximize their support teams with AI.

Tim's expertise lies in understanding the way that brands can not only use AI for building their brand awareness, but for creating an enhanced support team in a data heavy social media environment.

This post is based on a podcast with Tim Lopez from TSIA. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to AI: IRL.

If you don't use iTunes, you can find all the episodes here.

Incremental results get disrupted by smaller, more agile, often invisible companies.

How do large businesses transform to stay ahead of the disruption?

We hear a lot about digital transformation. But what does that mean? And how do you companies make changes that are transformative and not simply additive?

Sid Raisoni, being the Head of Analytics at Nestle Waters, is an expert on the subject of big company digital transformation

In this episode of AI: IRL, he unpacked: what transformation truly is, an analytics-focused 5 step transformation strategy, and how employees can drive transformational change.