Thankful During a Difficult Christmas

This is certainly a tough year for mankind because of all the pain and suffering COVID 19 continues to deal out. Despite this, we have hope and a thankful heart. First, at the physical health level, we have at least two vaccines that are rolling out at this time. Our prayers and positive vibes are going out to all affected by this monster plague. 

Secondly, we have the hope of our saviors birth which preceded his death, resurrection, and ascension to care for us. This is something for our spirits as a cure for our mistakes. It is not lost on us that God and the heavens show us the Bethlehem Star as a sign of hope during this serious plague that besets our lives and livelihoods.  Here is a picture that was taken outside the city over the Arizona desert skies by Cindy Morrison Maes that is spooky good.  We are thankful for God's salvation through our savior, Jesus Christ. 

                                      Happy Holidays to all from the Sinur clan!!!!  

What Are People Reading?

 As the number of hits on my blog eclipses 700,000 in seven+ years, I want to thank those who have been loyal readers. In the spirit of transparency, I wanted to share what others have been interested in over the last year and beyond. I hope the numbers below help you in picking out some interesting blog posts to visit on my blog  Use the search bar to help you hone in on your topics of interest.  

Figure 1 represents the greatest hits over the years. The top areas of interest were Automation (RPA), Customer Journeys (CJM) Process (BPM), Cognitive (AI). Digital and Industry 4.0 (IoT).

                                                     Figure 1 Greatist Hits

While most hits come from the US (65%) the offshore hits are significant. I do not get much action from Asia, but Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia are quite active as seen in Figure 2.

                                                           Figure 2 Off-Shore Hits

New Topics have emerged to shift the demand to also include Corporate Performance, Decisions, Real-Time, Data Management, Data Mining, and the Database of Now,  Figure 3 slices the 2020 themes for us. 

                                                              Figure 3 Top 2020 Hits

The second half of 2020 has some new topics in and around AI & Art, Monster Data, and the Value of Voice Data.

                                                       Figure 4 Second Half of 2020

Net; Net:

I hope that these charts help you in pursuing emerging topics as well as the traditional ones. Please contact me with topics you would like me to cover in the future. 

Are You Hearing Voices? Maybe You Should

 Many organizations are hungry to understand what customers and prospects think of their brand, products, services, and unique relationship. To this end, organizations are trying to move from reactive responses to negative experiences to proactive real-time action at the time of both positive and negative interactions. There is a movement to more sentiment analysis by supporting this shift, leveraging emotion AI and other forms of opinion mining to help spot, extract, and quantify subjective information around the customer's voice in real-time. Leveraging natural language processing, voice/text analytics, computational linguistics, and biometrics are becoming a strong trend.

Maybe You Should be Listening:

The cost of not listening after the damage is evident is not smart to do business today. When an organization hears phrases like "Can you believe this?", "Shame on them," "Let's get 'em," or "Do the right thing" in social media streams, it's getting to the point of damage. If there are positive responses, organizations would be foolish not to take advantage of those beautiful gems of customer delight. It is important to sense harmful and helpful responses in social media, tapping into real-time sentiments in the middle of voice interactions happening in the servicing channels.

What Should Organizations Listen to?

Organizations should be listening for brand health, product/service satisfaction, and the overall relationship. Listening to mentions of the competitor's names is essential and usually means you are under pressure of some kind. The customer is either growing in frustration or is beyond their tolerance for unsatisfactory service. Voice inflections will tell you if it is just a need or a real frustration. It is essential to distinguish between a want or a wish or a real need. Of course, listening for the good news is just as important, so knowing if your customer or prospect is happy and loves the service they are getting is a great thing. Listening for the positive is particularly vital if you want to upsell or cross-sell a customer.

What are the Typical Indicators to Focus on?

There are everyday things to listen to for sentiment. If there is a lot of customer silence, they may be learning or just controlling their emotions. Listen for overtalk where the agent is pushing their script over customer needs. Also, listen for impatient customers that feel that they are not being heard; they overtalk the agent and their talking script. These calls are great for training, but real-time action is the first prize.

It is also essential to listen to the drivers for the calls to determine if there are positive or negative trends forming. Customers will let you know what they want, so it is essential to focus on their goals, not just the CPA driven goal of reducing time to apparent resolution. This kind of listening helps in improving first call resolution and even net promoter scores (NPS).

Net; Net:

It's crucial to spot bad customer experiences early in your contact center. Voice and text analysis in real-time leveraging AI helps ferret out real sentiment analysis. Finding the right combination of digital technologies is much easier today than even a year ago. Many options will help improve customer relationship metrics. Voice is the growing approach today as it captures the real customer sentiments before the relationship breaks down and organizations are trying to bandage a large wound without much success.

Additional Reading

Voice; Voice Baby               

Got Customer Excellence? 

Let Your Voice Be Heard

 

 

 

 

 

Art for the 4th Quarter 2020

 I sure hope you and your loved ones are doing well during this COVID 19 Pandemic. Creating art doesn't seem to stop during tough times, but the demand is up, much to my surprise. I was able to complete a commission for my buddy Jonathan Yarmis proudly standing in front of his new mustang convertible in the middle of a large Texas sky. On a whim, I put a number of my better fractals on masks, and they sold out three times. I painted a cute little octopus with neon paint for creativity's sake and created a couple of interesting fractals. I hope you enjoy the pieces here. If you want to see more or even buy a piece hit my art website or email me at jim.sinur @gmail.com.  Happy Holidays to all. 

                                                MUSTANG JOHNNY 

                                                         ART MASKS

                                                      HAPPY OCTO

                                                      BLUE SWIRL

                                                       PURPLE DELIGHTS 

Real-Time Use Cases Enabled by the Database of Now

While we all know that real-time applications and analytics are constrained to respond in the order of microseconds, real-time systems have been difficult to justify and attain until recently. There is a whole new class of real-time analytics that are now open to more organizations and applications with the advent of “The Database of Now." This blog investigates some of the new and emerging uses and is meant to give the reader some real-world examples. Hopefully, this list of successful uses will inspire others to follow suit, mainly where real-time dashboards and analytics deliver significant benefits.

Real-Time was for Special Applications

Real-time computing started with operating systems and then only a handful of applications because of specialized software costs. The first implementations revolved around real-time networks and market-driven applications where results demanded no significant delays or instant results. Real-time was an excellent fit for physical systems that need instant responses like fly-by-wire or ABS brakes or single purpose-focused applications. These use cases required extreme correctness, deep concurrency, and durable stability while being distributed and sometimes autonomous. Real-time was a limited set of applications and systems until recently.

What Has Changed?

Business drivers require more speed. It used to be good enough for businesses to have dashboards that were relatively up to date. Now that kind of speed is not acceptable even if applications aren't hooked up to devices on the internet's edge (IoT).  Almost all the leaders of business-focused software organizations believe that speed is the new currency of business. We are in an era of extreme competition and dynamic adaptability. Those organizations that can handle emerging trends by sensing them, making rapid decisions, and implementing fast are the ones that will emerge as the winners as long as they consider the voice of the customer and other constituents. Savvy organizations will switch from reactive to proactive by planning alternatives, practicing them, and put in listening posts for an emergent change.

 

Technology enablers have been emerging to meet the need at a lower cost and broader use cases. It started with complex events processing's ability to sense signals, events, and patterns of interest and even respond in limited situations. And now, fast forward to today, and we see the accelerating trend of adapting to real-time applications with the mainstream use of streaming data. Ventana research states that more than 50% of enterprises will leverage real-time streaming data in their enterprise next year. It reaches full bloom now with databases that can handle various kinds of complex monster data in the cloud-managed as a single logical store rather than multiple special-purpose datastores, greatly simplifying and accelerating data delivery. Organizations simplify the complexity that revolves around data location, meaning, and transformation connected to the smart IoT, often embedded in Industry 4.0 solutions facilitated thus increased speed. 

Sample List of Successful New Real-Time Use Cases

They are listed in no particular order with common uses highlighted in bold text. All industries will have emergent situations that will cry out for real-time assists.

• FinTech
• Portfolio Management & Analytics
• Fraud Detection
• Algorithmic Trading, Crypto Exchange
• Dashboards & APIs

• Software & SaaS
• Improved CX for Internet Services
• Supply Chain Visibility  
• Machine Learning Pipelines & Platforms
• Dashboards & APIs

• Media & Communications
• Ad Optimization & Ad Serving
• Streaming Media Quality Analytics
• Video Game Telemetry Processing
• Network Telemetry & Analytics

• Energy 
• IoT & Smart Meter Analytics
• Predictive Maintenance
• Geospatial Tracking & Calculations
• Dashboards & APIs

 

Net; Net:

While there are many more industry examples not listed here, the evidence is clear that it is time to rethink real-time utilization. The Database of Now has lowered the hurdles keeping organizations from leveraging real-time implementations. This is especially true of dashboards, analytics, and other transparency rich situations. If you need to know about the status of work or outcomes on the spot and right now, you should be considering the real-time use cases that the Database of Now enables. Real-time is for everybody now, so start planning and preparing for new competitive implementations.

 

Additional Reading:

Corporate Performance in Real-Time

Database of Now

Monster Data

Ventana Source

 

 

Customers; Let Your Voice Be Heard

We all know that customers are the lifeblood of organizations, so organizations should treat their relationship with the customer as extremely important. Applying intelligence to voice data, either through analytics or artificial intelligence (AI), is particularly useful to both the customer and the organization. Organizations can identify patterns to improve the relationship, and customers will, in turn, get a better experience. Typically organizations use crucial voice interactions to extract vital information from customer interactions to measure and improve performance, but there is much more potential in leveraging voice data. The power of voice data in the customer experience goes beyond organizational excellence to relational effectiveness. 

Using Voice Data for Organizational Performance

Organizations are always looking for efficiency while optimally managing their resources. Contact centers and agents need the utmost efficiency and performance so that voice data can be searched for desired and undesired behavior. Customer service usually means measuring call handling times to deal with call volume. Sometimes call center agents are just measured on time to complete without considering if the customers' outcomes were delivered or experienced frustration in getting their needs translated into corporate transactions. Measuring customer sentiment in real-time adds a differentiating factor to the overall call handling perspective. If a customer has to call multiple times to get something done while the organization/agents hit handle time goals, they may not be impressed and leave permanently.

Indeed, voice data helps improve agent script adherence and the actual scripts themselves. Voice is also helpful in detecting when competitors' names are mentioned for further evaluation. When fine-tuning agent training programs, voice data is invaluable, enabling first call resolution and even reduce average call handling times. Some "bigger picture" efforts such as payment compliance, including redaction for terms like "credit card number" or "social security number," also benefit from voice data and analytics. You can even fine-tune your marketing campaigns by picking up on themes and slogans.

Using Voice Data for Voice of the Customer

Voice data delivers significant opportunities for a better customer experience without the customer knowing it. An example would be finding the best call center agent for each customer on a real-time basis. AI can understand which agent is suited for the type of call because not every call needs your best agent. Understanding who is needed will reduce frustration, call transfers, and escalations to managers or higher-skilled agents. Another terrific use is AI & voice data would understand the customers’ emotions. This emotional understanding would allow a real-time sense of frustration, anger, or sweet satisfaction. Appropriate actions could be taken at the moment, and lessons learned could be recorded for future analysis. Instant adaptation is a much more reasonable approach to responding to the customers in a way that optimizes the customer's experience. 

Customer pain points are sensed with voice analysis and dealt with before becoming a sour customer growing negative reputations. This analysis will reduce customer churn and increase net promoter scores. Imagine learning what is causing customer churn and adjusting strategies on the fly. Customer analysis helps implement predictive speech analytics to deal with the customer at risk and act immediately. It might include a link to smart calling software for callbacks when an expert can reach out back to the customer. In turn, call center supervisors can implement strategies to prevent churn by improving building a knowledge base, better training, and improved scripts.

Even if caller emotions can’t be handled in a real-time fashion, there is an aggregate picture of the overall customer satisfaction by measuring and classifying caller emotions into buckets. Examples would likely include want, like, frustration, anger, annoyance, need, passion, and pleasure. Not only can sentiment be classified, so can call drivers, topics discovery, and brand health. Keywords can lead to emerging trends, and real-time dashboards focused on customer experience.

Using Voice Data for Voice of the Employee

Often forgotten in the shuffle is the actual employee voice data. Looking for comments from the agents that say things like "I wish we could do ….."  Employees are a great source of understanding your customers' journey even if the journey is outside your organization's purview that might encourage communicating or partnering with other organizations. Indeed, voice data should be analyzed for more knowledge for the agents, creating projects, and training curriculum adjustments. Lack of experience might lead to AI knowledge bots to adapt scripts in real-time instead of the batch script creation process.

Net; Net:

Analyzing voice data with analytics and AI will accelerate time-to-value for both the customer and organizations. It makes organizations more personal for both customers and employees while demonstrating the power of voice data plus AI rich analytics in the customer experience.

 

Additional Reading

Voice; Voice Baby               

Got Customer Excellence? 

Journey Maps  

Voice, Voice Baby

Voice-enabled devices are everywhere, and there is a high awareness of the potential for voice data on a personal level. Devices are in our living rooms and even in our bedrooms, but we are just scratching the surface of the use of data in organizations other than a simple search, understanding, and basic commerce. People talk to speech recognition like real people and say things like "please and thank you". Organizations need to up their game to take on smarter uses of voice over the coming decade. Organizations will have to gear up for “Big Voice Data” that goes beyond rudimentary search to analytic leverage and secure redaction of sensitive voice phrases.

Popular Uses Today

Voice search is prevalent and driven by the younger generations, but the deep usage is coming for the middle-aged wealth builders. Search is a critical participant in understanding what something is, how to leverage it, and the best way to go about it. Search is also a significant participant in simple commerce to find and buy specific products and services. It is particularly useful for lower-cost items like groceries, entertainment, and essential clothing. Voice is poised for explosive growth in the enterprise for large and complex voice sources. 

Needed Uses for Tomorrow

Because the voice influence cuts both ways, voice can influence commerce and help organizations to get better.  Organizations will have to ramp up their use of AI-powered voice analytics to gain an advantage. Savvy organizations are examining the critical moments of sales or service leveraging conversation analysis speed and accuracy at optimal cost levels. By understanding what was said and making the intent discoverable, new opportunities arise. This process allows organizations to analyze interactions and prescribe proper actions. The typical uses are for offers, complaints, first call resolution, compliments, outages, and escalation analysis.

On The Edge Uses

Organizations need to stop thinking about voice as just an interface or the outcome of a conversation. Voice data is a unique source of critical insights for the business. The leading organizations create the next generation of communication and collaboration with AI bots/agents to identify call drivers, trends, predict new directions, and design or optimize products and service bundles. This kind of smart voice leverage can apply to prospects or customers and all constituents involved with product/service creation, including employees and vendors. Voice analysis could cover the end to end supply or value chains. Voice analytics applies to both external and internal voice moments of truth, differentiating amongst the individuals' diversity at the same time.

Net; Net:

We all know that voice has much more value than any other means of communication because it expresses context, sentiment, intent, emotions, and action potential. Speech technology should be a vital part of any digital transformation as there are critical insights about product, service, and customers. Better accuracy, smarter implementations, and bulletproof security will allow more complex solutions while making it easier for users. It's time to up your game at getting more value out of the voice in your organization.