SAS Customer Intelligence 360 – Turn Data into Experience
A while ago Angela Lipscomb from SAS got in touch with me to get me introduced to SAS’s concept of a Customer Decision Hub. Their Customer Decision Hub is a solution concept that shall allow organizations to derive insights and to trigger actions from interactions with external parties, like customers based upon rules and the derived insights. A Customer Decision Hub e.g. orchestrates the determination of Next Best Actions, and allows responding to an incoming request in real time using analysis and decision logic. At the same time standard communications can get suppressed based upon the same set of rules. In other words, the Customer Decision Hub fosters customer engagement based upon inbound signals that get analyzed and processed through the organization. Why is this remarkable, I hear you asking? It is remarkable because SAS Software first of all is an analytics company with a strong reputation for enterprise analytics at the higher end of performance and price point. SAS describes itself on LinkedIn as “the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions, SAS helps customers at more than 70,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world the power to know®.” SAS is not a company that is widely known for being actively engaged in the customer engagement market (pun intended). So I was intrigued. And so should you be. Finally, a few days ago my somewhat erratic schedule allowed me to have a follow-up with Troy Kusabs of SAS Software in...
Customer Service – How to Turn a Poor Experience into a Positive One
With mobile phones taking over our lives and conversational interfaces becoming ubiquitous there is certainly a new level of demand arriving at customer service centers. Customers do not accept a mediocre service experience anymore. With their smartphones they have the means to get to customer service with nearly no delay and they are certainly willing to use it. And they do it. In this situation customers are often already feeling some frustration or disappointment because they couldn’t achieve what they wanted to achieve in the first instance. They already had their taste of a suboptimal customer experience. Frustration, disappointment – customers’ negative emotions towards a brand have a corresponding negative impact on the business. Customers just might go buy somewhere else. After all, in times of smartphones this has become simpler than ever. The support center now has best chances to add the feeling of being disrespected and outright anger into the mix. Or it can create a feeling of relief, of being respected, valued, even some satisfaction; this in spite of having come into the need of asking for support. Here the service agents have the opportunity to create a positive customer experience out of a poor one – one that will overlay the negative one. Use Customer Service To Create Positive Emotions Which one is better for the company – and the company’s bottom line? The answer to this question is pretty obvious. Inmoment Research recently released a study that clearly established links between positive experiences and positive outcomes for a company. And this was not the first study finding that investing into positive customer experiences results...
AI and IoT at SAP – Yin and Yang
During the 2017 SAPPHIRE NOW conference SAP told the stunned audience about how they connected some dots to create better value and more intelligent business applications for their customers. In essence SAP lifted the veil on how the company will go ahead with two technologies that will dominate the next years and that are ordinarily treated as different topics. But which, in essence, are like yin and yang. I talk about AI and machine learning on one hand, and IoT on the other. SAP has been fairly quiet on the former and fairly vocal on the latter, although the first announcement was about machine learning powered intelligent business applications, back in November 2016. At that time SAP announced the availability of the machine learning platform for SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. After this, SAP announced SAP Leonardo, the bundling of their IoT portfolio back in January 2017. On day 1 of SAPPHIRE NOW SAP delivered on the November promise by announcing “it’s time for machine learning to take the work out of your work flow. It’s time for billions of devices to go from thinking, to doing. It’s time for SAP Leonardo, the SAP system for digital innovation.’ With this approach they even go beyond only connecting two technologies but they also add Blockchain, Big Data, Data Intelligence and Analytics into one single platform. Whereas one could argue that Big Data, Data Intelligence and Analytics are essentially the same. With this powerful combination, as Holger Mueller, Principal Analyst of Constellation Research, aptly observed, ‘technology for the first time can do more than business best practices want’. To accommodate for this, SAP...