Ocean Medallion – Which Customer Problem Does it Solve?
A few years ago Disney embarked on a massive customer experience journey that included the introduction of a ‘Magic Band’. Disney at that time followed (and likely still does) an idea that can be paraphrased as looking at everything through the eyes of the customer and pay attention to all details. During his 2016 CRM Evolution opening keynote Dennis Snow explained this concept and implementation in depth (see also my earlier CRM Evolution post). Dennis talked about the Disney way of creating great customer experiences, which basically follows three simple rules Design your processes with the customer in mind, not with internal/operational priorities; look through the lens of the customer Pay attention to details Create little “Wow Moments”. These add up to a lasting great experience and are easier to achieve than single “big” experiences. To me the most important message that Dennis conveyed is that the simple things and consistency are what matters. Consistently provide little experiences throughout the customer life cycle. He underpinned this with some examples from the ‘ordeal’ of getting out of the park and back into the hotel. Everybody is exhausted, kids may be edgy, riding the bus is usually not fun. What about the bus driver singing some songs or doing a little trivia? The rooms showing some little surprise, like specially folded towels? Another of his core messages was that a company gets loyalty and advocacy only by creating those “wow” moments mentioned above. For this to be effective, however, it must not fail at base priorities. Customer expectations can get mapped to a pyramid. Every customer expects accuracy and availability. These...
AI and Machinelearning in 2017 – What to Expect
2016 has been the year of Artificial Intelligence and machinelearning. With the year being almost at an end, let me chime in to the gang of pundits who venture into prediction land and pronounce what we get out of our glass balls. So here are my 5 plus 2 bonus ones. AI gets mainstream in Consumer Environments Alexa paved the way, the Google Assistant is on its heels, Microsoft Cortana wants to get there, too – and Apple, amazingly, is a late starter in this environment. Amazon started with a pretty smart strategy by not overselling the capabilities of its underlying AI, as Apple did with Siri, which caused some grief for Apple and some laughs for many people around. More and more helpful Alexa skills are developed and implemented that improve its usefulness. Similarly Google; they started late but are in the game now, too – following a different strategy of adding new functionality by just making it available in contrast to Amazon, who opt to have users individually enable ‘skills’. Identification of what these systems can do will be an interesting question. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg created a butler for his house, who he calls Jarvis, like the one of Tony Stark in the Ironman movies. Google recently based its translation engine on machinelearning and AI, seeing vastly improved translations. Facebook’s translations base on an AI, too – although this one still seems to have a lot to learn. Not to mention all the countless other consumer services Google has, that utilize machinelearning and AIs in the background. Two of the main developments to look at here are...
SAP and MachineLearning – A Strong Approach, but none too early
In my yesterday’s analysis of SAP’s HANA announcement, I wondered why SAP stays silent on the AI and MachineLearning frontiers. Well, today I know. They saved this announcement for today. And the announcement is a bang. SAP will deliver what they call ‘intelligent business applications’ that are based upon SAP’s new machine learning platform. The platform itself shall be made available with SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. The first significant intelligent application by SAP that is mentioned, is a brand intelligence application that leverages deep learning to analyze brand exposure in video and images to provide ‘accurate, real-time insights into sponsoring and advertising ROI”. You may remember that SAP earlier showcased an application to reduce recruiting bias, which is based on the machine learning platform, too. According to Juergen Mueller, Chief Innovation Officer at SAP, the new machine learning platform is intended to serve SAP’s and their ecosystem’s applications with the goal of creating more business value. Consequently, there are two more aspects to the announcement. SAP launched a partner program dedicated to SAP Application Intelligence. SAP invests into education offerings, starting with a ‘massive open online course’ on Enterprise Machine Learning on their OpenSAP platform. MyPoV This announcement clearly shows that SAP is as serious about machine learning as the company is about leveraging the power of its ecosystem. As I, and many other people, have often said, SAP is a formidable organization if and when it chooses to drive a topic. This is shown here again. And SAP is absolutely on the right track by pursuing this three-pronged approach of delivering a platform with first solutions, encouraging partners, and...