Delighting Customers with AI

I recently had the wonderful opportunity of presenting AI thinking to a group of customer success professional in Totango’s Customer Success Summit.

We discussed current state of AI in terms of technology readiness, business adoption and specific use cases. I also had a chance to share a set of recommendations that can help anyone looking to start leveraging AI get started towards making that goal a reality.

Here are some getting started tips on how to infuse AI into every aspect of your business:

?       Integrate AI with your core scenarios – AI is not being done for the sake of AI, AI is a method (just like many others) that can help you further accelerate some of your key enterprise scenarios. Start with choosing a scenario you want to improve and are already focused on this can be anything between better understanding you customer base, scaling your ability to deal with a diverse portfolio of customers (see a great example in this video) or reducing the churn rate of your customer base.

?       Find and own valuable data that no one else has – AI requires data to provide an impact. To maximize the potential of AI to help your business it is important to identify data that is unique to your organization. This can be your unique collection of customer engagement data, data your customers create using your systems like contact lists or past search history. Identifying unique data does not guarantee your ability to leverage AI but provides a great starting point to explore leveraging AI for the scenarios you are looking to accelerate.

?       Take a systemic view of your business and find data adjacencies – Don’t stop with the data your own. Do not stay in the silo of information your team has access to but rather try to find more data that may be available in your organization. This can include finance and licensing data, additional CRM information and engagement metrics from multiple products your company provides.

?       Don’t start from scratch – Long gone are the days where leveraging AI mandated hiring a team of top notch data science experts and multiple proprietary servers. AI powered out-of-the-box solutions, Cognitive Services and APIs are available for you to leverage without the need to create a data science organization, train complex models while still tending to your specific business needs.

AI's current state provides a revolutionary approach to solving problems that has come a long way since it was introduced back in the 1950’s.

So if you are looking to leverage AI to take your business level now is probably the best time in history to start tackling the experiences, scenarios and solutions you provide to your end customers.

Keep in mind that according to Gartner, 46% of CIOs have developed plans to deploy AI but only 4% have (see more detail on https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3856163). The opportunity is yours to take so, hopefully, this article will get you one step closer the path of infusing AI into your business and making your company, your team and most importantly your customers that much more successful.

If you are looking to get started or if you are already leveraging AI please share some of the experiences you have gone through by adding a comment to this article or reply directly to me.

 Special thanks to the Totango’s team for giving me the opportunity to participate and speak in #CSSummit18