You don’t need AI (to win)

So many posts about AI – its simply bewildering.?Everyone needs it.?It will make companies super-efficient.?It’s going to take over the world.?It’s going to send us to extinction.?Your competitors are using it, so why aren’t you??

Apparently.

So first a drop of reality.?Remember the last time you phoned the bank, for example to report a case of fraud.?You want to speak to a human, but you get the automated phone system ask to describe in a few words what you want.?You say “report fraud”.?It says it didn’t understand.?You say “report fraud”, perhaps a bit louder.?Maybe patronisingly.?It says “you want a new mortgage?”.?And so it goes on.?How are you feeling when, or if, you eventually speak to an actual person??I know how I feel, my blood is boiling.?This is where we are today.

And now the anti-dote.?Rather than follow the hype, or find a problem for AI to solve because your competitors might be, lets understand your aims.?Your blockers.?

Most companies I work with want to scale and grow.?That typically means being more efficient so you can grow without employing more and more people (with the associated complexity).?It means better understanding your customers and reaching them with the right services at the right time.?It might mean looking at your products, developing adjacent services, new products, new locations, new channels, M&A models, etc.?

So really first understand your scale and growth enablers and where technology can help.

And here are 13 things that depending on what you do and what your scale and growth enablers are will help you accelerate away from your competitors.

1.?????Take a “systems thinking” approach and implement better processes for your customers.?You probably need little IT work for this.

2.?????“Outsource” some of your activity to your customers, so you don’t need to do it. Their life is easier as they can do what they need, when they need. Win-win

3.?????Create some really useful apps and use the data from the device to do some good things.?Banks use it to help secure payments and reduce fraud (by using device, network, location information).?If you are into healthcare you could use it to pick up on trigger activities.

4.?????If yours is a type of business that is more physical, then think about the information you wish you had….and then when you can get it from.

5.?????Get a better understanding of the different types of customers, what triggers their buying decisions and automate the contact.?This is about using your data, some digital marketing and a bit of experimentation.

6.?????There is loads of data out there.?What can use to make it easier for your customers, while improving the accuracy and reliability of your data because its from a known source.?This is important in insurance, because it allows you to assess risk more accurately and price better.?A great example from the past is relating to property rebuild costs, customers are generally poor at estimating that! I could write a whole article on this!

7.?????Offer a greater range of contact methods.?Webchat, WhatsApp, etc.?Your customers might prefer a text-based conversation, not waiting in a long queue and its more efficient for you too.?Win-win.

8.?????Find a more efficient way of doing business with your partners.?That might mean APIs, but keep it simple if it doesn’t need to be real-time and isn’t part of a to-and-fro service activity.

9.?????Sell your products or services in more places, using the data that those other places (partners already have).?Now I am talking about APIs, but let’s not limit it just to APIs if you or your partners aren’t ready for that.

10.??If you are part of a supply chain, understand your customers and suppliers pain points and use your systems or processes to help solve them.?You probably have some useful processes, data, MI or insights that would help them in their business so give it to them, preferably in a way that helps the relationship but makes it much more “sticky”.

11.??How can you be agile with the footprint and location of your company (and remain secure).?Without incurring the drag of complex infrastructure set up and out-of-date disaster recovery plans?

12.??If you want to engage with innovative tech partners, then make it easy.?Promote a secure sand-pit, anonymised data and enable them to develop and showcase their solutions to you.

13.??Maybe you just need to look at your website, make sure its really clear about the variety of services you provide, how customers access them and how you manage the quality, performance and the promotion of them.?I have worked with companies that provide customer-facing services from all different teams, but you really needed to know the structure of the company to access them.?Make it easier for your customers, so they don’t have to burn loads of calories to figure it out, then axe the services with low take-up.

OK, so most of this is quite tech-oriented.?That’s because we haven’t worked together yet and I don’t know your business.?Without us working together they are simply examples.

So let’s have a chat and together we can identify the real solutions that will work to solve your challenges and help create opportunities to scale and grow and the practical steps forward.

AI is coming and we will need to think about how we future-proof and incorporate that into our technology – it may not be the thing you need to do today though!