When integrating AI into your organization, it’s critical to have the correct mindset, which means seeing past traditional #ROI benchmarks and considering how AI can truly augment and empower decision making. In this article, you’ll read about four compelling arguments you can bring to the boardroom to help make your #ArtificialIntelligence initiatives a reality.
In three years, businesses will report $40B in additional revenue driven by AI. This means that without a doubt, #ArtificialIntelligence will become a key factor in the ability of organizations to innovate and improve efficiency. In this infographic, you’ll learn how investing in #Microsoft #AzureAI can open up new revenue-generating opportunities for your business in the digital age.
Our simulator, uses an intelligent agent to monitor activity. Using this type of technology, is in line with where AI jobs are going. It’s expected that the number of professionals working in AI-focused roles will nearly double in the next three years. This shift will not only require changes to businesses’ digital environments, but to their organizational structures as well.
Read this article to learn four ways in which businesses need to evolve to fully prepare for the advent of #ArtificialIntelligence.
If you’re reading this, then chances are that getting easy access to clean, running water isn’t an issue for you. But for around 43 percent of the world’s total population, this simply is not the case. For them, obtaining the drinkable water they need to sustain their families requires hard work and commitment.
To make matters even more critical, most of them live in rural areas in which farming is their main source of income. This means that any available water must be carefully distributed between their crops and family. This is an exhausting situation that can take all day just to keep a small patch of land in farmable condition.
Such is the case for Monica, a Kenyan farmer who every day must assume the roles of mother of four, farmer, merchant, and housekeeper just to make ends meet. In this video, you’ll learn how she managed her dwindling water supply to keep her farm yielding, family fed, and trade at the local market—a situation that was soon to improve dramatically thanks to modern technology.
Well, it’s now August and many of us optimistically thought in March that Covid-19 would be a fading memory. How naive we were. But here we are and every company is trying to figure out what the “long-game” is in regard to changing the way business is done.
Two years ago when I launched Verbal Transactions our small team was able to quickly land some well-known clients who saw the value of using our simulator as a way to augment their existing training programs. One key reason was that it gave them the reassurance that employees would get more “hands-on” practice.
Now with the majority of employees working remotely, tools like ours are even more imperative. Why you ask? Here are the top 5 reasons.
I’m a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell and I’m sure many of you are familiar with the term “10,000 hours to mastery”. This has since been proven to be taken out of context but he still references it as a guide to how long it takes for someone to master an innate skill. In Frans Johansson’s book, The Click Moment he explains that Deliberate Practice is a more likely predictor of success. Here are the core elements to Deliberate Practice
One of the core reasons our customers use our simulator is that it uses this deliberate practice approach. Many of our customers need to get contact center agents up to speed quickly. Traditionally they are putting them on the front lines before they have had time to really master interacting with customers. By using our simulator, they see how this gives agents realistic practice so they can reduce the time it takes to get to mastery. Like Johannson’s approach, our simulator is a predictor of agent performance — here’s how.
No need to use a crystal ball to try to determine who will be successful. Our ACES automates this process. The intelligence embedded into the system, allows the managers to know right where in the transaction the agent may have gotten off track.
Businesses don’t have the luxury of 10,000 hours of time to help employees get up to speed on their skills. So imagine if you had the ability to help your agents master many of your complex transactions in 5-10 hours vs. 5-10 weeks? You can view some examples on our video page.
Here is a quick video I shot to demonstrate how to use our “bot” technology to teach someone a new skill.
Like Chicken Little’s cries that the sky is falling, everyone keeps shouting bots are replacing people. Well I am here to tell you they have a long way to go.
There is some truth that bots are beginning to manage simple transactions like help with resetting a password or authenticating your credentials. But in a recent article published int Silicon Republic, Forrester’s Srividya Sridharan states that bots will only be handling 20% of these basic activities by the end of 2020.
The interactions that bots are not able to handle will require higher-skilled agents. Even though many of us are accustomed to interacting with an intelligent agent, we won’t have the patience for this when we need immediate answers. Agents who can handle the tier two situations, will need to be trained skills such as:
Historically it takes months to get an agent up to this level of proficiency. This is why many of our customers are seeing the value in using or call center simulator ACES™. With the clock ticking on speed to proficiency, companies are looking for ways to get these employees up to speed faster to manage the more complex transactions.
So rather than using AI and bot technology to replace employees, we are using it to help upskill them. By giving employees a realistic immersive experience, we can put them in the hot seat. The built-in bot gives them real-time coaching to help guide them through each scenario. By giving them repeated “deliberate practice” we can get them up to speed in days vs. weeks.
So have no fear, the sky is not falling. We see that AI can be used for good – not evil.
If you want to see an example of ACES in action just click this link.
In a recent conversation, I had with a client we discussed why they are using our simulator in their contact center. As a large BPO, their revenue is directly tied to documenting agents are following very detailed KPIs. They asked for me to provide a full list of how our simulator can impact each of these so I thought it would be helpful to share this list with others.
In number six, this was not an intended KPI but as a result of working with a very large technology company, they now use our simulator as a way to ensure outsourced agents are English Proficient. This came up when they enrolled agents at a call center in Vietnam. They were struggling to complete a simulation successfully. Our client thought that the simulator wasn’t working correctly. I assessed that their accents were too strong. The client was somewhat skeptical that this was the case so they placed them into production as voice agents. Shortly after they 
were in production, customers complained they were not able to understand them. They are now all chat agents. Moving forward all of their simulations now account for and measure their English proficiency with our simulator.
As we have proven many times, if you pro-actively use a tool like our simulator, you can address a lot of the “back office” metrics on the front end and improve the customer experience.
I was one of the first people to evangelize the use of Learning Management Systems (LMS) twenty years ago. Now I’m singing a new tune — find a way to measure skill readiness vs. “completions”.
Initially, the LMS systems served a great purpose. But as time went on, companies began adding more and more features to it to help manage various learning activities. I worked with a client who had very robust features for managing classrooms, assessments, catalogs etc. But the bi-product of this was arming trainers with data on the consumption of activities. I could tell you how many people passed an assessment but couldn’t tell you if these same people knew how to really conduct a proper “lock-out tag-out” procedure.
In a recent survey conducted by Donald H Taylor Learning Analytics made the top spot in what the learning
Web analytics concept
the community has a priority interest in 2020. In previous years personalization and adaptive learning held these top spots.
This is great news for Verbal Transactions — as I have been preaching the benefits of more data for the last four years. In our simulator ACES™ (accelerated contact engagement system) we can pinpoint key behaviors that will truly prepare employees for how to do their job well. We are supplying the “system” to measure these behaviors because the standard LMS can’t do this.
For example: In a standard online training program to teach customer service skills, the manager only knows the following:
In most instances, this course wouldn’t allow the student to complete the course without successfully reaching the passing score.
If you were to build a similar course in ACES™, you would know the following:
Anyway, you get the point. With the new digital transformation taking place, organizations can bring this power of more information to them to help trouble-shoot employee performance problems before they impact the customer experience.
If you’d like to see the simulator in action, just click this link.
© 2024 Verbal Transactions.
