Gartner Application Strategies & Solutions Summit

Summit 2017
4 – 6 December 2017 / Las Vegas, NV

Using AI Conversational Platforms for Customer

Experience — Better, Faster and Cheaper
Magnus Revang

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  AI can extract insight from
unstructured data but there is a
huge difference between
knowing and understanding
 Hence AI needs human
guidance to apply critical
thinking and judgment to what
it discovers — "synthetic
intelligence"
 "Narrow" AI is becoming better
than humans at defined tasks
 "General" AI is still a long way
off (except in the movies!)
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 1. What is a conversational
platform?
2. How will it enhance the
customer experience?
3. How do I get started?

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 What is a
conversational
platform?

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Conversational Platforms Underpin VPAs, VCAs, EVAs
and Bots

Virtual
Virtual
Personal
Customer
Assistant
Assistant
Conversational Platform:
Conversational  A natural-language processing (NLP) engine.
Platforms  A user interface (UI) that receives the request and
delivers the response via speech or text.
 A search and knowledge engine that can traverse big
data repositories of knowledge and content.
 A context engine to analyze the intent of an individual
and deliver personalized answers and other actions.
Virtual
Employee
Assistant

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There Are Five Classes of Conversational Agents

Virtual Personal Assistant. Working for users brokering first-, second- and third-party services and
VPA
knowledge. Available on consumer devices.
interaction
Human

Virtual Customer Assistant. VCAs act on behalf of the enterprise to simulate a conversation that can
VCA
deliver information and potentially take action on behalf of a customer to perform transactions.

Virtual Employee Assistant. VEAs support employees in simplifying engagement with the enterprise
VEA
and enterprise systems.

Narrowly focused chat agent — typically for a specific use case. Can be for users, customers
Chatbot
or employees.
interaction
No human

Talks to other bots and assistants using natural or structured language. Often dealing with subtasks
Bots
or narrowly focused conversations.

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Where Do Bots Fit?

VPA Chatbot
VCA
Chatbot Chatbot

Chatbot Chatbot Bots are narrowly focused

conversational entities. The
specialists — outsourced to
Chatbot Chatbot

Chatbot Chatbot by the generalists.

Chatbot Chatbot
Chatbot

VEA

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Three Axes

VCA
Audience

Chatbot Bots EVA

VPA
Consumers Employees

EVA
VCA
Scope

Chatbot Bots
VPA
Specific Purpose General Purpose

Chatbot
Purpose

VCA Bots EVA VPA

Automate Empower

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An Interesting Vendor Landscape

Facebook (M)

Apple (Siri)
Tencent
VCA

VPA

Google Assistant Microsoft (Cortana)

Clara

x.ai IBM Watson

Rapid Consolidation
Illustrative vendors of market not complete view
VEA

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Use Cases Vary but the Underlying Technology Is
the Same

Analytics/Supervision

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 Logical Architecture
With Capabilities

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 How Will It
Enhance the
Customer
Experience?

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Over the Next Three Years, Machine Learning and
Conversational Agents Will Be the Technologies to Watch
Plans for emerging technologies for customer experience projects

Implemented or plan to 55% 47% 40% 32% 28%

7% 7% 3% 3%
Have implemented 10% 8%
12%
14%
Will implement within next 12 months 24% 14% 17%
17%
Will implement in next 3 years 20%
22%
No current plans to implement 23%

68% 72%
60%
53%
45%

Machine Learning Virtual Customer VPA for Customers Augmented Reality VPA for Staff
Assistants or Chatbot
Base: n = 150/Excludes "unsure" Gartner Research Circle Members
Q. And finally, what are your organization's plans for implementing emerging technologies for customer experience-related projects?

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We Will Talk With
Them to Buy, Sell,
Negotiate, Complain
and Make Deals
Popular Conversations Modes Today

VPA API Company

User Company Employee Enterprise
VPA Chatbot
EVA APIs Systems

Scenario 1: User requests Scenario 3: Support employee

service/support/information via VPA e.g., coordinating sales program, BI reporting
user-driven customer service

Chatbot
Chatbot VPA Chatbot

User Company User Company A Company B

VCA

Scenario 4: VPA collaboration with multiple bots. Service

Scenario 2: Company provides service orchestration e.g., calendar and email VPA functions engaging with
(narrow — bot, broad — VCA) hotel and car booking. Context passes from VPA to chatbot to chatbot.

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Five Use Cases That Will Influence the CX

Lead generation and Payment Targeted upsell

improved conversions services and cross-sell

Customer Personalized media

service queries and news
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Leading experience: IP Australia

IP Australia "Alex" Helps Website Visitors to Apply for Patents with

Nuance Nina Virtual Assistant

"With approximately 99.6% of our

Of customer inquiries resolved by the virtual assistant customers now transacting with us
online we are reimagining the digital
service experience. […] The latest
• Through Nuance's sophisticated technology, IP Australia advancements from Nuance enable us
eliminates the need to sift through menus, ensuring that
every interaction begins and ends with an effortless, natural
to take our 24/7 customer experience to
experience the next level through the
implementation of advanced artificial
• IP Australia is the first organization across the Asia Pacific intelligence and machine learning".
region to add next generation automated machine learning
and human-assisted AI capabilities to its virtual assistant
Director General of IP Australia, Patricia Kelly

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Leading experience: KLM

KLM Customer Service Reps Avoid Turbulence in Social Media with

AI Tool from DigitalGenius

• KLM Royal Dutch Airlines uses

artificial intelligence to assist 'A personal approach is extremely
customer service agents in important to KLM as this is what defines
managing the increasing volume of
interactions with customers over our social media service. Applying AI,
social media channels. KLM can handle a greater volume of
• Initially, the application has been questions while still maintaining its
trained on 60,000 previous
customer-agent interactions and it
personal approach and speed.'
continues to learn by observing the
actions of the agents. Pieter Groeneveld, Senior Vice
President Digital Air France KLM

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Leading experience: Dell

Dell delights their customers and improves the business

performance by using AVA from NextIT
 Instantaneous access to content Q & A's

 Enhanced dell.com navigational tools

• Customers using chat +80%
• 316K conversations taken in first 3  Advisory experience via natural language conversation
months
 Improved product differentiation based on customer needs
• Reduction in live chat cost by 27%
• +600bps improvement to live chat
 Increasing customer satisfaction on Dell.com
close rate
• AVA driving AOV and margin-per-unit  Delivering sales productivity via improvements to Dell.com
premiums vs frictionless Dell.com conversion and basket size
• +12% total chat (AVA+Live) revenue  Reduction in live chat sales OPEX

 Incremental chat demand & mix of total dell.com revenue

(when AVA + Live chat considered)

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Measurable Benefits for Customers and Your Organization

Speed Customer Satisfaction Simplifying Complexity

Scalability Cost Savings Increased Revenue

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 How Do I Get
Started?

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 Employees plan, drive and deliver
the customer experience

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Manage the Human Relationship to AI and
Conversational Agents

Technology Technology as a Technology as a

as tool subordinate social peer
Customer issues Employee issues:
 Trust, safety  New working practices and skills, deskilling of some roles
 Attitude to "things" and "intelligence"  Change in field workforce role from "heroes" to "replacers"
 Weaker personal relationships  Opaque systems and recommendations

CIOs must be sensitive to the huge psychological transition of power and

control that is involved. Give people time to come to terms with the new order.

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Put Humans in the Loop — For Years
to Come

Paranoid Level:
Escalate

 Develop parallel efforts with HR

for retraining the machine
 Get training data, build a machine-learning model, use it to classify incoming
requests, but back off to human judgments whenever the model is confused.

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Revive Knowledge Management With the
Digital Workplace

Capture

Structure

Reuse

Organizational Knowledge Management Knowledge-Centered Service

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Determine Your Use Case
Interactive Conversation

Volume
A B
C
Customer
Dialogue Personalized Engagements
C
Informational Transactional

Level of Engagement
Task Complexity

B A C
General
Questions/Answers Guided Task Completion

C
A
Explicit Information

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Expectations of Conversational Platforms

Automated Actions

Solve Case
Dialogue Translation Smart
Advice

Routing Smart Ordering

Search Insight Actions

Form
Escalation Completion Update Fixing
Knowledge Base

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Reality …

Automated Actions

Solve Case
Dialogue Translation Smart
Advice

Routing Smart Ordering

Search Insight Actions

Form
Escalation Completion Update Fixing
Knowledge Base

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How Will the Winners Differentiate?

 Show personality in engagements

 Differentiate themselves by the kinds of engagements provided
 Capture novel, but relevant contexts
 Show industry knowledge
 Ability to precisely target needs and wants
 Capture all the data collected through interactions
 Have the ability to "market" to smart machines
 Automate knowledge management through machine learning

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Recommendations

 Vendors are tactical at the moment, don't choose a strategic vendor

as the market will change significantly over the next year
 Target the highest impact areas and do proofs of concept, where you
have good historical data
 Don't underestimate time for developing decision trees and
maintaining them
 Enrich data to ensure best performance, be in control of the training of
the machine
 Design the conversational agent with the human in the loop — smarter
with every interaction
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Building Your AI/Automation Action Plan

Sweep the competitive Build your knowledge Understand the

landscape: What are of AI/automation business strategy —
others doing? technologies and humans vs. machines.
1 What is happening in
adjacent industries?
2 assess their maturity
and potential to
3
Is the time to act now? your organization.

Build bots Don't be seduced

and reusable by AI, sometimes
algorithmic engines. simple robotic process
4 5 automation is sensible
or an algorithmic
business approach.

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Recommended Gartner Research

 Four Use Cases for Chatbots in the Enterprise Now

Van L. Baker and Magnus Revang (G00316146)
 Architecture of Conversational Platforms
Magnus Revang, Brian Manusama and Anthony Mullen (G00323532)
 Conversational AI to Shake Up Your Technical and Business Worlds
Tom Austin, Mark Hung and Magnus Revang (G00315689)
 Market Insight: How to Collaborate and Compete in the
Emerging VPA, VCA, VEA and Chatbot Ecosystems
Anthony Mullen, Magnus Revang and Brian Manusama (G00319851)

For more information, stop by Gartner Research Zone.

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 @Brian Manusama

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