5 Key factors of IVR for Customer Service

Consistent, easy, and efficient experiences are the key to customer satisfaction and loyalty. One of the most essential tools to achieve that is through an Inter voice response system. And often, the first touchpoint for customer support which plays an essential role in preliminary interactions and ongoing customer engagement. Also, IVR is responsible for identifying, segmenting and routing callers to the most appropriate resource.      

Here are five key advantages of IVR that make it so vital in customer engagement.

#1 Personalised Self Service

By combining self-service with personalization, IVR system becomes a valuable asset to build customer relationships. Pre-record greetings and messages using IVR to reflect professionalism, consistency and great first impression. IVR systems allow for tremendous personalized greeting or a prompt to seamlessly transfer the call to a live agent when the customer requires detailed information.

#2 Increase Customer satisfaction

On holding a customer for too long can lead to a call being disconnected or a customer getting impatient and hanging up only to call right back. A great benefit of IVR is First Call Resolution by reducing the time taken to confer with various agents or passing the call around, the customer query can be resolved faster with minimum waiting time and thus, lead the higher Customer satisfaction.

#3 Reducing Costs

Reduce agent call volume, manpower costs and overall cost per call by automating all inbound & outbound transactions & processes. Visual IVR costs less to deploy & providing customer information automation automatically, no need for additional agent training, and can easily integrate into existing IVR systems.

#4 Increase Loyalty

The IVR connects to the CRM which stores the customer’s details and the details will be displayed on the agent screen when the customer calls. Moreover that, in terms of customer profile and in terms of what products they have purchased, customers will be prioritised and loyal customers who are assets to the company deserved to get connected directly to skilled agents.

#5 Keep Business get Connected

Through Interactive Voice Response, can easily provide round-the-clock customer service. Using IVR’s self-service options, customers can get answers to their basic queries at any time. Also, can transfer the call received at off-business hours to your personal number through the call forwarding feature.

Now that you know the many benefits of having an IVR system, it will become even more clear that, to make the best of these new opportunities, companies need to switch their thinking about IVR technology. Let’s break the Roadblocks of Customer Satisfaction using IVR technology.   

New Chapter with RPA; Are you Ready to reap the benefits?

As we ramp up for a prosperous 2019, many are on the lookout for innovative new applications that can help them fine tune their organizations and improve business performance. AI is certainly on everyone’s radar, but more specifically, robotic process automation (RPA) – the subset of AI & a key factor in transforming organisation, ready to gain a significant competitive advantage in today’s ever evolving market.

Our main objective is to provide RPA benefits to society offering the possibility of improving the current competitiveness in most sectors of the economy. How does RPA do that? By allowing access to fully documented end-to-end robotic processes, by improving risk, compliance and audit management through reduction of errors and higher consistency and accuracy of reporting, or by enhancing the human experience with the business.

Top benefits of RPA adoption which also includes business benefits of robotic process automation.

Compatibility with existing systems and seamless implementation

Companies no needed to make changes to existing legacy systems, but rather optimising them when implementing RPA. it finds beneficial for organizations because it allows them to implement improvements in a non-interruptive way and that’s unique among other types of automation.

Better management capabilities

RPA allows enterprises to achieve enhanced governance in order to better manage business operations by embedding certain requirements within automation rules. Moreover that, RPA allows auditing and analytics to happen in the same place, without losing the track of the data input.

Improved customer experience

RPA comes very helpful here, since it can reduce employees from the burden of repetitive, high-volume tasks. And More time for employees means ability to deliver higher quality services to customers in a timely, pleasant manner.

Data integration and compliance      

For Mid Based companies, hundreds or thousands of software platforms needed to implement here RPA will be Life saver.  It removes data gaps between disparate sources and allows employees to proactively recognise and manage any compliance issues and consistently run internal reviews.

Thanks to RPA the “game changer”, which offers a real-world solution to a real-world problem.

Let’s Change the world for better with automation, Get ahead with RPA!

Using CRM to Personalize the IVR Experience

Technology is now playing an important role in amplifying customer service. Interactive voice response systems (IVRs) is still the workhorse in the call centre, with clear and proven value propositions like cost reduction through automation, helps to reduce hold time, minimize abandoned calls, confirm proper agent transfer based on customer input selection and, play a vital role in growing contact centre productivity.

Yet, we frequently see businesses ignoring the potential of this medium and leaving the customers at the mercy of a poorly designed flow, driving them to extremes of frustration.

The question is how do we make our IVRs act more natural, more “personalised”, so that businesses can build more efficient customer journeys, enabling customers to solve their issues faster or independently?

A Fully Engaged IVR integrated CRM Solution, which can be used to provide the more personalised & engaging services to the clients. The IVR solution will use the available user data, which is collected and stored in the CRM. Based on the available data’s in the CRM, system will play more personalised IVR prompts. Thereby, user journey will become more engaging and personalised. Thus, the IVR solution integrated with the CRM can provide better services by giving the more personalized response to the customers.

This kind of CRM integration Interactive Voice Response Solution (IVRS) can be used by any firm. Nevertheless, the E-Commerce, customer support centre and call centre can influence the maximum advantage by IVR CRM Integration. The CRM integration in Call centre or eCommerce will boost the up-selling and cross selling, too. Similarly, it will convert lead in IVR itself, which decreases the IVR to agent transfer ratio.

3 Keys that will change the face of the contact center in 2020!!

The industry is changing, with the changing customer preferences and new technologies. But, what will be the top contact centers seems like in 2020 and beyond?

2020 is shaping up to be the year of strategic thinking: better analytics, more intentional social media conversations and innovative ways to involve artificial intelligence.

The three key points to build a picture of how the contact center will look in the future along with research and strategies, helping you make the best decisions for your customer experience. Some of the key takeaways include:

Artificial Intelligence Integrated into Customer Interactions

To Streamline call center experiences for customer and agents, business is getting deeper into predictive analytics using artificial intelligence.

With the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), companies can now improve CX by learning more about the customer and anticipating their needs. Many CX-focused brands are deploying artificial intelligence technologies strategically at key customer touch points.

The Digital Transformation Be a Key Part of Digital Strategy

The modern business environment has completely restructured owing to the applications of advanced technologies. Digital channels are here to stay and continue to grow with channels such as live chat and apps building in popularity. Businesses need to take care the whole of the customer experience: a truly digital contact center redefines the customer experience from start to finish.

it’s not the thing about using the right channels to communicate with customers where they are; the smartest businesses are integrating technologies across their business to provide full customer context with each interaction and leveraging system data to provide proactive service.

Chatbots Have Appeal – But You Need to Get the Balance Right

Chatbots have become one of the latest staples of modern Contact Centers. Automation within the contact center is inevitable, but you need to make sure that you get the right balance between agents and bots when building your customer journey.

All these trends have shown us that the call center sector has is adopting new technology at a steady pace, keeping customer expectations in mind and learning from their shortcomings to deliver a better customer service experience.

How CRM Improves Call center Agent Productivity?

Even with all the advances and changes in the world of marketing, a happy customer will become a promoter of the brand. But, only a happy agent can drive contextual conversations to increase customer satisfaction, hence a happy customer. Having said that, we can deduce the worth of investing in your agent’s productivity. Agents are bottle necked with strict deadlines and have got no time to take a break from their busy schedules. So, how do you take care of your agents?

Integrating CRM with leading applications help agents to increase their productivity & also help them to deliver quick service to the customers. The Recent studies says CRM applications can increase sales by up to 29%. A CRM Software allows agents to get a holistic view of customer’s details and their buying behaviour which helps them maintain the context of their conversation.

Here’s how your agents can benefit from CRM Integrations:

Single Sign-On

How would you like it if you didn’t have to remember multiple passwords and log in process was just a click away? Automatic two-way synchronization between CRM and your system eliminates the need of entering passwords every time you have to log in.

Drive Contextual Interactions

Do your agents struggle with remembering customer’s details? Of course, they do when they handle high call volume each day. Customer’s interaction history displayed in CRM will help agents understand their journey and pain points. And, once they know the problem, they can drive contextual interaction.

Knock Out Human Error

With bottlenecked schedules, agents fail to deliver consistent service because they are always stuck with manual errors. Reduce the possibility of dialling wrong numbers when you can have a click-to-dial functionality. Agents can dial any number with just one click without manually dialling the number on CRM.

Quick Call Functionalities

While agents are on call, they can transfer the call to other agents and solve customer’s query in one go. Allowing agents with functions like call recording, conference call, and scheduling a call back helps them in resolving the queries quickly. Through CRM the agents have the edge of call disposition in CRM to add notes and follow up with customers.

Agents work round the clock and they are the building stones of a business. Empower your agents with CRM technologies that help them delight the customers.

5 positive ways artificial intelligence will impact accountants

Today, AI is being used for image recognition, object identification, detection, classification and automated geophysical feature detection. These are underlying tasks that once required the input of a human.

Focusing on how artificial intelligence will impact accountants, AI will very soon help you to automate much of the routine and repetitive activities that are undertaken on a daily, weekly or annual basis.

It will also help you to:

Empower quick decision-making

Create smart insights

Examine huge quantities of data with ease.

With this in mind, here are five examples of how ai could be useful for your accountancy firm over the coming years.

1.       Predictive and forecasting solutions

With AI integrated into the software, you will be able to provide a comprehensive and accurate insight for your clients without the usual “manual heavy lifting” and number crunching behind report creation. On a day-to-day basis, being able to quickly and easily access up-to-date and accurate reports and forecasts can help you form a closer and more useful relationship with your clients.

This revolution will be empowered by one of the cornerstones of AI today: machine learning.

This is the ability of software to essentially program itself based on the data it encounters. The software is able to learn from what you do with data and can make its own suggestions for humans, if not act entirely autonomously. Machine learning is everywhere. It allows mobile phones to enhance predictive text, use speech recognition, create route suggestions when navigating, and suggest places you might want to visit when you reach your destination. At companies worldwide, 77% of businesses already say they’re completely or very reliant on machine learning technologies.

2.       Smart assistants

Are you an accountant who, during crunch time when seemingly every client is sending through their accounts, considers turning off your phone or email so you can get some work done? You’re probably not alone. Fortunately, smart assistants might be able to give you a helping hand. They can form the first line of customer contact and might even be able to provide clients with the information they need, such as details about their current tax liability.

3.       Automatic tagging and allocation of transactions

The next two areas where AI will help your accountancy practice are also enabled by machine learning. This will save you time by correctly tagging transactions and assigning them to the right ledger account. Put simply, your accounting software will learn from previous tagging decisions that are typically made according to rules that the accountant is aware of. Some of these rules are intuitive but others can be surprisingly complex, at least from a computer’s point of view. Over the coming years, the ability of technology to discover these rules and predictively plan will help to remove a significant component of your daily workload.

4.       Anomaly detection

Computers love data, of course, and when machine learning is applied to massive amounts of data—such as the yearly ledgers of a large company—then there are clear benefits.You will be able to discover anomalies that may exist, and the process will be much quicker and take significantly less effort.

If an audit is required, for example, it will be possible to audit all the data rather than merely a sample, yet without the huge resources typically required for what’s traditionally considered a “full” audit.

Optical character recognition (OCR) isn’t new but AI enhances its accuracy significantly and opens it to new usage scenarios.

        5.     OCR solutions

While it’s always been possible to extract information automatically from documents, this required a human to point out to the OCR software where the data was located—something that also meant the document layout couldn’t be altered without further instruction.

        So what next for AI and accountants?

How will we get all these wonderful AI-enabled benefits? Well, the good news is you probably won’t have to do very much. While in the past you might have expected to buy an add-on software package to gain revolutionary new functionality, the kind of tools discussed above will more than likely start to appear over the coming years in the software you’re using now. Some of it, such as bank account reconciliation, might already be present in your firm’s accounting and client management software—and you might not even be aware.

All you might have noticed is that things just got a little bit easier when the software appeared to get that little bit smarter. This is the shape the revolution will take—many small increments, rather than an overnight change.

It simply means being aware of what’s common-sense good practice as far as technology goes and ensuring solutions such as cloud computing are adopted within your practice.

This gives you all the benefits available today while ensuring you’re prepared for the future.

Cloud ERP: The Time Has Come

Hardly any software vendors today want to be stuck with an on-premises-only product portfolio. In the ERP subsector, probably the most important technology area for CFOs, it took market leaders Oracle and SAP longer than most to diversify into the cloud. But now they’re leaders there as well.

But while the global cloud ERP market is expected to grow, it likely won’t be at a lightning-fast pace. Statista forecasts that the market will be $28.8 billion in 2022, representing an 8% compound annual growth rate since 2016.

So far, CFOs as a group — those at large companies, at least — have been fairly reluctant to trust their core financial and operational data to public clouds. Still, companies’ overall growing fondness for cloud computing could influence faster change in the ERP arena.

Research and advisory firm IDC estimates that 70% of companies’ core applications currently run on-premises or in co-location facilities. The rest are in private clouds (23%) or public clouds (8%).

In a recent survey by 451 Research, however, 60% of participating technology professionals said they expected their companies’ approach to IT in 2020 would be focused on off-premises cloud solutions.

More Robust

In the ERP market, count Jeff Buchheister among the converted. His company, Cetera Financial Group, replaced its old on-premises system with an Oracle cloud solution in August after an eight-month implementation period.

It’s early days, but Buchheister, Cetera’s finance chief, is impressed. Because Oracle, like other cloud providers, handles all of the system’s administration and maintenance, the IT department has eliminated two full-time positions. What’s more, his finance team is reporting efficiencies that he predicts will save him at least 10% on accounting staff costs.

A key reason Buchheister chose a cloud solution was to avoid having to keep asking the board of directors for permission to implement upgrades. Automatic upgrades are included in cloud subscription costs. “The cloud solution’s ability to constantly keep us upgraded with new functionality and to keep us from falling versions behind was really attractive,” says Buchheister.

Such converts are driven by not only automatic updates and drastically reduced maintenance expenses, but also lower up-front capital costs and faster start-up times for rented software delivered through the Internet.

Modern cloud ERP software is more robust than earlier incarnations, as well. As the market has matured, vendors have addressed earlier security fears and added capabilities that have users whizzing in hours through tasks that formerly took days.

Still, among organizations that aren’t ready to move to the cloud, some may never be. Many are stepping gingerly, adopting a hybrid approach in which they move some ERP functions to the cloud but keep those that store proprietary data on premises. Still, others think the most sensitive data is actually safer in the cloud, but they keep some processes on site. It’s not just fear that is staying the hands of those reluctant to move.

“It’s hard for a company with years of investment sunk into an on-premises ERP system to make that move to a more modern cloud-based solution,” says Melanie Posey, research vice president, and general manager at 451 Research. “Then there’s the extent to which the business depends on that system for day-to-day operations. So, there are a lot of reasons to keep the ERP as-is.”

When a company moves close to fully amortizing the cost of its old on-premises systems, though, it becomes more likely to migrate to cloud solutions of one type or another. Flavors include a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution running in a multi-tenant public cloud, a single-tenant private cloud hosted by a cloud vendor, and a private cloud maintained in-house.

Cost Questions

At such a time, a company wants to understand the financial ramifications of switching to the cloud.

The SaaS payment model is a lure for some. Instead of paying an upfront hardware cost and annual licensing fees, cloud users pay-as-you-go subscription fees. That said, from a total-cost-of-ownership standpoint, cloud solutions may actually prove more expensive.

After five or six years, subscription fees will likely outweigh the ongoing maintenance fees a company would pay for an on-site solution. “If you do a careful analysis, an on-premises solution, while not as easy to implement and maintain, is going to be a lower-cost solution over the long term,” says Jeff Carr, CEO of Ultra Consulting.

That assessment, however, assumes that the company will continue to use the on-premises ERP for a lengthy period of time, Carr acknowledges. And, as in the case of Cetera, the opportunity to reduce staffing costs could be an important factor in going with a cloud ERP solution.

Another factor lifting cloud ERP sales is the fact that other enterprise applications already run in the cloud, as do myriad consumer products that people feel comfortable using online. Once eyed skeptically as a potential security risk for the kind of sensitive data that’s in an ERP system, cloud software is now perceived as much more mainstream.

Perceptions have slowly changed as vendors have touted encryption capabilities and the enhanced security protocols available on cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services. “In corporations that rely on on-premises solutions, adherence to updates and compliance often lags those that are well maintained by a software vendor,” says Juergen Lindner, vice president of SaaS at Oracle.

Cetera’s Buchheister buys the argument. “We’re better off having Oracle, which has a very large team that focuses on this with 100% of their time, handle our ERP security than employing our IT department to do it,” he says. “As we’re a financial services company, there are hackers trying to get into our systems, and there is a benefit to us in having our ERP system sitting outside of our primary network.”

Transition Tips

Migrating your ERP to the cloud is not as easy as flipping a switch, according to technology consulting firm Emerald TC. Some preparatory work is required. Consider the firm’s following tips:

1. Establish goals for your ERP project.

2. Build a cross-functional team composed of everyone who will use the system to guide the process of choosing the right cloud ERP for the company’s needs, identifying reports, and assessing data elements for the integration.

3. Take an inventory of current data elements throughout all departments. Back up all data.

4. Review the business processes you are seeking to improve. Cloud ERP makes processes go faster, but making a bad process faster is just increasing the speed of frustration.

5. Add extra time for project completion. Questions, broadening the scope of work, and minor glitches all take time to address.

6. Share all documentation, data dictionaries, and other information with your integration partner. The more information that is shared the better.

7. Look for a cloud ERP vendor with a proven history of successful transitions for companies in similar industries. Ask for and check on references.

8. Allocate extra time for training groups and individuals who will use the system.

Selling Security into the Boardroom

Technology has been the single biggest change agent in the banking market. Over the last 30 years, a continued and relentless path of technology innovation -- most notably the Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, mobility, and the maturation of standards and integration -- has shaped the industry and continues to do so today as we begin 2019.

Advancements in automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology have enabled a new generation of capabilities that propel real-time interactions between security operations and fraud investigators, to customers and employees. The term "security" no longer means simply protecting the perimeter of a building; it also involves securing corporate networks and sensitive data, and enabling the highest order of customer trust, through all their engagements.

The evolution of technology, fraud mitigation, and the overall security structure has propelled security leaders to take a new approach to 'selling' the investment in technology to their senior executives and board of directors. Once a cost center, security -- and its technology investments -- are now a critical part of any business and are designed to deliver long-term value to shareholders and customers.

Here's a question: Are you in the right position to sell the value of your investments to your senior executive team? In this blog, we take a look at how to position for success and plan for the future of a security department: 

Propose the Value

Board-level executives process information and decisions differently. 

When going before this audience to gain buy-in for plans, you need to understand their overall mindset. Does your organization's board view security technology as a cost or an investment? If it's the latter, you're in a very good position and you can easily move on with the pitch.

However, if your leaders view security as a cost, you have to change their mindset ... now. Develop a pitch that explains how security aligns with the overall goals of the business, such as delivering exceptional customer engagement through video-enabled analysis of processes or addressing organized fraud schemes through the identification of abnormal behavior.

Share potential business results or new efficiency targets, outline how many different people will benefit from your plans, and describe how the business will benefit from your strategy.

Consider the use case of expedited remediation and how timely resolution can be a key to protecting the value of the brand. Remember: "Senior management is more likely to do business with you because of what you know about their business, rather than what you know about your business."

Build Partnerships

Security no longer operates in a silo. Today, convergence occurs at an organizational level. The alignment of risk management, IT, compliance and security enables a comprehensive approach to security that takes into account cyber and physical elements -- and helps leaders proactively recognize threats.

With this in mind, you must consider evolving the relationships you have beyond these partnerships. Learn how to collaborate with finance, operations, facilities, strategic planners, and marketing leaders. These stakeholders can be valuable allies in your road to gaining budget approvals, especially if you're able to gain insight from them on the ways in which your security strategy can benefit them.

Understanding the challenges that your fellow department heads face, as well as offering them ideas and solutions, can go a long way to helping you meet your own goals.

Speak the Language

If you're like any traditional security leader, you find it easy to discuss issues related to risk management, business continuity, threat mitigation, and security technologies. If you've embraced the value of and collaboration with IT, you're ahead of the game.

However, can you speak your executive team's native language? That is, can you speak business? Can you easily discuss liability, cash flow, gross margin, ROI, TCO, and profit margins as they relate to your department? If not, you need to educate yourself and your team to be able to gain approval for your future security plans.

Focus on outlining ROSTI: Return on Security Technology Investment

• Reduce expense results
• Optimize performance
• Standardize products or services
• Timeline for results
• Improve process, progress, and steps toward goals

Technology is a great force multiplier. Security helps secure an entire branch footprint, alleviates risk, helps ensure operational compliance, and improves fraud investigations. Video surveillance systems, analytics, threat management platforms, and other solutions can provide organizations with intelligence and unprecedented protection from fraud -- all while enhancing the customer experience. 

But all of these cost money. Therefore, being able to explain the business benefits will enable you to create a stronger, strategic security program within a financial institution. Following the suggestions above will help guide you along the right path to the future in communicating these needs to executive leadership.

Top CRM trends that can be game changers in 2019

As businesses gear up to embark on their journey of becoming customer-focused to customer-centric organizations, the need for reaching out to customers is more evident than ever before. Ensuring 100 per cent customer satisfaction is no longer good enough; in fact, the term is no longer relevant in today’s business environment. The modern customer is looking for unique experiences and expects to be delighted. Organizations over the world have taken note and have come up with CRM strategies that focus on achieving customer delight. Whether you already have a CRM strategy in place or are designing one, you need to keep a close eye on the market. Customer tastes and preferences often change frequently like seasons. To ensure your CRM strategy addresses your customer pain points, you need to revisit and adapt your strategy frequently. With this thought in mind, let’s take a look at some upcoming CRM trends for 2019. 

1. Artificial Intelligence powered CRM is set to take the industry by storm  

As more organizations strive to deliver proactive customer service, the demand for AI-powered CRM is set to increase in the coming years. More organizations will start using intelligent chatbots that will help teams with a number of tasks including recruitment and building and selling service packages. 2019 will see the rise of more AI-enabled contact centres that will play a key role in improving customer experience and agent performance. 

More organizations will start integrating voice assistants into their CRMs that will help both customers and agents save time and efforts. In 2019, more organizations are expected to use AI and machine learning techniques to extract strategic customer data. 

 2. Mobile CRM usage will rise  

According to a study by Statista (2019), the number of mobile phone users will reach an all-time high of around 4.7 billion in 2019. As mobile device usage continues to grow, more employees and customers will start using their mobile to access CRM systems. In 2019, mobile CRM will be the preferred tool of employees on the go. Mobile CRM delivers full CRM capabilities and can help organizations save employee training costs and improve customer satisfaction. 

 3. IoT will keep playing an important role  

IoT has emerged as a major driver of CRM. Over the years, the usage of IoT enabled devices have increased, and this trend is expected to gather momentum in 2019. More organizations will start using IoT to automate customer service and improve operational efficiency. IoT also helps organizations save time when collecting key data.   

At iMovo we specialise in Customer Experience Management (CEM), Business Intelligence (BI), Big Data Analytics, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Workforce Management. We enable organisations to build long-term value relationships with their customers resulting in consistent and profitable growth. If you want to delight your customers by providing excellent customer service, contact us today.

5 Most Promising Artificial Intelligence Trends To Watch In 2019

As a matter of fact, an expansive population worldwide was not very serious with artificial intelligence (AI). The reasons were: the so-called extravagant promises, frustrating disappointments, automation of jobs. But then a confluence of developments in AI started generating positive results and now the same consumers are taking advantage of the new technology in personal lives as well as in business.

AI actually has the potential to completely change the manner companies do business. Further with more technological developments, an additional number of companies, in 2019, will be able to access and implement this life-changing technology. Already, companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are leading the pack in AI.

So with AI as a mega trend in technology, let’s find the top 5 promising innovations in Artificial Intelligence in 2019:

1. Advanced AI Assistants

Just like how enterprises are adopting AI, domestic consumers like you and me are also witnessing the democratization of AI into our daily lives. The introduction of Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri and other devices have simplified our basic activities like searching for information online, paying bills or even reading mundane emails.

According to a study conducted by Adobe Analytics consumers are embracing voice services with an open mind. In fact, 71 percent of smart-speaker owners reported using them at least daily, while 44 percent said they used them multiple times a day. Come 2019, the number of users will definitely increase with the improvement in technology and the adoption of more languages.

AI assistants will soon be able to provide more personalized experiences as they become more superior at recognizing different users’ voices. Thus, instead of simply talking to your AI home device or your mobile, I can forecast in the near future you’ll be able to speak to your TV, refrigerator, car and even command your home’s electricity functions.

2. AI-Powered Conversational Search To Go Mainstream

Advanced conversational AI-Powered Search will become mainstream as users start using the AI-powered assistants more frequently and in new ways.

In traditional, conversation-based search, a person speaks a question, a voice assistant provides a response or a list of responses. Also, the voice assistant directs the person to the most relevant information. For example:

Searcher: “Can you tell me car dealerships nearby?”

Voice Assistant: “There are two car dealerships within five miles from here. St. Michael’s Luxury Cars and Hot Wheels SUVs.”

In this example, the traditional voice serves as a call-and-response mechanism that directs users to exactly what they want to know when they had started searching: a car dealership to his/her nearby location. Once the searcher calls or clicks on the dealership link, the search engine ceases to be of any use to the searcher. But in 2019, search engines will add more value from the beginning of the search through the purchase process and beyond, like into the customer service, sale or resale.

Let’s continue with the car dealership example, to testify how conversational search will be a game-changer for consumers and businesses. Here’s how it will work: Let’s assume a customer named Joseph is a first-time car buyer, and as an average buyer doesn’t know which models and features are suitable for him. His first question might be something along the lines of “Where can I buy a car for less than $10,000?

A conversational Search Engine, powered by AI will respond by questions like, say:

• Would you like me to help you find a car?
• What is your concern about the car’s mileage?
• What is your favorite color?
• Are you interested in buying hybrid cars?

Now Joseph will be able to narrow down the solutions and get the exact search results he is looking for with his car selection.

3. Advancement of Capsule Networks

The Capsule Networks (CapsNets) is not a new invention. The theory behind it was presented by Geoffrey Hinton in 2011, but the idea gained more traction recently as it emerged as one of the top technology trends.

The architecture is based on the concept which has proven to give promising results in image recognition while using much less training data.

Data scientists are confident that CapsNets can evolve even more in 2019 and will be used more frequently in various computer vision tasks.

To learn in more detail about capsule network, check out this explanatory video by Aurélian Géron, author of the book Hands-on Machine Learning.

4. AI For Recruiting

For many businesses, recruiting quality talent is one of the most stressful and time-consuming tools. However, with the improvement in artificial intelligence technology, AI-powered tools will be an interesting trend to watch out for in 2019.

According to Katrina Kibben of Randstad, “Any area of recruiting where distinct inputs and outputs occur – like screening, sourcing & assessments – will largely become automated.”

For example,
Mya, which stands for “My Recruiting Assistant”, is a conversational AI chatbot which uses both natural language understanding and natural language generation.

It can communicate with candidates via email text or Skype. Mya can also shortlist qualified candidates based on their rich profiles or even reject a candidate if the HR decides to pass on his/her application.

The future of work is surely transforming with these emerging HR tools powered by AI. These improvements will make hiring optimized and efficient in 2019.

5. Democratization of AI

While the majority of the previous use of artificial intelligence was majorly done by the military, academia and the tech giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook or Netflix, we are now venturing into the process of adopting algorithms into the business world.

Now that several open-source projects and companies are offering their proprietary AI solutions at a price accessible to small and medium enterprises, 2019 marks the democratization of once elusive artificial intelligence technology into the wider market.

In most instances, organizations can begin by adopting simple algorithms, however, over time, they’ll begin to discover additional scenarios for the utilization of AI.

2019 can also the year within which the sensible application of artificial intelligence, like e-commerce recommendation engines, can become a reality available to a larger number of market players.

Conclusion

As a future value factor businesses have embraced artificial intelligence. However, if AI has to make a disruptive impact in organizations it has to be trustworthy. Till then, only time will tell if artificial intelligence will be able to augment human understanding or not.