We often say that customer success should be part of an organization’s DNA. But, what if it was also in the instruments of our daily lives—our phones, computers, and devices?
We’re certainly on that path. Machine learning—applications that not only respond to inputs without the help of human intervention, but learn, or adapt, from each interaction—is transforming the ways that we communicate with customers, thus allowing us to know customers better and anticipate their needs before even they are aware of those needs.
A Gartner report found that 89% of organizations expect that customer experience will be a top priority for maintaining a competitive advantage from 2016 into the foreseeable future. A key aspect of machine learning is already changing the way we do business. It is enabling a more intelligent and intimate customer interaction by learning and adapting to the way our customers and employees operate—providing the information we need to deliver enhanced service and helping us recognize customers’ patterns to predict what they might need before they know it themselves.
Intelligent business applications, which can automatically offer individualized recommendations and streamline tasks for business users, are making their way into the market. These smart cloud applications—known as adaptive intelligent applications—use web-scale data and apply advanced data science to learn about an organization’s users and their behaviors.
With adaptive intelligent applications, organizations can also begin to offer personalized recommendations to customers by getting to the heart of their individual business needs, purchasing decisions, interests, and patterns. These capabilities can help enterprises be in perfect lock step with their customers: from initial interest, through purchase and service, to the next buying cycle. This helps companies become a trusted partner and advisor, committed to ensuring a customer’s success.
New Oracle Cloud services can provide employees with a knowledge base that provides the insights they need to improve business results through a heightened understanding of the way their customers operate. These adaptive intelligent applications can provide organizations—from finance professionals and HR recruiters to marketing and supply chain managers—with actionable business and customer insights to make more informed decisions, leading to more success for their customers.
For example, the hospitality industry can use customer reviews and digital feedback to personalize its customers’ visits. Hotels are using virtual hosts and robot hotel staff to provide guests with tailored experiences—ultimately giving guests a more enjoyable and efficient experience whether they are traveling for business or pleasure.
In addition, financial institutions are turning to machine learning to offer more personalized experiences—from tailored financial advice to custom offers and services—based on the customers’ portfolio and past investments. Banks are also leveraging data from AI to detect fraud, improve their communication with their customers, and provide better recommendations on future investments—ultimately enabling customers to make better decisions to achieve success.
Recruiters can use adaptive intelligent applications to create job descriptions that will help candidates more efficiently find the best positions that suit their skills and career goals, and automatically identify best-fit candidates by following their search patterns and past experiences. With the best employees in place, helping customers achieve success is even easier.
By using machine learning to achieve more actionable and precise insight, organizations are empowered to engage in more productive dialogue with clients, advance their value as partners in problem-solving, and help to propel their customers to new levels of success. While customer success has long been a central component in the DNA of many organizations, adaptive intelligent applications are helping business integrate customer success further into the DNA of the devices their clients and employees rely on daily. Then, businesses can truly begin to transform the way they anticipate customers’ needs and provide unrivaled experiences and unmatched success.
Jeb Dasteel is senior vice president and chief customer officer at Oracle.
