Interview with Jay Hinman, VP of Marketing at DigitalGenius

Given the “hype” in the AI space, most companies are looking at AI to deflect or automate conversations in their contact center.

How do you prepare for an AI-driven world as a marketing leader?

AI as a technology is still in its early stages. There are thousands of people (researchers and engineers) working on advancing the science and theory behind AI. What’s changing now is that we finally see some practical applications of machine learning making their way into various business functions — with customer service being the first.

As with any emerging technology, the biggest challenge is to avoid over-hyping the market. We’ve done this by always connecting our proposition with concrete and quantifiable evidence of ROI that companies using DigitalGenius have achieved. That makes it real, and I think that’s important.

Everything else is just a matter of your marketing budget.

Yet, when you have real case studies of customers using your AI product, you should share them proudly, because as I said, it’s still the early days for AI applications and not many companies have achieved tangible results.

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Tell us about the AI engine driving your Conversational Process Automation (CPA). How does it put customer service in autopilot mode?

Conversational Process Automation (CPA) enables companies to quickly boost customer and employee satisfaction levels by becoming adaptive to business demands. Customer service interactions require two critical factors: processes and conversations. CPA seamlessly integrates them providing the capability to process massive amounts of queries without the need for human involvement, essentially putting customer service in autopilot mode. As the contact center experiences growth, our CPA system continuously learns how to offer end-to-end solutions impacting even more types of queries.

Take Course Hero, for example, 33% of all of their inbound inquiries are now supported by DigitalGenius with half of those inquiries are resolved end-to-end, including in their back-end systems, with zero agent interaction. We are seeing these numbers continue to grow as our technology learns over time.

What processes does DigitalGenius automate? Tell us more about your email automation technology?

We automate those mundane, repetitive tasks that customer service representatives spend a significant amount of time on. Customer service teams that use our technology now can focus their efforts and valuable time on solving queries requiring a human element. For example, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines enlisted our help to support their contact centers. As our AI system learns over time, it’s able to produce AI-suggested responses for KLM agents using a deep learning algorithm that works on any channel and in any language. With the most common questions on any subject, KLM is now able to automate those answers without a human service-agent.

How is customer service automation different from call center intelligence and automation?

I’m not certain they are different! The way we differentiate our products is whether or not an inbound query from a customer – be it from a web form, an email or via social media – was resolved with or without human involvement. Full end-to-end automation, including in back-end systems such as b****** or account management, is handled using conversational process automation and our “AutoPilot” product or mode. If a question comes in that can be partially automated, but requires human agent assistance, it is resolved using our “CoPilot” product or mode.

Given the “hype” in the AI space, most companies are looking at AI to deflect or automate conversations in their contact center.

The reality that most people miss is that “conversations” are just 30 percent of an average customer service experience. The other 70 percent is a series of actions and processes that customer support agents have to perform manually each time a customer asks them for a refund or the status of an order.

What is the state of ‘AI in Workplace” in 2018-2020? How can companies better benefit from leveraging DigitalGenius?

Businesses and professionals across all industries are seeing the benefits of practical AI

in the workplace. Human resources, healthcare, insurance, financial institutions, the list goes on. This is because AI can fulfill the repetitive (and often expensive) tasks, allowing employees to focus on higher level work.

At DigitalGenius, we’ve found there are three key characteristics of companies that best benefit from our platform —

1. They have common, repetitive, and expensive customer service interactions that take up a large percentage of agents’ time—interactions such as refunds, cancellations, user validation etc.
2. These interactions require customer service agents to take actions in different backend systems (b******, ERP, account management, etc.)
3. These systems have existing APIs to connect with an AI platform or new APIs that can easily be developed

Early results have shown that CPA provides a significant impact on a customer support team’s average handling time, its customer satisfaction scores, and its first-contact resolution metrics. We believe that every single company in the world will have some form of AI in their contact center in the next few years.

How could machine learning and data science empower Mobile-only brands to better engage customers?

Customers have never been more connected than they are in today’s mobile-first economy. Following poor customer service interactions, they take to social media with live videos that often spell out their experience to their friends and family. The barrier to entry for bad reviews will become obsolete as our mobile economy continues to evolve rapidly.

While that is a risk, social media offers companies the opportunity to connect with customers immediately. This adds multiple customer touch-points resulting in more queries to tend to for customer service teams. Brands are currently being tested, and it’s critical to their success to develop a strategy addressing these channels of communication.

In a video-focused industry, what’s next for cross-channel marketing platforms?

Our marketing team is keenly focused on account-based marketing, and using what we already know about our target enterprise accounts to provide them with personalized marketing information in the right channels and at the right time – rather than simply trying to drive them to one-size-fits-all lead forms. They believe that video is an important part of this, but is only one of many tools in the modern B2B marketer’s arsenal.

Tell us about your AI research programs and the most outstanding digital campaign at DigitalGenius?

We have a dedicated team of researchers and engineers diving deep into creating practical AI. They’re the ones behind our successes in Conversational Process Automation. At this point, we don’t have a specific research-oriented digital campaign to point to aside from the many resources, videos, guides, and articles that we have on our website.

The Crystal Gaze

What AI and machine learning startups and labs are you keenly following?

I think Unbabel are doing some really interesting things in using machine learning combined with human translators to deliver a scalable and affordable solution to help internationalize businesses and their customer support function. They’re one of our favorite partners at DigitalGenius.

Which technologies within AI and computing are you interested in?

Anything at the intersection of customer service and machine learning, as well as the more generalized and exploding field of robotic process automation.

As a tech leader, what industries you think would be fastest to adopting AI/ML with smooth efficiency? What are the new emerging markets for AI technology markets?

We’ve found that the travel and hospitality sectors are extremely interested in using AI for customer service, most notably airlines. E-Commerce and on-demand companies are also extremely bullish on automating their repetitive, expensive customer support tickets out of their business, and thereby allowing their human agents to tackle the complex problems their human brains were built to handle.

What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

You’ve probably never seen someone travel any lighter than I do. I’m able to fly from our London to our San Francisco office for a week and then back using only one carry-on piece of luggage, while still ensuring that I have something clean to wear every day. I’ve got it down to a science, after much trial and error – and honestly, it saves me hours in time otherwise spent waiting at baggage claim and in packing/unpacking – time that’s better spent being put toward DigitalGenius.

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Vasco Pedro – CEO of Unbabel

Thank you, Jay! That was fun and hope to see you back on AiThority soon.