Do you remember the excitement you had when you were young and finally had a piggy bank full of coins? It was time to exchange the coins for paper money so you happily hummed a tune as you began separating the coins out to their denominations, counting them and stacking in piles across the floor, then finally stuffing the coins into the paper rolls. You admired your work and knew it was all worth it because now you could buy that first gift. But as time went on, the process of separating, counting, stacking and rolling became too repetitive and tedious. It took too much time to get to the real prize.
Today, businesses are still “counting, stacking, and rolling” their processes and it takes far too long for customers and employees to get what they need, the real prize of insights that help the business move forward. On that point of taking far too long, Bain & Co. and the Economist Intelligence Unit collaborated on research and they “found that the average company loses 21% of its productive power to time-wasting interactions.” For companies, every interaction people have with their work should feel efficient yet human. No one should feel like they need to roll coins and stack rolls in order to get the answer they need or to work with you. The experience should be rewarding, like having a piggy bank full of money, without the hassle. That aforementioned research also concluded that the best companies are typically able to reduce that 21% loss by nearly 50% compared to their peers.
We were intrigued then by a recent article published in SiliconAngle. It coincided with announcements Oracle made at its annual Oracle OpenWorld user conference and it provides insights into how productivity can be vastly improved through the use of AI and digital assistants. The trend of forward-leaning businesses now is to find and implement tools that will create more time for strategic analysis and execution and reduce the amount of time spent on repetitive, low value tasks. Think about that for a second. Creating time. If you want more of the world’s most valuable resource, an important metric to track is the ratio of time your organization spends gathering and cleansing the data versus analyzing the data. Companies should pour more energy into finding ways to have their high-priced talent working on things that add real measurable dollar-generating value. Value like the kind that’s produced by giving your marketing team the tools they can use to infuse their campaigns with the ability to engage with more relevance and precision micro-target audiences in order to accelerate sales. Or tools that allow them to connect in a more conversational manner with those target audiences.
In this new frontier where AI and machine learning streamline the interaction between businesses and customers, neither party should have to waste time getting lost or experiencing delays to access what they need. The adaptable technology of AI changes with its environment and responds quickly to any requests, improving itself over time. Equivalent to a GPS turn-by-turn navigation, AI guides the customer smoothly throughout their journey with the company.
The use of chatbots for ERP and EPM Cloud has quickly become an important channel for businesses. They enable companies to interact with everyone in their world, from employees to customers to prospects, quickly enabling those people to get answers as soon as they type the question. And with the use of Oracle’s new “predictive planning” feature, companies now have the ability to help people identify and leverage trends and patterns in financial and operational data. Such automatic predictions improve the quality and timeliness of planning decisions by enabling customers to access predictions at data load time, see prediction and forecast variances, identify variance patterns and make revisions seamlessly with a touch.
Generally speaking, with the deployment of digital assistants across Oracle Cloud Applications, organizations now have the opportunity to more directly engage with their customers and their employees in a proactive and personalized way, across all web, mobile, and messaging platforms. Customers no longer have to waste time searching for bread crumbs of important data, in getting lost in a company’s catacomb of information sites, no matter the method they choose when interacting with the company and its offerings.
Finally, and perhaps the aspect of this technology advancement that promises the most significant long-term business impact, these new technologies offer real productivity boosts that help connect employees to their best self. By reducing the frustration of delays experienced while gathering information and resources that they need in order to excel at their job, AI opens up the possibility for more fulfilling engagement of an individual with their work and a stronger connection and understanding of its relevance to the larger corporate mission and associated goals. Employee success, anyone?
To learn more about how modern technologies can help drive measurable improvement in the way your business operates and how it engages with customers and employees, see how Oracle’s Customer Success – Business Advisory Services can help.
Interested in finding out what tools make marketers’ live easier? Find out more about working what better targeting, segmentation, digital analytics, and automation with Oracle Marketing Cloud.