Future.Customer. chats with Karsten Kraume, CSO/CIO at Arvato CRM Solutions, about the future of automation and its impacts on consumers and businesses a topic also researched in the Omni-channel lab.
https://www.future-customer.com/where-is-ai-heading-artificial-intelligence-in-customer-service/
In an ever-changing world where customers constantly switch between multiple channels and have an always-on expectation in terms of being heard and answered, both BPO providers and brands must work harder to deliver seamless customer interactions.
Digital must sit at the heart of customer-centricity and customer-first thinking must be aligned across internal stakeholder groups. Whether it’s IT, marketing or operations, all departments need to come together to develop customer journey models.
The partnership between Arvato and the European Research Center Information Systems (ERCIS) addresses such challenges in the Omni-Channel-Lab and has invited sixteen students to tackle the challenge of collaboration.
Eight bachelor students in Information Systems from Münster as well as eight MBA students from the University of West Georgia will meet at the ERCIS headquarters in Münster. Working closely with the Lab’s team, the students will explore ways to encourage and facilitate organisation-wide led approaches to customer-centricity. This will support the Lab’s mission to develop practice-oriented research that can be applied in today’s commercial operations.
The team will be working with the Lab from 23rd – 30th May 2018, with outcomes shared in the near future.
Everybody is talking about automation and its potential to transform businesses, create new efficiencies and enhance customer experience. But this is just the start. Over the next decade, it will pave the way for a revolution in service delivery and how customers interact with brands. This shift has already started and businesses need to prepare now, or risk being left behind.
But how can brands keep the ‘human touch’ while seamlessly integrating new technologies like RPA and AI? What impact will they have on customer service in the future and what will Customer Service Centers look like in 2027?
Drawing on Arvato CRM’s experience of designing, delivering and differentiating customer service for some of the world’s most respected brands, its Chief Strategy Officer, Karsten Kraume, will deliver a keynote lecture on “Customer Management in times of automation – how to blend cognitive and human agents to leverage multi-channel marketing excellence”. The lecture will take place Wednesday, 20th June 2018, 2-4 pm at J2.
Karsten will also share some unique insights from Arvato CRM’s most recent research paper: “Customer Service in 2027: How Automation, RPA and AI will transform the way companies deliver customer service over the next decade”, which will be available to download.
About Arvato CRM Solutions
We design, deliver and differentiate customer service on behalf of some of the world’s most respected brands. Arvato CRM Solutions has approximately 45,000 people at more than 100 customer service centers in 27 countries speaking 35 languages and is recognized as a ‘clear leader’ in the global customer services/customer experience (CX) sector1. It is a part of Arvato, the world’s third largest business process outsourcing (BPO) provider2 that provides customer services, supply chain solutions, financial services, and IT solutions, and has total revenues of €3.8 billion.3 Arvato is a division of Bertelsmann.
1CCO – Service Provider Landscape with PEAK Matrix™ Assessment 2017 by Everest Group June 2017. 2’HfS BPO Top 50’ by HfS Research July 2017; 3 2017.
Arthur D. Little’s sixth executive roundtable on digitalization focused on artificial intelligence (AI), robotics process automation (RPA) and blockchain. The cross-industry discussions revealed that certain AI and RPA applications have reached “ready-to-use” maturity and are almost standard in some industries, while they are hardly dealt with in others. Participants included experts from Deutsche Bahn and the Frankfurt School of Finance and Karsten Kraume, CSO/CIO at Arvato CRM Solutions and ERCIS Advisory Board.
“There’s no doubt that customer service is becoming more technology driven, with service delivery automation (SDA) like RPA, AI and big data analytics at top of our clients’ agendas.” said Karsten Kraume “However, we believe that the ‘human touch’ will always be a key element in the design and delivery of differentiated customer service, which is why we’re seeing a huge interest in hybrid and blended solutions that leverage both approaches.”
“For our global clients, customer service is a key brand differentiator. Therefore, effectively combining emerging technologies with human customer contact that deliver a seamless experience to customers is essential. However, as we’re currently seeing with chatbots, implementing these hybrid delivery models is complex – it demands not only technology expertise but deep customer service know-how too, which Arvato is ideally placed to deliver.”
Download the full article by Volker Pfirsching (Partner at ADL) here: http://www.adlittle.com/en/insights/viewpoints/executive-roundtable-digitalization-0
