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mobile and wireless
They go just beyond simple
voice recognition to be smart
enough to intuit what you might
be looking for, even if your lan-
guage is imprecise.
This is the nascent kernel
of artificial intelligence, or AI,
which will eventually underpin
a world where we are able to
interact verbally with any range
of machines and get good an-
swers. That’s known as “docu-
ment search,” taking keywords
and returning information. To-
day, you might ask Siri to help
you find an Italian restaurant,
or Alexa to play music, but to-
morrow these technologies will
“learn” about you from your re-
quests and questions, in order
to make better and better sug-
gestions – eventually carrying
out predictive analysis to cater
to your needs before you even
express them.
The opportunity for this is
clear in the consumer space,
but it’s also migrating to cus-
tomer service platform. Accord-
ing to Accenture, 83 percent
of consumers prefer human
interaction with channels over
digital platforms to solve cus-
tomer service issues. But, 79
percent of IT and business ex-
ecutives “agree that AI will help
accelerate technology adoption
throughout their organizations,”
and, “AI is poised to enable
companies to improve the ex-
perience and outcome for every
critical customer interaction.”
From a channel perspective,
new platforms are coming to the
fore to help service providers and resellers leverage
some of the more advanced options for AI.
For instance, DeviceBits is touting its Academy
product suite for customer service for mobile virtual
network operators (MVNOs).
An MVNO leases cellular coverage and data
bandwidth from one of the four nationwide carriers
(AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile or Verizon) and then resells
it to consumers. MVNO service packages are often
sold through big-box retailers such as Walmart, Best-
Buy and Target, in a prepaid service plan. The cus-
tomers service aspects of this can be old-fashioned
at best, and frustrating for consumers.
DeviceBits’ Academy suite offers MVNO custom-
ers a destination that includes digital content for all
handset device models, which include FAQs, guides,
tutorials and videos that are intelligently linked to
predict user journeys, providing a positive customer
experience. It uses data science to adapt over time
and create relationships across digital assets, even-
tually predicting consumer behavior.
“Today’s customer is more self-sufficient than
ever before thanks to a wealth of knowledge and
support materials readily available online,” said JC
Ramey, CEO of DeviceBits. “Mobile carriers are le-
veraging this customer service content and are now
utilizing self-service platforms such as Academy that
By
Tara
Seals
A
Smarter
MVNO
W
e’re so used to, as consumers, the
digital assistants offered by everyone
from Apple to Amazon – think Siri,
Alexa and even Microsoft’s Cortana.
Artificial
intelligence
altering customer
service
Channel
Vision
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May - June, 2017
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