At our Africa customer conference this year I showed off a new member of the SYSPRO stack, a Bot christened Ken. I highlighted how intuitive the Bot is, using the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to have an intelligent, and even anticipatory conversation with the customer.
Ken the Bot
The future of both business and ERP is in automation, with more and more businesses embracing automation in order to remain competitive; especially in customer service where AI can answer customer queries intelligently and fluidly with no downtime or lengthy training required, which also boosts productivity.
Ken, as I named him uses machine learning to constantly evolve and learn, like a human operator. Ken learns customer requirements and probable solutions by mining our database and calculating the most useful response and provides support solutions quickly and responsively.
Ken listens and responds in a natural language which is what gives it a human, lifelike quality. For example, I taught Ken that vendors are synonyms for suppliers and customers are synonyms for debtors, similarly Ken can be taught almost anything within a business and can adapt accordingly.
Bots and Social Media
Using social media formatting enables business owners to have access to trending information that will be pushed directly to the customer, so inventory and invoicing for example can surface as visible insights for the business owner. And we know that Millennials are often more comfortable with an interactive experience with the Bot using social media like Facebook and Skype.
Ken can also deliver a consistent customer experience and has the ability to inform and deliver service to the customer 24/7. This has given rise to fears of job losses but I believe that as we move into the future more and more job titles and new positions are being created, for example, our development team now has more user experience (UX) experts whereas a few years ago the title barely existed. The Bot is definitely here but work roles are evolving as well.
Here’s to the present and future of customer service and support.
