HITT- The Impact of AI on Customer Journey Orchestration April 30, 2024

Transcript

High Intensity Tech Training

But we kick things off today with our high intensity tech training, and your comments and questions are welcome for today’s presenters in our chat window. Live q and a will follow each presentation.

Today, we’re going to study the how tos of unleashing the power of customer journey orchestration, a critical concept in today’s experience driven marketplace. We’re going to look at the technology behind CJO and explore specific use cases showcasing its use. Telarus solution architect for contact center and AI, Jason Lowe, joins us with today’s presentation.

J. Lowe, welcome back to the Tuesday call. How are you doing?

Doing great, Doug. How are you?

Fantastic. Thanks. Always good to have you here.

It’s always good to be here. So thanks for joining everybody. We’re gonna have a lot of fun today talking about some pretty crazy stuff related to AI and how it influences the customer journey. So let’s go ahead and see if we can get right to it.

Here we go.

Okay. So let’s talk about what the customer journey is first, and then we’ll start talking about how things happen along that customer journey using today’s modern tools. So many of the representations of the customer journey that are used, by marketing practices today use a lot of similar terms, but this is really the basic structure regardless of what the phrases are. There’s the customer awareness phase where they’re becoming aware of the product and what they could use it for or how it could influence their practices.

There’s the consideration stage where they start figuring out if it really is something that they want to purchase and buy. There’s the decision making stage, and that also includes the implementation once the decision is made to go ahead and go with that product. Then you move on to the retention stage where companies are going ahead and and figuring out how to support their customers and make sure that they keep them. And, hopefully, if they keep them and they have a high enough opinion of the vendor or the provider, then they move into the advocacy stage where these customers are actively promoting the customer or they’re promoting the provider’s products.

Evolution of Customer Management

So as recently as the nineteen sixties, the execution of all of these different various stages of customer management, they were really done by different company departments without a whole lot of customer specific communication going on between these different departments. And then with the advent of the computer age, automation really started to take hold, and software packages that focused on maintaining accounting records that were customer specific came to be. Then you get to about the seventies when small businesses could finally afford to join the computer age and computer tools start to really come into prevalence with the way the businesses were doing business.

In the late late nineteen eighties, the first components of the modern computer relationship or sorry, customer relationship management or CRM software tools really came to be. This was the pivotal step in advanced marketing and sales and customer retention practices. And then by the mid nineteen nineties, you had a bunch of different CRM’s products that became prevalent with the launch of things like ACT. I don’t know if any of you remember the old ACT product.

GoldMine, Maximizer, and eventually Salesforce and other competing products, and Salesforce incidentally was that first, software as a service CRM, which really started to spin the CRM industry on its head. And so finally then, you have decentralized applications that were all were a place where all personnel could really participate in all of the stages of the customer journey. They could track and they could reference customer specific information. It allowed for the customization and tailoring of specific practices targeted at individual customers.

Impact of Software as a Service

And as software as a service came to be prevalent, eventually, communication started to reach the cloud so that communication methods and channels, which were vital, and they started to become executed in all of these different customer journey areas using these cloud based products. And so now, here we sit today where CRMs and cloud based marketing sales, communication, documentation, and support tools, all of those can each reference each other and can talk to each other via a very important method called integration. I’m sure that everybody that’s on this call has heard the term one way or another, API and how vital and important that is in these different applications being able to talk to each other and exchange information for the purposes of executing their particular task along the customer journey path.

Influence of Modern Applications

So if we think about it, really, all of these different stages are drastically influenced by modern applications like awareness. You have tailored marketing campaigns with emails or Internet ads or proactive outbound outreach targeted at individuals based on things like even their surfing practices on the Internet or previous purchasing history.

Even traditionally mailed credit card applications are influenced by information known about individuals as they take part in each of these different stages along customer journey. So it’s not just digital paths that are influenced by what goes on today using CRMs and these sources of truth.

Also, in the consideration stage, you have sales process tracking, you have customer testimonials that influence the way that customers make their decisions. We’re talking about rating systems like Google and Yelp and g two and and different other tools like that. It’s really interesting to help people rate certain products and services could actually lead to awareness campaigns about other related products and services. Because if you like this type of tool, perhaps you might like this other tool.

So stage two could actually inform. Stage one. Go figure. And then in the decision stage, which also includes the implementation and support stage, this is where efficient and effective communication tools are really put into place, monitoring tools to make sure that the products are doing what they’re supposed to be doing for the customer, really anything associated with turning a customer up and supporting the customer throughout the onboarding process becomes very vital.

Stages of Customer Journey

Then once things are running, retention comes into play where knowledge based management becomes prevalent, online reference materials, good documentation, q and a repositories, and a whole lot of other things become very vital. This is also where customers’ history is stored in the CRM’s transition. And so or sorry, it’s stored in the CRM and everything transitions from sales based activities to kind of usage and support activities about how the customer is using these tools moving forward. And then finally, when things have normalized post implementation and the customer is actively using the products and services and hopefully they’re happy, surveys really come into play.

This could influence how the product is developed moving forward, but it also influences how the customer is supported in the future so that they could eventually become, hopefully, an advocate. So custom custom companies will actively promote the rating of products so that these future prospects also back on stage two can be influenced by their hopefully positive experience that these customers are having. And also let’s talk about what is really quite true. I think everybody will acknowledge the customer logos are oftentimes used on race car slides for sales efforts.

Customer Advocacy and Retention

You wanna make sure that these customers are happy so that you can keep their logo on your race car slide.

And in the best cases, customers will agree to be referenceable during future sales processes.

Okay.

So now let’s talk a little bit about the structure of how these tools are integrated and how they are put into place today and how these different tools exhibit themselves in the Telarus portfolio of providers. So the customer experience, regardless of the stage of the customer journey, are influenced in a lot of different ways.

Telarus Portfolio of Providers

You have unified communications tools or UCaaS UCaaS, unified communications as a service. You have contact center tools, which are really the heartbeat of supporting a customer or CCaaS, customer or contact center as a service. And then you have CPaaS, which to some people is a little bit more ambiguous and not as very well defined. Not as people know not as many people know really what CPaaS does compared to the other two tools, but we can talk a little bit about that today.

And that stands for contact platform or communication platform as a service as well. And the great thing about the Telarus portfolio of products is that we have great providers along each of these different areas in addition to a lot of add on products or products that are traditionally coupled with a core platform in each of these different areas along the lines of what you see down below. Everything from digital engagement to robotic process automation or RPA, even things like employee engagement, like gamification products or analytics or which oftentimes are tied into quality analysis or quality management.

And then BPOs will heavily use these tools, including some artificial intelligence tools that are targeted specifically for BPOs that you wouldn’t think about, like accent mitigation and other things like that. But, really, one of the big things that comes into play here is artificial intelligence, and that is why I am here today as a solution architect for artificial intelligence addressing you about the different ways and the different tools that are coming into play. One of which you’re going to hear from in a little bit, Core dot ai. They are a very important and very powerful artificial intelligence platform that handles a lot of the different activities and ways that you communicate with and manage customers along that entire customer journey.

Role of Artificial Intelligence

So really AI is the big key, the big place where major advancements have been made and continue to be made. And so let’s talk a little bit more about that specifically.

So this is a chart that shows as of two thousand twenty three, by the way, that’s when Forbes published this. This is the different ways that AI is really improving and influencing that customer experience. And as you can see, as we all would expect, what is the most prevalent way in which artificial intelligence is really starting to influence that customer communication pathway? It’s chatbots.

Influence of AI on Customer Communication

Now we’re not just talking text based chatbots, we’re not talking about just web chatbotting, you know, the little thing on the side or in the bottom right hand corner of websites where people can get their information or find out a little bit more. Chatbots now also include, if you will, SMS texting. A lot of those SMS communication methods are driven by chatbots. Customers may not know this, but those are oftentimes automated texts and oftentimes natural language understanding and natural language processing is driving the chatting that’s being done over SMS and also social media platforms like Twitter.

Or forgive me. I should say it, you know, sorry, Elon. X. We’re talking about Twitter or x where tweets or, you know, x posts can can actually be done and direct messages can be, facilitated via these chatbots or these text based artificial intelligence engines that utilize natural language understanding and natural language processing. We’re also talking about Instagram and Facebook even and, you know, all of these chat you know, Snapchat, TikTok, instant messaging, and direct messages can also be done using these various artificial intelligence entities.

AI in Different Communication Channels

Now emails are still something that are very prevalent.

Something that happens more as far as artificial intelligence management of emails is really robotic process automation.

This is where emails are sent during different stages of that customer journey. Most prevalent during things like marketing outreach, product delivery during that decision and implementation process. You know, your order has been placed. Your order has been shipped.

You have received it. Here’s a picture of it on your porch. By the way, did you like this product? Let’s go ahead and survey you during the retention and the advocacy stage.

You know, email sets a very important tool in each of those different intervals.

And then also personalized services. Now this is where we’re talking about those product recommendations. Right? Artificial intelligence is the engine that can figure out that if someone likes this this much, and they also like this this much, then perhaps we could try and sell them this other product. So let’s make them aware of it.

Artificial intelligence is used very prevalently in a platform that we all know and love called Amazon. And it’s really interesting how when we go and we take a look at an individual product on Amazon, all of the different ways in which artificial intelligence exhibits itself and modifies what you see.

Product recommendations, sponsorship are also shown to only those where the sponsorship could be most effective. They’re only going to show you those sponsorship ads if Amazon has a reasonable assumption that you have interest in that product. And then isn’t it interesting how down below when you have the area where you can purchase it and see more information about the product, it’ll show you related products or how often this product was also bought with this product at the same time. Or if you have interest in this, you might have interest in that.

Artificial intelligence is driving each one of those little different slight modifications of that interface that you’re dealing with when you’re purchasing a product on Amazon. So that is something that is shown in those personalized services. We’re not just talking serving you. We’re talking about promoting things and making sure that we’re exhibiting things to you personally.

Personalized Services and Advertising

Text messages, we already talked about. Personalized advertising, we touched on a little bit there. And then an area where these large language models or generative AI are used heavily as this personalized advertising, and that is also fed by this long form written content stuff where copy or bodies of text are being generated by artificial intelligence engines oftentimes done in a voice that you would like to hear it in. If they know enough about you, they know what type of communication you like, you know that you if they know that you like things in a humorous form, when content is created for you, they can ask these LLMs or generative AIs to write a bit of copy for an email that’s being sent to this individual and do it in a funny way, or do it in a serious way, or do it in a technical way, or do it in a flippant way, or do it in a brief way, or a verbose way.

All of these different things can be done to help generate specific copy targeted at you, the individual consumer, or at purchasing personnel within companies. It’s really quite interesting how AI is being used in all of these different ways.

Telarus AI Product Portfolio

Lots of interesting points. Okay. So this I put on here to kinda target what are some of these different tools that are in the Telarus portfolio that can serve these different ways that AI is improving the customer experience. And so oh, let me go back. Sorry. We don’t wanna get to that quite yet.

The AI used in the customer journey, notice the digital channels of communication and how they expand each of these different steps. They are used and they’re vital across that entire customer journey. Phone calls obviously are going to be a big deal no matter where you go because person to person and voice communication is going to be important everywhere. But text messages are used for awareness, they’re used for consideration, they’re used during the decision making implementation process, during retention, and then advocacy.

Will you please go and rate us here? Will you please go and rate us there? Emails, as we know, are very important along the way. And then chatbot.

Everything from awareness to let’s offer them ways to reach out to us during the retention stage regardless of where they might be or even during the consideration or decision making stage. We want to sell our product to customers in any way that they want to consider buying it, buying it. And if they want to communicate with us during a or using a specific communication channel during a specific time, we want to enable that so that they can reach out to us in any way possible.

And then you have the different other AI uses that are early in the customer journey process, like personalized services and product recommendations.

That allows the awareness and the consideration steps to kick in.

Personalized advertising also being facilitated by LLMs and generative AI, and then, of course, the written content that is generated much the same way.

So I’m I’m sure that there will be questions on this a little bit later, but, you know, this is obviously a good exhibition of how AI really shows itself.

Powerful Use Cases of AI

Now let’s talk a little bit about a couple of really powerful use cases about the impact that AI is having along the customer journey, not just for the customer, but also for the company that is using AI to increase the effectiveness of the customer journey.

Klarna. This is a big thing that hit the Internet and people went nuts about this. They started to use an AI assistant powered by OpenAI. In other words, generative AI or an LLM engine. So they immediately took out a huge portion of the customer service chats, and instead of having those be served by actual people, they were being served by a generative AI engine that was driven by an LLM model, taking the workload of seven hundred people.

Economic creative destruction is a real thing, you guys. Businesses are going to be shaping the way that they hire and the way that they do business in the future very much around how AI capabilities are growing and developing and evolving, and this is a perfect example of that. If you can shift the equivalent of seven hundred people’s worth of work away to an AI tool, that means you less you need less people. So I’m sorry to put it that way, but it’s eliminating jobs in one area. It’s creating jobs in other areas, and that’s the principle of creative destruction, but there will be jobs that will be lost as a result of the prevalence of AI and how AI is doing business. This is a positive and a negative. Or the company that starts utilizing this AI, you can see on the very bottom line down there, it’s estimated to drive an additional forty million dollars worth of profit improvement this year for Klarna.

Impact of AI on Businesses

Significant.

Very significant. Not only because of personnel and payroll savings costs because they don’t need as many agents to handle those communications, but also because these AI agents are just as good as humans when it comes to customer satisfaction, but they’re better at first contact resolution with a massive reduction in repeat inquiries that these chatbots are dealing with. It also decreases the handle time, so it’s more efficient for the customer, so the customer is not spending as much time having to deal with the problem. And then also you deal with the fact that you have the same type of digital agents that are being able to serve a lot of different markets in a lot of different languages without having to hire additional personnel that have these targeted skill sets. You can use the same AI bots for multiple countries and multiple marketplaces, and they can communicate in a way that has context local to the customer’s market. Very, very important.

Another one of these examples was put forward by by the vice president, of Forrester talking about a specific contact cut center customer that reduced their costs by eighty million over the course of the year by shifting some responses to a GenAI virtual assistant and agent platform.

And they also experienced increased customer satisfaction and greatly improved net promoter scores. This is the revolution.

It’s happening right now today.

Okay. So how are some of these AI products exhibiting themselves, and what are some use cases that you can go and take to your customers to talk about incorporating AI in their business. Now this is just a handful. We’ve covered that top line already, I think, extensively enough. The virtual agent and the bot place where everybody is able to do things using these natural language understanding, natural language processing, and even these generative AI engines to drive interactions with customers.

That, my friends, is still the low hanging fruit. There is a large, and I mean a large number of companies out there, especially in the small business and even the mid market areas that don’t know that these bot engines are affordable, and that they are cost effective, and that they will give a positive return on investment.

We have providers like Core dot ai, who you’re going to hear from in just a few moments, that have these chatbots. And part of their sales process is that they know that they are selling a new product to people in a way that people are unfamiliar with or uncomfortable with. And so they’re all about being able to prove out the ROI and buying their product.

You can help the customer understand that return on investment, but these companies also can help you with that because they can prove to the customer, look, not only can we serve your customers better, but we can save you money, and you’re gonna get your money back within, who knows, Microsoft says as early as fourteen months.

IDC says as early as sixteen months before you reach positive ROI. It’s estimated by Microsoft that if you invest in a dollar into artificial intelligence, you’ll get three dollars and fifty cents back. Those are some pretty compelling statistics.

Bots are the low hanging fruit. But if you’re going to go ahead and move forward with agents, then why not help the agents do their job better by using AI to drive quality management practices?

Traditional QA practices have people listening to a small sample of calls. AI can listen to all of them.

You’re not just going to have targeted instances for a particular agent where they might be unduly graded low because a outlier was graded. Five calls for an agent out of five hundred and one of them happened to be bad is going to skew things drastically if the other four hundred and ninety five calls were exceptional. So AI driven quality management, very important.

And then, also, if it’s going to get to an agent, let’s make it so that their handle time is reduced as greatly as possible by using AI to give them real time assistance.

Customer asks for help with this product.

Wouldn’t it be cool if an AI entity was listening in on the phone call and then immediately could pop up information or order forms or technical diagrams or q and a documents about those products that the customer is asking about and give that to the agent before the agent even has time to go to their search engine and start searching for things. This is the concept of real time agent assist, where AI is listening to the call and immediately giving the agent the tools they need to do their job and be the most efficient and effective agent that they can be. There are also products out there where you can give them a chat GPT, who knows, like a chat GPT or, you know, like a llama or like a Bing or a Copilot or, you know, claw type interface where they can interact with their knowledge base.

They can interact with their documentation. They can interact with their SharePoint repository or even their chat history on things like Microsoft Teams or Slack. There are products out there that you can put in place where employees can reach out and have a conversation with the knowledge base, ask it questions, and it will be able to answer them in the voice of an actual individual.

Very effective, very efficient, very timely.

Robotic process automation, very important as well. We’ve already talked a little bit about that. Data analytics is also very important. And something that a lot of people aren’t paying a lot of attention to, but that are really important, are the outbound sales campaign and management automation tools that are out there today.

Wouldn’t it be neat if we could use AI bots to warm these leads?

Let’s go out and obtain these leads, find out that these customers are interested in these products, and then these AI products to converse with them, to tell them all about the products, to reach out periodically to see if they’re still interested in information about these products without having to involve a human and keep those things warming until such time as it’s ready for a human being and then immediately hand it to a human being and provide it the entire history of what the AI did in interacting with this customer or this prospective customer. Forgive me. So that the person that then is talking to them has an idea of what happened, what’s important to the customer, and can pick that up right where the area left off and be better at their sales job.

And then, of course, there’s marketing and messaging campaign management, which is very related to that same type of activity that we’re talking about.

Okay. I’m sure we’re gonna have some questions about this as we go along, but let’s take a look at a bunch of the oop. Let me go back once more. I went ahead and advanced slides faster than I should have. Darn it. There we go.

We have at Solaris a lot of providers in a lot of these different areas. As you can see, UCaaS and CCaaS, which we talked about previously, lots of prevalent providers there. CPaaS also, we’ve got the best ones in the business. You guys don’t need to go anywhere else or talk to any other CPaaS providers because we’ve got the ones who are the highest rated, as well as plenty of CRM capabilities and other things to make the workforce more efficient like workforce engagement products. But look over there in the artificial intelligence area. And, guys, this is not all. A lot of those CCaaS providers and a lot of those UCaaS providers, they also have artificial intelligence products in some way, shape, or form.

Understanding AI Products and Providers

And you’ll notice in artificial intelligence that a number of those actually are the chatbot type, those low hanging fruit pieces that I was talking to you about.

This is where you can now exhibit to your customers that you know about AI.

Let’s talk to you about a chatbot. Oh, you already have a chatbot? Well, what AI are you using to help your agents do their job better? Are you using AI driven quality management?

No? Well, let’s talk about that. Are you using AI driven agent assistance real time? No?

Well, let’s talk about that. Plenty of ways that you can have conversations with your customers and how they can enhance their customer journey and drive that using good AI products.

Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s what I have for you today. Let’s go ahead and move to the q and a segment, Doug. I admit I have not been paying attention to the chat because I’ve noticed it’s been going crazy. So I’m gonna go ahead and let you feed me some questions.

I got you covered, J. Lo. Great presentation.

Customer Concerns and Security

As always, when we talk about AI, it’s absolutely fascinating. Little scary in places, but overall fascinating, and the opportunity for our Telarus advisors is real.

Lot of questions coming in about the different vendors and suppliers that we work with and the various things that they do. And I think you did a good job of explaining that, you know, there’s a lot of different aspects to AI in terms of what it can do for a business. But some of the specific questions have to do with how do you determine in helping your client how much contact is too much, as they set up their own AI functionality?

When they look at advertising, when they look at, outbound calling, and when they look at other ways of communicating with their customer, how do you determine that sweet spot of how much is enough and how much is too much?

Great question. AI is actually used pretty heavily in analyzing that. Right? So there are tools that you can put into place to make sure that customers aren’t bugged unless they want to be bugged. Right? They can opt out of these different things. There’s always the stop capability in texting.

And so oftentimes, a lot of companies that I talk to, they want to talk to their customers as much as their customers will allow it. But they also have to be able to analyze and see at what point are customers telling them to stop communication. And if they can average that and they can figure out that this type of communication is really starting to hit the edge at about this quantity, they can scale that back and make sure that when they’re communicating with customers in the future, they don’t reach that threshold quite as quickly or that type of rapidity of communication. So it it’s sad, but it really is a little bit trial and error.

You’re probably going to lose some customers while you’re figuring or lose some prospects while you’re figuring out what the edge is that you can push the limit to in communicating with these people in these different marketing communication techniques. But once you’ve got it figured out and you’ve got it zoned in, then the stuff can be really effective from that point forward.

So our advisors threw out a number of different scenarios of things that they would like to be able to help their clients do. One was talking about doing, outbound calling in a proprietor’s own voice, that could then interact with the customers. Another one talked about personalized ads. Another one talked about being able to train customers and so forth. As we look at the list of suppliers that are involved with AI and have different services available, How does a Telarus advisor know which of those suppliers to rely on in specific questions and scenarios that come up with their clients. We’ve got a lot of them there.

You know, Doug, this is a great way, and thank you for the softball. This is a great time for me to stand up and talk about how great our engineering group is.

This is why we exist, people. This is why Jason even has a job, not just so that I can stand here on this thing and talk to you and just spew all of this stuff.

My job is to actually work with you in opportunities to figure out the right providers to meet the right use cases.

We have a great engineering group. You have your regional sales engineers that you work with that are generalists that know a lot about a lot of things.

This is a fantastic group of individuals that are very, very smart. You even have some inside sales engineers that will work with you on some of the smaller opportunities and things that are a little bit more general as well. So those they support a lot of the regional SEs. And then you also have this layer of solution architects of which I am one, where we specialize in different areas.

I’m in AI and communications. We have two other, architects that you heard from last Tuesday on the pre or no. Wait. Pardon me.

Two weeks ago on the previous Tuesday call. Megan Tai and Mike Balargin, who are CX solution architects that also deal heavily with UC and CC. We also have a couple of cloud solution architects, and we have a cybersecurity solution architect who, despite what you may hear, is actually a really nice guy, and he’s not nearly as grumpy as he tries to come across on. We’re talking about Jeff Hathcock here.

And, Jeff, if you’re listening to this, I love you, brother. But we do have a lot of really fantastic people in our engineering group.

Listen.

Doug, this is not warranted, and I know that I’m kinda stepping out and being my own individual here. But I’m gonna tell you folks as an individual, Jason Lowe. I have a long history in working in providers in the software as a service space and a long history in working with a lot of different engineering and sales engineering groups. I am not blowing smoke when I say that the group that I’m a member of right now is easily the best and most qualified group of engineering types I have ever worked with. So we have a strong group, and I would encourage each of you to please forge a relationship with your regional SEs and forge a relationship with the solution architects like me that can help you and stand in with you in these opportunities.

There’s a question that just came in from Pete Salerno, I think is great. I’m gonna move it right to the top of the list.

The AI partners that Telarus offers for our advisors, are they vetted for security?

And what role I know this is a little outside your wheelhouse, but it comes up often.

As we talk about artificial intelligence, what are the security concerns that, arise, and how can our advisers use that to their advantage in those discussions?

So we definitely, during the vetting process, take that into consideration. I mean, there there are definitely questions that we go through with these providers as we start to evaluate them about the structure of their business. Not only things like are they ready and able to support the channel. Do they know how to work within the channel? Are they effective in the channel? But also, where are they based out of?

Where is their support done?

Where are their development teams? You know, these are all questions that are asked.

Generally, we do it from a functional perspective.

Investment, that’s a little harder to try and head off at the past or not because depending upon the structure of the company, they may or may not be easily, or you may not be able to easily discern who the parent company is or where that investiture is made from. And so we tend to focus a little bit more on the practical use of the stuff, like where is the code generated in the store? Where is it these people are being supported from? At the investment level, they tend to not necessarily have an active hand in the tactical and the strategic implementation of the products.

It’s more, from, you know, a visionary type side. So, do we take that into consideration? Absolutely. At what level as far as we can?

I mean, we take into consideration as much as we know, and some of it may or may not be easily known. But whatever we can find out, we definitely take that into consideration when we’re figuring out what providers we’ll do business with.

You touched a nerve earlier when you mentioned, the old ACT software. I think many of us have used that. Andrew Robertson said that he’s still got his, laying around somewhere. He also asked a couple of great questions.

Internal Use of AI at Telarus

Can you give any insight on how we use AI internally at Telarus and how that might translate into the customer experience?

And for partners that want to have these discussions, do we have talk tracks or other materials available that will help them prepare?

It’s a great question. So we are using AI actively along at one level or another all of the different things that we talked about.

I I could get into super detail, but let me just say that along that entire customer journey spectrum that we talked about earlier, Telarus is also involved in our customer journey, not only for our customers’ customers, but also you, our partners, or our customers, and our providers are Telarus customers as well. We try to serve everybody, we love everybody, and it’s very important for us to be able to manage our communications with people in the way that we do business along every stage of the journey, for all directions. And so, yes, we actively have people in our account management platform or account management offerings that are using communication platforms that have artificial intelligence components, everything from, omnichannel communication channels to, workforce management to, you know, all of that other stuff.

Analytics, we use heavily. We do use it for outbound, marketing campaigns and the like. We also can, in very targeted instances, use it for content generation. One of the great things about generative AI is that if you’re using it right, you use it to give you the rough draft, and then you go in and you really make sure that it is refined.

Sometimes it works great, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you read through it and, like, oh, this is completely off, and you end up writing it really yourself anyway. But I will confess personally to have used generative AI to assist me in writing a few things here once in a while.

Sorry for anybody that might have a problem with that, but it is something that we do use at Solaris quite heavily. Yes. Artificial intelligence infuses our company at a lot of different places.

It makes sense. Not too much of it here on the Tuesday call. We tend to rely on more on my own natural stupidity, than artificial intelligence, but, we’ll we’ll get there for sure. I I wanna throw one other thing at you. Harry Barnes had a really interesting comment, and I hadn’t really seen this approach before.

But I’m sure it would come up in our advisers’ discussions.

Customer Training and AI Interaction

What about training for people on the other side of AI? Folks who are being conversed with, called by, and interacting with these, chatbots and other forms of AI.

Can our advisers provide help and advice to those whose customers may need tips and tricks or instruction on how to deal with the influx of AI in their interactions with a particular business.

Boy, that’s a very interesting angle on a very really thought of that before.

Yeah. I haven’t thought about it much. What I would say is where that you know, and I may be off base here, and so I apologize if I’m missing the mark. But where that starts to become a real problem is when we’re dealing with security concerns.

Right? We’re talking about individuals that are gonna get targeted phishing emails or, you know, smishing or, you know, all of these other different methods that are being used to try and infiltrate companies for nefarious purposes. Artificial intelligence these days is being used to make those things more effective. You don’t see very many emails with grammatical errors anymore that are phishing emails.

Oftentimes, they read just like somebody in the Midwest Midwest wrote it when it was actually originating from other sort of nefarious nation state territory, and that’s because they can use artificial intelligence to build these things in the language of choice in a much better way than they would write it themselves trying to use Google Translator or some other means. And so we do have, security offerings, their behavioral products. I would talk to Jeff Hathcock and others. I could mention certain platforms, but I don’t dare mention one or two and miss others, where their whole prospect is training internal companies on how to recognize these different types of things and safeguard against them and make sure that they’re not being fooled.

This also includes recently for the product that we use internally at Telarus, modules about deepfakes, talking about video and voice deepfakes and how to recognize that or how to make sure that you’re not being fooled by that type of communication. So, if I’m missing the mark again, I apologize, but I would say, let’s talk in the cybersecurity area where we can deal with behavioral training on how to recognize and mitigate those risks.

Yeah. Really, a question a little bit out of left field there, but so important. I wanna thank Harry for that question.

Nice perspective on that one. Let’s take this back to customer journey orchestration for just a second. We’ve gotta finish up here, but, terrific presentation. Overall, it seems to be that the goal is to use more technology in more creative ways to help customers on that journey and make it a win win situation for them and for the business involved.

Best way for a Telarus advisor to approach a business about AI and other technologies with the concept of the customer’s journey in mind?

I would say CX. That’s your low hanging fruit.

There are lots of different ways that you can use AI, and the biggest area that that’s gonna have the biggest impact is in CX. And so AI can be used to enhance the customer’s journey using some of the CX products that we have in the solar portfolio all the way from marketing and advertising to advocacy.

So according to the previous slide that I had, where I was showing the different types of communication mediums and how they span the different segments of the customer journey, that is really, really a a big thing to keep in mind that CX influences all of the customer journey, and Telarus has a ton of great Telarus providers that can influence that. Leila has has raised a good point in the webinar chat where, there are CX and AI courses in Telarus University.

I would point that out. I maybe have a little stake in the game because I’m the guy that did the AI courses, and I’d, you know, I’d love it if you went on and saw those and rated them as fantastic, but make sure that you’re going and taking a look at those courses. You’ll learn a lot about CX. You’ll learn a lot about the different ways in which CX can be served by its large providers. And then when you take the AI courses, you’ll learn a little bit about how AI works and how you can recognize opportunities for presenting AI products to your customers. So there you go. Solaris University is a good place to start.

Solaris University, and, of course, contact JLo or any of our engineering teams, members, with your particular questions, circumstances, and opportunities around AI and CX.

Obviously, still so much to be done there, but partners need to be at the forefront of this. As always, fascinating presentation. We could go for hours, JLo. Thanks so much for, the, information today. If partners wanna reach you directly, your email address?

J Lo at Solaris, j l o w e at Solaris. Not that. There you go.