Prediction Series 2019: Increased Focus on Data Expected

By Kate Hammett On Mar 22, 2019

In today’s digital world, the volume of data an organization generates creates its own challenges when they try to derive value from it. Typically, data sources are stored in silos or in disparate systems (our recent survey suggests that as little as 8% of business claim that their voice data is easily accessible for fuelling AI engines and analytics) and reading through or listening to large quantities of unstructured data is time-consuming and next to impossible for any organization.

The way users interact with CRM, Marketing and Sales applications is rapidly changing, organizations currently rely heavily on the data that’s inputted, and users want more automation to help them with everyday tasks.

Red Box anticipates that as businesses look to understand their customers in order to provide the most personalized customer experience, there will be an increased focus on data (and in particular voice data with almost all – 95% – C-level executives regarding voice data as “valuable” or “very valuable” to their organization according to our recent survey), and there will be a big shift in 2019 towards automation combined with AI. Organizations will want to analyze customer sentiment and feedback, predict buying patterns and react in real time, but humans alone cannot process the information quickly enough to respond effectively.

Listening, analyzing and understanding how a customer currently experiences a brand and the customer journey, is essential before considerations can be made as to how AI can be used to improve and optimize it and benefit the business.

Applications need to talk to each other, maximize the data that they all consume and work through open APIs to deliver the business outcomes organisations need. Indeed, our recent survey suggested that 85% of businesses consider complete control and secure access to voice data to be “imperative” or “very important” and 84% of organizations express that it is pivotal to their voice strategies to have an open API approach, allowing freedom and options, feeding voice data into tools and applications of their choice and, crucially, not tying them to one provider. Budgets will be spent on AI and Machine Learning engines to take away the arduous manual processes allowing humans to concentrate more on the individual customer experience and not data entry.