Customer experience is a growing priority for organisations, as it should be as it is becoming the most critical factor for customers selecting your brand over another. As such companies need to implement measures to meet customer expectations and deliver consistent customer experiences at every customer touchpoint.

However, this can seem like a monumental task, particularly for organisations that work as silos, assigning specific responsibilities to specific departments. In today’s environment where the ‘customer is king’ and should be central to every business decision, customer experience can no longer lie on the shoulders of a single department. It needs to be the top strategic measurement for the entire organisation.

To be successful today, companies need to develop a customer centric strategy that is built from the customer’s perspective and designed to meet their specific needs. With tech savvy customers companies are adopting technology solutions that aim to delight their customers and enhance customer experiences. According to the 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report from Dimension Data, ‘CX is recognised as the number one driver of digital transformation’.

While companies may be keen to adopt technology solutions, often knowing which solutions to select can be a challenge on its own. In addition, legacy systems can also hamper companies from implementing technologies that could potentially be key in improving customer experiences. However, companies should start by putting the I before the A. This means implementing information automation which utilises intelligent automation and only once this is in place, implement AI.

AUTOMATING FUNCTIONS AND HUMANISING INTERACTIONS

Some technologies can sound like the silver bullet your organisation needs to improve customer experiences and drive company success, but companies should not adopt technology for the sake of technology. Rather solutions should be used to enhance the customer experience and assist employees to meet customer needs. Even though customers are tech savvy and accustomed to using technology solutions to meet their specific needs, technology cannot replace the human touch.

Automation can enhance customer experiences by improving self-help functions that require limited involvement from employees. At the same time by automating tasks that take time and resources but add little value to the client, employees are freed up and empowered to focus on high-quality, lasting customer engagements that delight the customer.

For example, if a customer is looking for a statement, rather than placing the customer in a queue to speak to an employee, the customer is able to help themselves to access the information they need. However, if the customer has a query on the statement, it would be more appropriate to have an employee handle the sensitive issue and spend more time meeting the customer’s needs and making a difference where it matters the most.

MAKING MAGIC WITH DATA AUTOMATION

Automating repetitive tasks can have a significant impact on improving customer experiences by removing repetitive tasks and empowering employees to give customers the personal touch they seek in specific instances. In addition it can reduce costs and help drive sales and growth.

These benefits alone present a good case for companies to adopt automation technology, but they would stand to benefit significantly more by using data to firstly determine which tasks should be automated and then understand how customer data can be used to enhance experiences even further.

At the crux automating repetitive tasks has a significant impact on driving employee satisfaction which directly impacts on customer engagements. However, when companies put the I (information) before the A (automation) and strategically and intelligently drive automation, this is just the cusp of how the marriage of data and automation impact the customer experience.

Customer data should be used to add personalisation into your customer engagements. By understanding your customer behaviour, you are able to target them with offers and deals that are specific to their previous behaviour. You are able to engage them when it matters most and enhance the customer experience beyond the standardised content companies have traditionally relied on to reach out to their customers.

This is supported by the Dimension Data 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report which states that ‘by transforming big data into customer and market intelligence, they’ll be able to align their analytics strategy with their business strategy and design personalised experiences that proactively address customers’ needs – using self-service and automation at the right time in the customer journey’.

IGNITING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

Although technology brings great promise to companies and is able to increase productivity and drive cost saving, customer experience is about more than the technologies that companies implement. Customer experience is about creating a customer centric business where the customer is at the centre of everything the business does.

So while there is benefit in giving customers the tools they need to access self-help services at their convenience, employees need to be given the tools that empower them to deliver high-touch customer experiences at critical times. To ignite customer experiences, the customer needs to be at the top of the agenda in all boardroom discussions and solutions need to be developed and tailored with the customer in mind.

Only when the customer is central to the business strategy and employees across the organisation are equipped with the right tools to meet customer expectations across the entire customer journey, will the company be able to create meaningful customer interactions and enhance the customer experience that drive business success.

Paula Sartini, founder and CEO of BrandQuantum, says that to be successful today, companies need to develop a customer-centric strategy that is built from the customer’s perspective and designed to meet their needs.

With tech-savvy customers, companies are adopting technology solutions that aim to delight their customers and enhance customer experiences. According to the 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report from Dimension Data, ‘CX is recognised as the number one driver of digital transformation.’

Customer experience is a growing priority for organisations, and it should be as it is becoming the most critical factor for customers selecting your brand over another. As such, companies need to implement measures to meet customer expectations and deliver consistent customer experiences at every customer touchpoint.

However, this can seem like a monumental task, particularly for organisations that work as silos, assigning specific responsibilities to specific departments. In today’s environment where the customer is king and should be central to every business decision, customer experience can no longer lie on the shoulders of a single department. It needs to be the top strategic measurement for the entire organisation.

In addition, legacy systems can also hamper companies from implementing technologies that could potentially be key in improving customer experiences. However, companies should start by putting the I before the A. This means implementing information automation which utilises intelligent automation and only once this is in place, implement AI.

IGNITING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

Although technology brings great promise to companies and is able to increase productivity and drive cost-saving, customer experience is about more than the technologies that companies implement. Customer experience is about creating a customer-centric business where the customer is at the centre of everything the business does.

So while there is a benefit in giving customers the tools they need to access self-help services at their convenience, employees need to be given the tools that empower them to deliver high-touch customer experiences at critical times. To ignite customer experiences, the customer needs to be at the top of the agenda in all boardroom discussions and solutions need to be developed and tailored with the customer in mind.

Only when the customer is central to the business strategy and employees across the organisation are equipped with the right tools to meet customer expectations across the entire customer journey, will the company be able to create meaningful customer interactions and enhance the customer experience that drive business success.

AUTOMATING FUNCTIONS AND HUMANISING INTERACTIONS

Some technologies can sound like the silver bullet your organisation needs to improve customer experiences and drive company success, but companies should not adopt technology for the sake of technology. Rather solutions should be used to enhance the customer experience and assist employees to meet customer needs. Even though customers are tech-savvy and accustomed to using technology solutions to meet their specific needs, technology cannot replace the human touch.

Automation can enhance customer experiences by improving self-help functions that require limited involvement from employees. At the same time, by automating tasks that take time and resources but add little value to the client, employees are freed up and empowered to focus on high-quality, lasting customer engagements that delight the customer.

For example, if a customer is looking for a statement, rather than placing the customer in a queue to speak to an employee, the customer is able to help themselves to access the information they need. However, if the customer has a query on the statement, it would be more appropriate to have an employee handle the sensitive issue and spend more time meeting the customer’s needs and making a difference where it matters the most.

MAKING MAGIC WITH DATA AND AUTOMATION 

Automating repetitive tasks can have a significant impact on improving customer experiences by removing repetitive tasks and empowering employees to give customers the personal touch they seek in specific instances. In addition, it can reduce costs and help drive sales and growth.

These benefits alone present a good case for companies to adopt automation technology, but they would stand to benefit significantly more by using data to firstly determine which tasks should be automated and then understand how customer data can be used to enhance experiences even further.

At the crux, automating repetitive tasks has a significant impact on driving employee satisfaction, which directly impacts on customer engagements. However, when companies put the I (information) before the A (automation) and strategically and intelligently drive automation, this is just the cusp of how the marriage of data and automation impact the customer experience.

Customer data should be used to add personalisation into your customer engagements. By understanding your customer behaviour, you are able to target them with offers and deals that are specific to their previous behaviour. You are able to engage them when it matters most and enhance the customer experience beyond the standardised content companies have traditionally relied on to reach out to their customers.

This is supported by the Dimension Data 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report, which states that ‘by transforming big data into customer and market intelligence, they’ll be able to align their analytics strategy with their business strategy and design personalised experiences that proactively address customers’ needs – using self-service and automation at the right time in the customer journey.’

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bring great benefits to businesses across various industries. Already companies such as Google and Microsoft have invested significantly in this technology and are benefiting from it.

Companies that don’t have AI solutions in place yet don’t need to rush off too quickly to implement it in an effort to catch up, but they should start planning for AI as to not fall too far behind the curve.

Marketing departments in particular stand to gain vast benefit from using AI, most notably in their ability to deliver consistent experiences and exceed customer expectations. However many marketers are cautious in adopting new technologies, and as AI can be a massive task to implement, marketers stand to benefit from easing into the process of AI adoption by following the steps below.

START WITH AUTOMATION

Automation software enables marketers to automate repetitive tasks such as applying the correct branding to company documents. Whilst these are important tasks, they can impact on productivity and detract employees from focusing on more pressing matters within the business. This is supported by research conducted by McKinsey[1] which found that 45% of work activities can be automated by implementing technology solutions. With automation, companies will benefit from cost savings, improved productivity and improved reliability.

Before implementing brand automation, marketers need to conduct a brand audit to determine how the brand compares to its competition, what the brand strengths are, how customers interact with the brand and where the key customer touchpoints are. It is important to look broadly beyond a specific department and include the “messy and complex” things too as this is often the stuff that no-one wants to do but that will provide the most valuable insights. For example, marketers may suggest that email signatures are the responsibility of the IT department, however, customers don’t discriminate between the internal departments within a company, they expect their needs to be met and view the organisation as a whole regardless of who they engage with. As such every element of the brand should be audited.

Once you have conducted a brand audit, the next step is to determine which functions can be automated. These are the functions that require a time investment from staff but deliver minimal return on the investment. For example, complex customer requests should be handled by employees but if a customer is calling for a statement, this process could be automated to free up employees to handle the more challenging customer issues. The most important thing to remember when automating tasks is that customers are often looking for human interaction, particularly when dealing with sensitive or complex issues. 

In the case of the customer experience, companies need to get the balance right between what can be automated and what should be handled by employees. Ultimately the best approach is to remove human intervention from the repetitive and menial tasks in order to free them up to handle the more important and complex functions that make the real difference to customers and ultimately build the brand. Once these function have been identified the next step is to identify patterns within customer engagement by analysing the data.

MOVING BEYOND AUTOMATION

For many years marketers have been collecting customer data but haven’t been able to use it effectively until now. With a mountain of data, combined with established parameters, technology is able to move beyond mere automation to bring marketers intelligent and intuitive offerings. For example, in the case of email, employees could select pre-developed content to drop into emails they send to customers.

Initially this would require these employees to make decisions in terms of which content to select, however, over time the technology would become intelligent and intuitive and combining the data with usage patterns, it would simplify the process even further for users by automatically inserting the correct content for the recipient.

However, marketers should also pay attention to unstructured data as this is where the real magic lies. By identifying patterns in unstructured data, you’ll be able to find opportunities to innovate and identify real behaviours rather than rely on what people say they are doing. With greater insight into who your customers are, and a clearer understanding of their needs, it is easier for employees to engage with them using relevant, personalised information, sent at the right time and improving the overall customer experience.

INTRODUCING AI TOOLS

Once marketers have become comfortable using these technologies, the next step would be to assess their business needs to determine which AI applications are the best suited to meet their specific needs. There are several AI solutions available and marketers should be cautious not to implement AI for AI’s sake but rather determine which solutions are best suited to help them achieve their business objectives.

It is also important that you consider the legacy systems within the organisation as this can often be a stumbling block to implementing new technologies. Marketers need to clearly articulate their requirements and collaborate with the IT department to implement solutions that meet the business needs.

The most imminent AI solutions available for marketers include anticipating future customer purchases and presenting offers accordingly, improving media buying, monitoring social media comments to determine brand affinity and tailoring promotions. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what AI can bring to the marketing table. With the correct data combined with the right AI solutions, marketers are able to gain greater insight into customer sentiment and behaviour to more proactively plan and target campaigns that deliver the best results and enhance the customer experience across every customer touchpoint.

GET STARTED NOW

There is no doubt that AI brings about some uncertainty with the promise of great things for marketers and business. While still in its infancy, this is the time for marketers to slowly start implementing technologies that lay the foundation for AI at a later stage. Marketers should start getting familiar with automation technology and determine exactly what they expect from AI technology before making the leap and introducing AI solutions into the organisation.

While it can be tempting to jump in head first, by adopting a slow and steady approach to AI implementation, they will be setting themselves up for success in the long-term. But the time to start is now.

Ensuring brand uniformity and accuracy in the digital world.

When Paula Sartini arrives for our interview, I’m momentarily taken aback. She’s wearing a little black dress with a lace overlay and elaborate fluff around the neckline, and killer heels perfect for dancing the tango.

She’s certainly turning heads on a sweaty Joburg morning. Then her make-up artist steps in and moves her hair a fraction so she’s picture-perfect.

It feels like overkill for a friendly chat in a café, but Sartini is the founder and CEO of BrandQuantum, and this time, the brand she’s promoting is herself. Smart marketing indeed. If you can’t make your own brand look good, how can you be trusted with the brands of your customers?

“Brands are built on trust. If you can’t even get your logo right, how can I trust the services you’re offering because it looks like you don’t know what you’re doing?”

Sartini looks gloriously exotic too, and tells me her parents are Argentinian. She’s fluent in Spanish and that Latin speaking style makes her conversation fast-paced and passionate.

A varied background has given her skills in marketing, accounting and art, and she learned coding as a kid when her engineer father brought home an Apple computer and helped her create a game where she calculated the profit on selling lemonade. “I learned the logic of programming, even though I just wanted to play with my dolls because I was really girly. But I’m very grateful now because that logical brain kicked in,” she says. “I’m not an engineer, but I’m very logical and I love statistics, accounting and numbers.”

All her skills have now combined in BrandQuantum, a business she launched in 2014 to help companies protect and promote their brands by making their communications consistent and secure.

She talks about gorgeous fonts and typefaces, and how you can spoil her beautiful design work on a logo by squashing and distorting it. It sounds a little precious, but she explains it well. “Brands are built on trust. If you can’t even get your logo right, how can I trust the services you’re offering because it looks like you don’t know what you’re doing? Maybe you’ll send me the wrong terms and conditions or the wrong information if you can’t get the simple things right,” she says. “If you’re a bank and you write to me in Comic Sans, I wonder if I can really trust you, because what you’re showing me isn’t very believable. It could be the difference between getting the business and losing it if you can’t even maintain your brand.”

AUTOMATE THE PROCESS

The BrandQuantum solution is based on software that was developed for her previous business when she was helping companies take their IT products to market. After about 150 projects, she realised it would be useful to have some software to take what she had learned and automate the process. “The work is quite analytical to determine if there’s a market opportunity. You look at the market factors and the offering, and put all the numbers into the software. Then the process is based on numbers, and not just the egos around the table.”

“One of our big shifts was in our own thinking about what we are, and now we know we’re a software company.” 

When clients call in BrandQuantum, they usually start by wanting tamperproof email signatures and letterheads to help avoid phishing scams and fraudulent communications. As part of the consulting process, Sartini monitors all the communications being sent out, and assesses the logos, advertising material and other corporate collateral.

Then the team can create consistency across all the documentation and store approved, up-to-date versions in a central repository in the cloud. The BrandOffice and BrandMail software give the employees instant access to these standardised communications, and if something needs to be changed or updated, it can be done overnight and the old material will disappear. This uniformity also helps companies meet the compliance, legal and risk management aspects of doing business.

Giving people instant access to the correct logos, letterheads and forms automates those tasks, eliminating errors that come from having old versions hanging around in the system. It also gives them more time to do strategic things like use their judgement and initiative to add a personal touch to their communications. The aim isn’t to stifle personal contact by making people rigidly adhere to corporate protocol, Sartini says.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

“Artificial intelligence and automation is where we want to go, but it must create opportunities to give us more time to talk to people because everyone wants an authentic relationship. One of the scarcest things is human attention,’ Sartini says. “We don’t shrink-wrap everything to where there’s no human intervention.”

In the past year, the IT side of her company has come to the fore, as clients adopting the products are now driving it through their IT departments as much as through the marketing side, and her team works with the client’s technicians to roll out the software and train them to support it.

“Our discussions have become more serious because we’re solving operational issues as well as brand issues. The CIOs are adopting it to solve their challenges and we have to dovetail into their systems. One of our big shifts was in our own thinking about what we are, and now we know we’re a software company.”

There doesn’t seem to be any international competition for what BrandQuantum offers, and Sartini believes the company can win business globally. New York State University could soon become a client, as it’s in discussions to implement the software to manage its brand across all departments and faculties. BrandQuantum has already started to go international on the back of clients with foreign operations, and New York State University would be an important win.

“We can take this South African software international,” Sartini says.

Marketing needs to evolve into a fully integrated role – it should own the customer experience, embrace technology to meet customers’ digital requirements and have a seat at the boardroom table to drive and influence product development based on marketing insights.  This was the key take-out from a BrandQuantum marketing round table held earlier this year to debate the role of marketing in today’s digital business environment. 

Other issues discussed at the round table include the fact while digital isn’t new, several marketers are still grappling with it, and in many instances, it remains a separate function from the marketing department. Marketers agree that they lack the knowledge and skills to use digital tools and technologies to their advantage and need to upskill quickly if they are to own the customer experience.

Customer experience, which is critical in giving businesses the competitive advantage, is a complex phenomenon that is greatly influenced by every customer engagement at every touch point. With so many touch points throughout an organisation, consistent brand experiences that are not diluted are crucial.

Companies must adapt to the new business landscape, which is driven by customers’ requirements and regulatory changes. Organisations have restructured accordingly, and marketers believe that an integrated marketing approach has to be adopted to respond to customer needs quickly and deliver a consistent customer experience.

A key challenge for marketers in larger organisations is legacy issues – traditional processes and systems that prevent change, as well as time frames that do not allow for long-term strategic planning.

Smaller organisations may have the advantage of having teams in place to meet customer expectations and keep up with the latest trends, but they don’t have the brand strength to help them overcome potential hurdles they may encounter in building the brand reputation.

Macro-trends such as the Protection of Personal Information Act, privacy issues and data protection present new challenges to marketers, who need tools to help them to be nimble and compete against local and global organisations.

THE BIG TAKE-OUT

In a changing business landscape, both the marketing department and the chief marketing officer need to redefine their roles and gain a deeper understanding of the technologies available to them to build strong brands, with consistent messaging across platforms.

Adding to this, marketing departments are under pressure to demonstrate their value to the organisation. Today’s marketers are being asked to marry marketing with sales functions and put measurement metrics in place to determine their combined output and the contribution to the company’s profits. In some instances, the role of marketing heads are shifting to that of chief growth officer and they are held accountable for the company’s sales success. With the right tools in place, marketers will be able to pull metrics that analyse their activity and show the success of various initiatives based on these metrics.

Brand remains a critical component of the success of the organisation, and while marketing is under pressure to deliver immediate results, its real value will be seen only in three to five years on the brand scorecard. Marketing’s success should be measured by customer experience over time and not just by the company’s profits.

In organisations where marketing has a seat at the boardroom table, marketing insights drive and influence product development and determine how the company moves into the market, effectively positioning the company against its competitors. A brand’s values remain critical to driving a company’s success. For this reason, marketers believe the greater the brand trust and love the greater the impact on the income statement.

Equally important is having employees buy into the brand and the company culture. Often larger, established organisations have an advantage over newer or smaller organisations, as the culture is already entrenched, and potential employees buy into it when applying for a position to work there. But it is important for both large and small organisations to take their employees along on the journey of building the brand and providing them with the right tools to deliver according to the company brand in all customer interactions. After all, if a company doesn’t pay attention to the smaller details, how can their customers trust them to get the more complicated things right?

Paula Sartini is the founder and CEO of BrandQuantum.

From user experience to automation – a big shakeup is set to take place in the enterprise software space.

Gone are the days when your IT team were the only ones in the office who knew how to use technology. And with this change in tech aptitude comes a change in approach to enterprise software. A space that has historically been quite slow to evolve, 2018 is set to bring about a few changes to the status quo. As so many businesses begin on their digital transformation journeys, these are some of the enterprise software trends they should be watching in 2018.

#1 SMART ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE

With smart enterprise solutions, a sales agent is so much more than someone just trying to sell you something. Using advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, your sales team will seamlessly have access to critical customer data, notes Mervin Miemoukanda, a senior research analyst for Africa at International Data Corporation (IDC). If they can easily pull up information about past invoices, previous transactions and payment terms, they’re better equipped to serve the customer and can close deals more effectively. “Having actionable business data handy via business intelligence and reporting tools, organisations will leverage on this to drive critical business operations and strategies more efficiently and effectively.”

Greg Palmer, a sales director for Sage Enterprise Africa, agrees. If real-time data is fed to operational staff, the business can act on what is happening in the moment, and improving the intelligence within their organisations allows business leaders to make more strategic decisions. Along with this, Palmer believes that smart businesses will bring more and more apps and services together via a single, united interface, which makes it possible to do everything on a single screen without needing to switch between different applications.

#2 USER EXPERIENCE

In the past year, we’ve seen a renewed focus on the user and the user experience and enterprise software will soon reflect this, says Wynand Smit, CEO, Inovo. “Increasingly, business users are starting to expect the same type of experience from enterprise software as they do on popular consumer platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The onus is on developers to create an experience that is comfortable, easy and familiar – all of which will help companies derive better business results from their projects.”

More efficient and productive output has resultant benefits from a customer experience perspective, which, in turn, boosts the business as a whole. As an example, Smit suggests that a business could incorporate gamification software into their contact centre environment to appeal to, and better motivate, their younger employees, who are likely to have grown up with some sort of gaming console.

“In addition, technology needs to be always on and easily available so that employees can work when they want to and where they want to.” Paula Sartini, BrandQuantum.

According to Paula Sartini, founder and CEO of BrandQuantum, users are becoming more and more vocal about their experiences and if a technology is not easy to use or requires additional time and energy, they won’t use it. That said, she cautions that any focus on user experience should be aimed at solving solid business needs. If you think of the employees within your organisation as ‘consumers’ of technology, the tools and solutions used in the enterprise space should ideally work in the same way as regular consumer technology.

“As such, user experience becomes a critical component to the adoption of enterprise software. In addition, technology needs to be always on and easily available so that employees can work when they want to and where they want to. If it isn’t available as and when employees want to use it, it won’t be adopted,” Sartini continues.

#3 AUTOMATION

In line with the above, more and more enterprises are starting to recognise that automation can have a positive impact on user experience. To reap the benefits of automation, successful digital enterprises should aim to automate the entire business process, not create islands of automation. These were so typical in the past and demand that humans bridge the gaps between different bits and pieces of information, notes Jaco Viljoen, an agile consultant at IndigoCube. Traditionally, customers would talk to employees who would capture necessary information on internal systems, but now we want customers to interact directly with the business via software. This makes processes quick and simple for customers who want to get on with their lives, he points out.

“Automating discrete processes obviously yields some benefits, but in order to obtain the full benefit, islands of automation must be connected and entire processes automated. The human handover element between discrete processes typically leads to inefficiencies, problems, and poor customer service.”

#4 IoT

Having spoken about how the right solutions can help a business make more informed decisions using corporate and customer data, Leon Coetzer, COO of redPanda Software, believes that the Internet of Things (IoT) will unlock these data insights. This will bridge the gap between digital and physical worlds, says Coetzer. “Businesses can use IoT to entice customers to enter particular outlets with personalised promotions, and then track how successful these campaigns are at an individual level. Sales associates will know exactly when a particular customer enters a shop and can provide a personalised experience as they will have the customer’s profile on a tablet or mobile phone.”

From a manufacturing perspective, IoT is key to any digital transformation effort, adds Kerry Hope, business development manager at Magic Software South Africa. Here, an enterprise will fit sensors to existing technologies, or purchase new technologies, and the data generated via these sensors is used to streamline the supply chain, eliminate waste and better forecast demand.

For Kethan Parbhoo, chief marketing and operations officer at Microsoft South Africa, in order for IoT to have any real impact, it needs a little help. He says cloud computing will be the push IoT needs to really come to the forefront in 2018.

#5 CLOUD

Parbhoo describes cloud as the platform for the next generation of businesses. “Cloud computing is driving the transformation of the IT industry across the entire stack, offering dramatic improvements in business agility, operational efficiency and IT maturity, with significant cost savings.”

Locally, Miemoukanda thinks cloudbased enterprise software may just outpace on-premises versions, as more and more organisations in South Africa migrate their application workloads to the cloud.

While it may seem like we’ve been talking about ‘cloud’ as a ‘trend’ for several years, this momentum will only continue this year, Palmer points out. We are seeing more and more companies of all sizes look beyond on-premises software implementations or large, complex private cloud deployments, towards the benefits of leaner, more agile public and hybrid cloud solutions, he continues. “With a new generation of business management software, they can choose from new alternatives that are powerful, adaptable and quick to pay for themselves.”

But as is the case with anything, along with the good, comes the bad. Hope cautions that employees who use their personal devices and email accounts, and become accustomed to using popular cloud-sharing solutions, run the risk of leaking sensitive corporate information. She calls on businesses to educate employees about the risks and develop enterprise solutions that are engaging enough so that employees aren’t tempted to reach for other solutions that are less reliable and secure.

“Today, enterprise software must deliver personalised experiences that are tailored to new working styles across social and mobile,” says Palmer. “This allows people to be productive wherever they are.”

ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS GO CONSUMER

For Leon Coetzer, from redPanda Software, it is better for a business to create multiple, specialised, intuitive applications that require no formal training than it is to create something too complex. In doing so, employees are generally more willing to use these tools because they require minimal effort.

An example of this can be seen in some local banks where employees are tasked with merely guiding customers as they complete tasks on their own tablet or smartphone, says IndigoCube’s Jaco Viljoen. With this approach, enterprise systems mimic what customers are used to, what they prefer and systems are accessed via a device they know how to use. Modern enterprise solutions and apps need to be as good as the apps people already use and love, which is quite a departure from the average enterprise system in the wild today.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings a lot of promise for organisations. Marketing departments, in particular, stand to gain significantly from using AI, most notably in easing delivery of consistent brand experiences and exceeding customer expectations.

However, it can be daunting implementing AI so here are a few steps to help you ease into AI adoption:

1. Brand audit: Conduct a brand audit to determine how your brand compares to your competitors, what your brand strengths are, how customers interact with your brand and where the touchpoints are. Take a holistic view as if you were a customer, as customers do not look at each department individually but rather view it as an entire brand. It is important to focus on every element of the brand, even those that may not traditionally be thought to be the responsibility of the marketing department such as the content included in letters from the credit department, the call centre script or email signatures.
2. Segment critical from none critical functions: Once you’ve completed the audit, you need to determine which functions can be automated. Typically the functions that take a lot of time to do but deliver the least amount of value should be automated, for example, typesetting of business cards, requests for artwork or logos and the typesetting of forms could all be easily automated. According to McKinsey, 45 percent of work activities can be automated by implementing technology solutions.
3. Automation software: Find a technology solution that automates the specific functions that you need to automate. While there is often some uncertainty to the functions that can be automated, generally it the time-consuming tasks that don’t add strategic value, such as creating a PowerPoint slide deck or typesetting employee certificates. By implementing automation software the company will save costs, improve productivity and reliability and deliver a return on your investment.
4. Use your data: For years marketers have collected customer data, now is the time to use it. By combining data with technology solutions, intelligent and intuitive technology solutions can be introduced to combine customer insights with personalised, relevant information that is sent at the right time to impact customer behaviour. It is also valuable to look at unstructured data as patterns can emerge in unexpected places and give real insight into behaviours than the structured data could provide on its own.

   To gather relevant information, rather than waiting for monthly reports, patterns should be identified from the data throughout the month. This provides interesting insights that can be used dynamically and put you ahead of the competition. It is also key that the information is sent to the right person so that they are able to use the information, for example, if recipients open up banner adverts, the sender should be alerted to this and use this information to touch base with the interested recipient.

5. Assess the business needs: With the fundamental technology solutions in place, easing delivery and utilising data effectively, you can now determine your businesses specific AI needs. There are several solutions available but not every solution may be the right one for you, so unpack your specific needs and then determine what the best solution would be to meet them. It is important that you consider the legacy systems and collaborate with the technology teams when looking at technology solutions for your business.
6. Implement your AI solution: With your strategy in place and your planning well underway, it is now time to implement your AI solution. It could be anything from anticipating future customer purchases, presenting offers to customers timeously, improving media buying and monitoring social media comments to determine brand affinity. There is a list of options available to meet your needs. Again you should work closely with the technology teams within your company to determine which solutions are the best to meet your particular business needs.

There is no doubt that AI brings about some uncertainty with the promise of great things for marketers and business. While still in its infancy, this is the time for marketers to slowly start implementing technologies that lay the foundation for AI at a later stage. Marketers should start getting familiar with automation technology and determine exactly what they expect from AI technology before making the leap and introducing AI solutions in the organisation.

While it can be tempting to jump in head first, by adopting a slow and steady approach to AI implementation, they will be setting themselves up for success in the long-term. But it is important to start implementing the technology now.

BrandQuantum has developed software solutions that can help companies to deliver consistent brand experiences across all communications. BrandOffice empowers every employee across an organisation to automatically create consistently branded documents across Word, PowerPoint and Excel. BrandMail is an email solution that helps companies to deliver consistent emails with beautifully designed, tamperproof email signatures that are sent out with every single email, both to internal and external recipients.

With BrandQuantum's BrandOffice all content across email, Word, PowerPoint and Excel can be predeveloped and approved to enable quick and easy access while ensuring brand consistency in all customer engagements. For more information about BrandQuantum and our brand consistency software solutions, please visit our website brandquantum.com.