VOLUME.XO:BRING COGNITION TO YOUR BUSINESS

ISSUE 2

Leaders in Cognitive Computing

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COGNITION/kɒɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/ noun;

The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and the senses.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Or the business of cognition?

What comes to mind when you think of AI? Superhumans? Bionic robots? Thinking soldiers made of steel? Cognitive computing and machine learning are technologically advanced it’s true. But they aren’t creating creatures, like us, with computers for brains and components for a body.

The reality is far less intimidating, and far more interesting: everything – every object, product, service and process – is becoming cognitive. Artificial intelligence is breaking down the barriers technology has put in place, freeing us to explore the art of the possible. It’s positively disrupting future thinking. It’s not replacing us… it’s optimising us, taking away our most mundane tasks and allowing us to put our brains to best use.

And Volume is one of the early adopters that can bring it to your business, revolutionising the way you sell, train and market. Forever, for better.

The future is here. It lies in turning your business into a cognitive business. It’s driven by Volume.XO.

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Today, consumers are the key drivers of innovation – and they expect an exceptionally high level of service. Service that’s timely, resolving issues and imparting information on demand. How will you deliver tomorrow? How can you get there today?

If your business isn’t cognitive yet, it’s time to get thinking. And Volume.XO can help you to do so. Why? Because it’s a cognitive business itself.

INTRODUCING VOLUME.XO Introducing cognitive marketing.

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Volume has already shown its commitment to the development and deployment of cognitive computing – both through its partnership with IBM Watson™, and in its implementation of the technology across several of its clients’ applications – including virtual assistants and cognitive Learning Management Systems.

Now, the company is proud to announce the creation of Volume.XO: its new Centre of Excellence for Cognitive Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and one of the first initiatives of its kind in the UK.

THE MAKING OF VOLUME.XO

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‘XO’ – which stands for extraordinary – is truly an apt word to describe not only cognitive systems themselves, but also the Volume.XO team, which comprises consultants and experts in cognitive applications.

After all, the centre doesn’t just boast the technology to drive its clients forward into the future; its people also share the knowledge and competencies that empower them to effectively put cognitive computing into practice.

Volume.XO sits firmly in the field of cognitive marketing and learning areas that can be described simply as ‘customer understanding’ – a deep knowledge of each individual the business and its clients are targeting, rather than a demographic or generic persona. Its ultimate goal? To automate the first touch, extend the self-serve cycle and provide a ‘know-as-you- go’ information platform – in real time, 24/7, without human involvement.

By amassing all the unstructured data from its audience’s interactions across the internet – from mobile, voice and more – Volume.XO can use cognitive computing and machine learning to create not only accurate insight into a person but also information that could conflict with other points, for example discrepancies in a user’s different social-media profiles.

Once composite profiles have been created, the best content to send each consumer can be defined, personalised and delivered in both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ scenarios, to a mobile device, tablet, wearable… or laptop. Because for some people, old habits die hard.

When recipients touch this content, it then triggers two likely scenarios: an ‘interaction’ or a ‘transaction’. Both of these feed back into the cognitive system so that offers or communications can be fine-tuned in the future.

Essentially, cognitive marketing provides the intelligence to better determine each of our actual personas, our true behaviours and our real purchasing preferences. And there are many smart machines that fuel its fire.

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THE MACHINES BEHIND COGNITIVE MARKETING

There are now emerging providers of cognitive and machine-learning platforms – and together with Volume’s new and existing clients, Volume.XO is striving to innovate using the most appropriate system for each of its required applications.

That includes those from IBM, whose solution – Watson – excels at ingesting unstructured data (such as emails and documents written in natural language), and Microsoft, whose platform – Azure – is designed to best manage structured data (which has a defined length and format). Examples of structured data include numbers, dates, and groups of words and numbers called strings.

Volume.XO is currently investigating the many ways in which it can apply cognition through the use of these solutions, to both new endeavours and existing applications.

It’s doing so through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs) – the set of programming instructions and standards that allow partners to access the functionality of cognitive computing systems.

Volume.XO is currently utilising IBM Watson APIs such as Natural Language Classifier (NLC), which interprets content to understand its meaning, and Dialog, which allows applications to use conversations to interact with users in natural language… storing the context of users’ previous interactions, and using this to interpret subsequent requests.

Other IBM Watson APIs include Language Translations (which can automatically identify and translate text), Personality Insights (which establishes users’ personality characteristics, needs, values and psychological traits from the way they communicate), and Speech-to-Text (which converts the human voice into the written word).

Let’s explore how Volume.XO plans to positively disrupt today’s marketplace using the power of cognitive marketing.

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OUR VISION

FACILITATING A SHORTER

DECISION TREE

TO ENABLE PEOPLE TO

SELF-ASSESS

TO EXTEND THE SELF-SERVE CYCLE (BY AUTOMATING THE FIRST TOUCH)

STARTING WITH DYNAMIC Q&A

WITH NLC AND DIALOG

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HUMANS TAKE IT FROM HERE!

AND A FASTER SALES CYCLE

IMPROVING CUSTOMERS’ KNOWLEDGE

WITH A BETTER BRAND

EXPERIENCE

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…sitting on the phone for seemingly hours,pressing numbers to reach the right department (only to arrive at the wrong one and needing to redial), then listening to monotonous hold music… all the while growing more frustrated?

Can you recall the last time you breathed a sigh of relief, seeing that a company’s website offered a ‘live chat’ feature, only to be met with unhelpful answers regurgitated from the FAQ page you’d just spent hours poring over?

Many can – and 40% of customers today call contact centres only after they’ve looked for answers to their question via self-service channels.1 Now, though, you can forget about all that.

Self-service is paving our path to progression, with 67% of consumers preferring to access the knowledge they need their own way.

In fact, 75% agreed that self-service is a convenient way to address customer-service issues – and 91% said they would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs.

Effective digital interaction isn’t just a more efficient way for you to serve your customers… it’s what they’ve come to expect.

With Volume.XO’s cognitive applications constantly learning about common queries, and understanding questions posed in natural language, your customers will soon be able to ask away and receive useful answers – without even realising they’re speaking with a machine.

EXTENDING THE SELF-SERVE CYCLE Do you remember the last time you had to ring a contact centre…

1 https://www.zendesk.com/resources/searching-for-self-service

112 http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/1929014

Even the more tricky or unusual requests can then be seamlessly passed on to the most well-equipped of your agents based on what’s been said, and they – thanks to the filtering out of discussions already dealt with – will be more empowered than ever to offer a bespoke, in-depth service.

And if you’re still not convinced, an analysis by Gartner2 has predicted that 50% of online customer self-service search activities will happen through a virtual assistant for at least 1,500 large enterprises. It’s time to get self-service-savvy, today. Let’s take a look at how.

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But that’s the problem, too. Like you and me, they’re mere mortals; humans who get ill, have bad days, leave jobs, and who are – at times – ruled by their emotions. Real brains in real bodies, who are not only inconsistent, but who also need to be trained, motivated and engaged with your brand.

Volume.XO’s cognitive solutions won’t replace your employees. But they can enable them to do more than just fix problems – taking them out of the first-touch scenario so they can instead focus on the bigger picture, adding real value to customer interactions and becoming happier with their role in the process (after all, 25% of employees claim they’d be more satisfied at work if they were given the opportunity to do what they do best3).

DRIVING EXCEPTIONAL BRAND EXPERIENCES No doubt your staff are exceptional people, each with their own unique skil l set.

3 http://blog.clearcompany.com/5-surprising-employee-development-statistics-you-dont-know

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Imagine your contact-centre agents – often paralysed into a robotic state themselves, as they read from scripts and deal with dissatisfaction day in, day out – being freed to take on only the most difficult customers, while the majority of conversations were handled by a cognitive Dialog solution.

Imagine effectively upselling, making highly tailored suggestions to improve sales; offering personalised promotions to generate brand loyalty; or making more effort to win over those customers worth serving, based on their likelihood of purchasing one of your products. All in a tone that suits the individual customer and their personality.

These tasks, too, can be made possible through the use of data-driven insight; collected, analysed and formatted for easy consumption by – you guessed it – cognitive applications.

But again, although cognitive computing can build the information needed to better our customers’ experiences with our brand, we still require a workforce to put these ideas into practice. A workforce that knows how best to do so. A workforce that is trained, developed and nurtured, just like your employees of today.

But not necessarily in the same way.

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The Learning Management System (LMS) market is predicted to be worth over $7 billion in 2018. And the mobile learning market is due to exceed $12 billion by 2017.4 What’s more, three-quarters of organisations use learning technologies today – and 57% think that developments in mobile learning technologies will have the greatest impact on the Learning & Development profession by 2020.5

And it’s no wonder, when it’s been proven that companies that invest more in training and career development outperform their peers,6 that 40% of employees who receive poor job training leave their positions within the first year,7 and that poor training – or a complete lack of it – can create an unproductive, inefficient workforce… and, therefore, a less profitable business.8

So, how can you deliver training that not only enhances your employees’ experiences – but, through osmosis, your customers’, too? How can you offer a know-as-you-go learning and development solution that’s sustainable, effective and affordable, that adequately meets your staff’s needs, and that is set up to perform both today and tomorrow?

Reducing the need for pre-compiled content, cognitive learning enables the introduction of a platform that asks questions and accepts and grades answers in natural language, and real time… constantly learning information and relaying this to users, then driving them to learn it and repeat it back to the system themselves. By prompting trainees regularly, and enforcing this training using gamification, knowledge is easier (and more entertaining) to gain, train and retain.

OPTIMISING LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT The global eLearning market is expected to reach $107 bil l ion this year.

4 http://elearningindustry.com/elearning-statistics-and-facts-for-2015 5 http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-resources/learning-development-survey-2015-infographic.aspx 6 https://www.officevibe.com/blog/10-pillars-employee-engagement-infographic 7 http://blog.clearcompany.com/5-surprising-employee-development-statistics-you-dont-know 8 http://lineshapespace.com/importance-of-employee-training

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Not only can Volume.XO empower you to take advantage of this technology, but it can also build applications – like sales-optimisation tools – on these platforms; applications that can suggest next steps in the sales cycle, propose products to push next, and more.

Unsurprisingly, the answer lies in Volume.XO’s cognitive-business expertise – combined with the collective experience of Volume’s Learning & Development team.

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Volume is unique, too. Unique in its mission to cut clients loose from the boundaries put in place by myriad off-the-shelf software solutions that connect loosely, integrate poorly, and restrict productivity with predefined functionality. Unique in its ability to actually do so – right now.

Volume.XO is a key facet of the company’s bespoke software-development model –

building solutions fit for purpose. In fact, it’s already taken IBM Watson-powered applications to market for two of the world’s biggest brands.

With cognitive applications, you can put the foundations in place to positively disrupt legacy technologies, and shape what future technology ecosystems will look like. These applications are innovating; solving tomorrow’s problems, today.

BUILDING BESPOKE SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS Your business is unique. It has its own needs, goals and processes in place. It has its own skil ls, its own systems and its own staff. It has its own l imitations.

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UNDER THE HOOD Now, let’s take a deeper look at how cognitive business is empowering us to automate the first touch, extend the self-serve cycle, drive consistently exceptional brand experiences, and provide know-as-you-go information in real time… and in ways we never previously thought possible. What makes cognitive computing different from anything we’ve ever seen before?

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We’ve all Googled. Many have been on Bing. Maybe you’ve used Yahoo! But cognitive computing does more than just scan the internet for content based on keywords – returning webpages that may (or may not) hold the answer to what you’re asking – like a search engine. Cognitive computing can process the nuances of human language, offering responses relevant to the content of the question.

It doesn’t settle for ‘almost useful’ or ‘nearly helpful’, either. When faced with more than one possible response, it begins a dialogue with the user to find out further information – either ruling out answers in the process, or increasing its confidence to return an almost certain result.

IT UNDERSTANDS THE CONTEXT OF INFORMATION

IT ASKS CLARIFYING QUESTIONS

And instead of looking in the same places, offering the same knowledge, it actually gets smarter over time. Still, it won’t need any input to learn from its own successes and failures; that’s how it improves.

IT’S CAPABLE OF LEARNING

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You’d be forgiven for thinking cognitive systems must always be trained with examples – absorbing knowledge, being given a selection of known responses to it, and applying these rules to any additional input – in order to generate reasonable predictions and produce useful results.

However, excitingly, it can also work intuitively – finding patterns in data itself and grouping similar bits and bytes on its own; assigning new information to the ‘clusters’ it’s created. For example, an e-commerce website could use it to automatically group customers based on buying habits… assigning new users to pre-populated clusters, and recommending products based on their profile and behaviours.

IT CAN WORK INDEPENDENTLY

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WHICH IBM WATSON APIs IS VOLUME.XO LEVERAGING TO CREATE INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR ITS CLIENTS? IBM Watson currently boasts an impressive number of APIs. Here are just a few Volume.XO are investigating:

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+ Enables a deeper understanding of users’ personas, needs and values from communications such as email, text messages, Tweets and forum posts

+ Helps to guide highly personalised interactions using insight, so you can better tailor your communications

+ Extracts user sentiment from available communications

+ Measures end-user sentiments and spots emerging trends in data

+ Leverages sophisticated machine learning to return confidence scores for anger, disgust, fear, joy and sadness

+ Measures customers’ feelings (for example, during chat sessions)

+ Identifies the language text is written in + Translates text from one language to another,

in real time, as users communicate

+ Enables applications to interact with users through conversation, using natural language to automatically respond to questions, cross-sell and upsell, or walk users through processes and difficult tasks

+ Remembers the context of users’previous interactions, using this to interpret the context of subsequent requests – asking clarifying questions to provide a more confident answer, or multiple possible answers

+ Allows users to understand the content of an image, or frames in a video, without the need for textual input

+ Uses image analytics to effectively segment photos into albums

PERSONALITY INSIGHTS

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

EMOTION ANALYSIS

LANGUAGE TRANSLATION

DIALOG

VISUAL RECOGNITION

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WHATEVER NEXT? Cognitive applications are only as clever as the information they’re given. By feeding its systems with its team’s expertise, and that of its c l ients, Volume.XO is paving the path to progression in an impressive range of innovative ways. Here are just a few:

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GET YOUR HEAD IN THE GAMELet’s face it: training isn’t always possible, realistic or accurate. It would take an unreasonable amount of time and investment, for example, to fly your Australian team halfway across the world to the UK, simply to learn more about your products or your industry. It would take a miracle for your team of underwater workmen to learn about operating in the deep, without taking them down there and hoping for the best. Or would it?

By connecting cognitive systems with virtual-reality headsets, your workforce can see, hear and feel things they usually only would in… well… reality. You won’t have to actually break bones to teach first aid, effectively, with added adrenaline.

You won’t have to pay for classes and courses, losing productivity as staff travel – and retraining them as their memories fade.

You’ll just need to hand employees those state-of-the-art goggles, and try not to laugh as they perform tasks as if they’re somewhere else altogether.

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COGNITION THAT CARESVolume.XO is currently creating a cognitive employee wellbeing application called Glooo™, which will act as a ‘virtual buddy’, available 24/7 for employees to talk with across various devices. By regularly interacting with the workforce, Glooo will be able to establish sustained low mood, allowing for early positive intervention and support to be offered to an individual. Glooo will use IBM Watson’s cognitive technologies to interpret employee behaviours through several of its APIs, including Dialog.

Glooo will remember the context of previous conversations, providing appropriate ongoing empathy and support. Where an employee with sustained low mood is identified, Glooo will alert companies’ HR teams or employees’ line managers. This enables organisations to offer positive intervention that fosters happier, more engaged employees – leading to improved productivity, reduced absenteeism, positive attitudes and reduced staff turnover.

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There are few things more frustrating than putting hours, days or even weeks of hard work and effort into a pitch that was destined to fail from the start. And though it’s always advisable to analyse bids you’ve lost, and the reasons you’ve lost them, does that insight influence whether you commit to projects in the future?

Your answer should be ‘yes’. But in reality, it can take too much time and resource – which you could be using to ace your next presentation – to calculate, based on previous lessons, the factors that put you on the back foot from the beginning. Not with cognitive applications.

Soon, thanks to an application currently being developed by the Volume.XO team using Microsoft Azure, Volume’s clients will be able to instantly understand whether they should be applying to bid for projects in the first place… or whether they’d be better off focusing on something else instead; saving time, saving money, and saving face.

FROM GUESSWORK TO GUARANTEES

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TIMING IS EVERYTHINGIt may be that your age, gender, job title and the things you like affect your interest in other things. But each of us is so unique, the only way to sell to us effectively is by treating us that way. Material that appeals to one 25-year-old female salesperson – whose speciality is selling laptops – might not resonate with another 25-year-old female salesperson with similar expertise.

It might be that one prefers shorter pieces of content and the other loves them longer, or that one learns best visually and the other, aurally. It may be that they’re at different stages in the sales cycle, or have different individual needs right now.

Using cognitive-powered applications, Volume.XO is soon to empower its clients to serve up the best possible resources at the best possible time – based not only on customers’ personas, but also on their behaviour, such as the content they’ve previously engaged with.

279 http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/20/internet-of-things-artificially-intelligent-stephen-hawking-spike-jonze

DATA-DRIVEN DISHWASHERSThe chances are, you already know at least a little bit about the Internet of Things (IoT): the emergence of countless objects, animals and even people with uniquely identifiable, embedded devices that are wirelessly connected to the internet.9 If not, you do now.

And it’s a good job, because it’s getting bigger and more prevalent – with products like Nest thermostats, Wi-Fi-enabled washing machines and self-parking cars already on the market. In fact, it’s predicted that there will be 50 billion connected devices in existence by 2020.9

The nodes within these products can send and receive information without the need for human intervention. And it won’t be long before cognitive-powered applications are added to the equation, automatically sending out orders to the chips now present in our everyday objects, and using data gathered from our belongings to further enhance our daily lives.

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TO SUM UPCognitive business – and cognitive marketing – is here. Whether your existing applications could do with enhancement; your legacy software isn’t fit for the future; you’re looking to enrich your brand experience, and better train and retain your staff; or you want to move employee wellbeing up your agenda; you need it. And you need it soon.

Volume.XO strives to lead – and we want you to join us on our journey. For our team, innovation isn’t simply an aim; it’s an obsession. If you’re passionate about pushing forward too, you need the technology that can make it happen… now. You need artificial intelligence.

To learn more about how we’re transforming the businesses of tomorrow, today – and how we can better yours – visit volumeglobal.com or contact Aidan Murphy on +44 (0)118 936 2038, or aidan.murphy@volumeglobal.com

We look forward to working with you.

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Chris Sykes Founder and Chief Executive of Volume www.volumeglobal.com

The big takeaway from this introduction to cognitive computing is that it will not replace human beings.

This exciting new technology will create opportunities for people to do more fulfilling roles, relieving them of the mundane and monotonous tasks that not only demotivate but are generally low-paid. Our brains are the most amazing things, so why not use them to best effect?

Extending the self-serve cycle and providing consistent and relevant interactions without human intervention will improve efficiency and productivity.

The customer experience will be enhanced and the sales cycle will be shortened or optimised by relevant upselling. Knowledge has always been deemed ‘power’. With cognitive computing, that knowledge can be harnessed and made available as never before.

Cognitive computing isn’t a world full of thinking robots; it’s a whole new way of doing business, and a whole new way of living our social and work lives. This far-reaching effect will become even more apparent when relying on the Internet of Things becomes the norm; an everyday occurrence.

Copy written by Brooke Charlesworth, Senior Copywriter, Volume

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Leaders in Cognitive Computing© 2016 Volume Ltd. The intellectual content within this document is the property of Volume Ltd and must not be shared without prior consent.