Integrated Data Is Key to the AI Kingdom

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving as an important part of the underlying technology that enables companies to target and track customers. The use of AI to anticipate what a customer needs and wants in order to deliver better, faster service is a new frontier for the financial services sector. The volume and scale of today’s digital interactions means that financial services companies need automated technology that can understand and interpret human emotions. AI has the capability to facilitate consistent, cross-platform experiences that would be impossible to deliver manually.

Meeting customer expectations.
Delivering custom content is key to meeting customer expectations. Implementing AI to provide automated, virtual customer service solutions can help financial services companies understand what a user wants at any touchpoint within an online ecosystem. “With AI you can deliver more personalized communication at scale, meaning that you can tailor messages to specific audiences, which increases engagement and revenue,” says Jaekob Chenina, product manager at Adobe.

One of the biggest hurdles many financial services companies face when considering AI solutions is that their customer data is scattered in different legacy databases.

“Siloed datasets is the number one challenge preventing companies from developing personalized communications that leverage augmented intelligence and automation,” says Jaekob. “If you don’t have your data integrated together into one spot, then the ability to have success with artificial intelligence and automation is limited.”

Data is the fuel that makes AI work. Great algorithms and sophisticated software will only translate into optimized customer experiences when they are combined with real-time access data about every online user.

“Data is the new oil, it’s so valuable,” says Jaekob. “The more data that you can integrate from different parts of your business into your AI solutions, the more it will empower your algorithms for analyzing and targeting customers.”

Integrating and optimizing your data ultimately fuels an automated process that can learn in real time what the customer needs and wants, and can serve up the appropriate content automatically.

Data integration also unlocks the potential for AI and automation to help companies leverage not only internal customer data, but also third-party information. For example, you can automatically pull in data from an external source to enhance your profile of a customer. Now, instead of being limited to your internal data, your system can automatically cull data from other sources in order to provide more intelligence about your customers. That, says Jaekob, becomes a powerful tool for enabling companies to deliver highly customized experiences to every user at every touchpoint.

TD Bank, for example, has implemented AI-driven technology to improve analytics and customer experiences. The company is using AI to merge its internal treasure trove of analytics information with external data sources.

“We’re starting to map non-banking data that shows how customers are interacting on Amazon and how they are using their phones, or how they are communicating on social media,” says Parin Kothari, senior vice president for digital channels and strategy at TD Bank, North America, in a recent interview with Money Summit.

Enterprise-level analytics.
Massive amounts of historical and real time data also require an enterprise-level solution capable of analyzing the information and implementing targeted content solutions that are relevant to each individual customer.

To ensure data integrity and to monitor other systems, your solution needs the ability to monitor itself. One cutting-edge tool that is already in use today is the equivalent of a “virtual analyst” that continuously combs through massive amounts of data looking for statistical anomalies.

A virtual analyst can help ensure that a company’s targeted content aligns with every individual customer’s specific needs. But the benefits of AI extend way beyond marketing and optimizing content delivery. According to Jaekob, a powerful example of this is ensuring overall website functionality. For instance, one company using automated monitoring technology recently discovered that a bug had been introduced into its shopping cart that resulted in a 73 percent decrease in sales conversions from user shopping carts. Items were being removed from the carts, preventing customers from completing their purchases. Automated monitoring detected the problem and facilitated a quick fix, preventing the potential loss of millions of dollars in sales.

Optimizing user experiences.
Optimizing customer experiences requires the ability to deliver relevant, engaging content across all digital interactions using any data source. But equally important is understanding how your content is being consumed. That requires the ability to assess engagement patterns and test delivery options in order to ensure that you are maximizing your conversion rates.

According to the 2017 Digital Marketing Study, 93 percent of all companies surveyed cited the importance of a 360-degree perspective of their customers. That perspective comes from integrating insights from analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), and other data sources.

More companies — across all sectors — are using automation to create personalized content. Mobile automation, in particular, grew 115 percent over last year. At the same time, one-third of the companies surveyed said they plan to focus more on predictive analytics.

The financial services sector reflects the broader industry trends. According to an eConsultancy survey, 33 percent of financial services leaders regard utilizing artificial intelligence and bots to drive campaigns and experiences over the next three years as an “exciting prospect.” While AI is still not a top priority for the financial services sector, 21 percent of those surveyed said they are already using some form of artificial intelligence in customer-facing applications. Looking ahead, potential areas for implementing AI include sales and marketing (67 percent), customer service (57 percent), and product expansion (42 percent).

One example of AI in action is being implemented by Wealthfront. The California-based automated investment service is offering asset management through a service called Direct Indexing. The robo-advisor manages more than $4 billion in assets, and recently added AI capabilities to track account activity on its platform in order to provide a more personalized experience for its customers.

In the insurance sector, Brolly, a UK based start-up, has developed a free personal insurance “concierge,” powered by AI. The company uses an automated approach to providing  personalized service for comparing insurance policies. Other insurance applications include the use of of AI to automate the underwriting process and for improving access to “big data” to help inform insurance company decisions.

AI is evolving.
The next wave of AI and machine-learning applications will help financial services companies create smarter products and deliver a higher level of personalization at scale. This has the potential to impact everything from personalization and day-to-day transactions to larger and more complex transactions such as advisory services.

For financial services companies, the key to benefiting from automated systems for reporting and analysis is data integration. Once data is readily available, it will fuel the use of AI to help deliver more personalized customer experiences.

For more insights on how  financial institutions  are adopting new technologies for more personal customer experiences, read more from our digital marketing FSI Series (need URL link).

Find out more about how Adobe’s Experience Cloud platform and integrated technologies designed to support your experience business. http://www.adobe.com/experience-cloud.html

The post Integrated Data Is Key to the AI Kingdom appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/integrated-data-key-ai-kingdom/

SEO basics: what are user signals?

Social on the Front Lines of Customer Experience

The 1960s brought about Volkswagen buses, MadMen advertisers, and the first call centers. For the next 40 years, these support farms led our customer service needs. Then came the gatekeeper, the automated voice trying to streamline the customer service process, but only succeeding in leaving you as a consumer saying, “there has to be a better way.” Nowadays, we have other, more successful, customer experience platforms like Social. Sixty-seven percent of consumers now tap networks like Twitter and Facebook for customer service, according to JD Power.

As a first line of defense, how can you ensure a good customer experience on Social? Putting focus on these three things will put you on your way to a first class customer experience.

1. Speed:  I performed a Twitter survey of 155 people, and nearly one-third said they received no response at all from a particular brand — Nearly 50 percent received communication within the day. If you consider a customer service opportunity similar to a website sales lead, you should look to respond within the hour. According to a study by HBR, responding to a lead within an hour generates seven times the conversations. Ideally, you should shoot for a response in under 15 minutes with Social, but within the hour is a worthy first step.

2. Experience: How can you make sure your brand stands out? If someone tags you on Social, they are either trying to get customer service help, complimenting you on something, or mentioning your brand or product related to their thought. This creates an immense opportunity to produce a raving advocate from just a normal consumer. According to a report I did previously, eight percent of loyal shoppers produce 41 percent of revenue. The quicker you can get regular consumers into the loyal category, the quicker you can produce more revenue.

A few years ago, I had an experience where I randomly tested the Zappos customer experience. I had a hard time contacting a different retailer to exchange some shoes. I knew Zappos sold the same shoe and had the size I needed. I tweeted them, they got my information, and then they gave me instructions on how to exchange the shoe with them even though it wasn’t where my purchase originated. It is examples like this one that can help create a loyal customer on Social.

3. Personalization: A best practice I have seen different brands implement is making social interactions conversational. You can do this by addressing the person by name (if available) and then signing the response with who is responding. This makes the interaction feel more like a face-to-face interaction and creates a good image in the eyes of the brand you are reaching out to. Personalizing your communications also helps to validate the mention and find a resolution that shows your brand in the best light.

We live in a fast paced mobile world where the slower you are to respond, the more difficulty your brand will face in expansion. If you can put focus on speed, experience, and personalization you may find that Social can be the next wave to future customer service success for consumers who prefer interacting with real people, in real time, and in a real way.

 

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/customer-experience/social-front-lines-customer-experience/

An alternative approach to Gutenberg

There’s a lot of discussion in the WordPress world right now about a new editing experience that’s in the making. It’s called Gutenberg. While some of that discussion is technical, every user that uses WordPress regularly should be aware of what’s coming. At Yoast, we are quite excited about the concept of Gutenberg. We think it could be a great improvement. At the same time, we have our worries about the speed in which the project is being pushed forward. And, we’re not excited about all the changes.

In this post I’ll first try to explain what Gutenberg is. Subsequently, I will tell you about the things that are problematic to us. Finally, I will tell and show you what we think should be done about the problems.

What is Gutenberg?

Gutenberg is a new approach to how we edit posts in WordPress. It’s basically a new editor. It tries to remove a lot of the fluff that we built up over the years. The intent is to make the new experience lighter and more modern. The end-goal is to make WordPress easier to use. That’s something we really appreciate at Yoast.

Gutenberg introduces the concept of “blocks“. The new editor will be a block-editor: paragraphs, headings, images and YouTube video embeds will all be blocks. Blocks will make it easier to learn how to work with WordPress. People starting out with WordPress, only have to learn the concept of blocks, instead of 3 or 4 different concepts. When we make WordPress easier to use, we make it more accessible to a larger group of people. Making editing easier was the goal from the outset, as Matt Mullenweg is quoted on the Gutenberg Github page:

The editor will endeavour to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery. — Matt Mullenweg

As well as introducing blocks, Gutenberg also introduces a new look and feel for the editor. For me, the look and feel is mostly a copy of the Medium editor, an editor that got a lot of praise in certain online circles. Gutenberg appears a bit more modern, more contemporary.

New technology in Gutenberg

Besides introducing a new look and feel and the concept of editing blocks, Gutenberg also introduces an entirely new technology to WordPress. Gutenberg will use a lot of JavaScript, particularly React. While this change in itself is not interesting to the average user, it does impact how WordPress is built.

Here at Yoast, we are worried about the use of new technology combined with the introduction of big new concepts. This is bound to make for a rocky experience. We know from our own experience releasing Yoast SEO 3.0 (we’d rather not talk about that anymore). Even when releases are very well prepared, a lot can go wrong and you’ll be busy fixing it for a long time. We feel worried about the combination of new technology, completely renewed functionality, and the extremely ambitious time plan.

Plugins in Gutenberg

The concept of blocks brings some very powerful new tools to plugin authors. At Yoast, we have lots of ideas on how to make our content analysis better, faster, and more user-friendly with the Gutenberg editor. However, Gutenberg does currently not have the technical necessities in place to allow us to actually build that integration. Yoast SEO can’t integrate with the new editor (yet). Of course, we are actively involved in the technical discussions around this. We are currently heavily discussing how to make it possible for plugins to integrate.

Fact remains that, if you test Gutenberg right now, you’ll see that Yoast SEO is not on the page, anywhere. Nor, for that matter, are all the other plugins you might use like Advanced Custom Fields or CMB2. All of these plugins use so-called meta boxes, the boxes below and to the side of the current editor.

The fact that the Gutenberg team is considering changing meta boxes is, in our eyes, a big mistake. This would mean that many, many plugins would not work anymore the minute Gutenberg comes out. Lots and lots of custom built integrations would stop working. Hundreds of thousands of hours of development time would have to be, at least partly, redone. All of this while, for most sites, the current editor works just fine.

Accessibility issues

The current version of Gutenberg has major accessibility issues both in its frontend output and in the backend editor. This ranges from inline styles in the output to many other things.

We feel very strongly about accessibility. Not without reasons. The law in many European countries requires government institutions to have properly accessible websites. If Gutenberg breaks their accessibility, they will have to disable it, or face lawsuits. The Gutenberg team needs to realize that accessibility requirements are simply that: requirements.

To conclude: we are very enthusiastic about the idea of blocks, but have strong concerns about some of the technical choices and the speed of the implementation process. We are also worried about the lack of priority given to accessibility issues in the project. But most importantly, we are very much concerned about the fact that plugins are not able to integrate with the new editor.

When is Gutenberg coming?

In a recent post about the JavaScript library of choice for the WordPress ecosystem, WordPress’ project lead Matt Mullenweg said:

It will likely delay Gutenberg at least a few weeks, and may push the release into next year.

At Yoast, we were pretty shocked about these words. In its current form, Gutenberg is not ready -at all- for mainstream usage. In fact, we do not see it as being ready to be released anywhere in the first half of 2018. In our view, ready to be released also means that the community has had ample time to fix all of their integrations. In this point of time, it’s not possible for plugins at all to integrate with Gutenberg. How on earth should plugin authors be able to build their integrations within a few months? That’s not possible. At least not without breaking things.

So what should be done?

We think that taking the following three steps would bring Gutenberg much closer to release:

• First of all, we should keep the blocks idea, as it’s a good one. And then we should start iterating, slowly. If you want the admin to get a modern “makeover” for 5.0: that’s doable. We don’t need to change how meta boxes are rendered for that to happen.
• There’s also no need to move the toolbar (with bold, italics etc buttons) away from where it is (this has been discussed before). Medium does that, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing and it means more re-training than the team building Gutenberg seem to realize.
• We should focus on making sure both the backend editor and the frontend output of Gutenberg meet basic accessibility requirements.

Once we’ve decided on the above, we should start educating plugin & theme developers on what will and what will not work in the new environment.

What should this look like?

We’ve made some mockups of what we think this could look like (click for larger versions):

Document level

Block level

Distraction free mode

Note that we have disabled the background color and text color controls in the block level mockup. These should be off by default in our opinion, and possibly only allow a subset of colors, chosen by the theme author, when enabled.

I’d love to discuss with you, in the comments here, on Github, on Slack: everywhere!

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from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/gutenberg-alternative-approach/

How to avoid common SEO mistakes

Use These Tips from Adobe’s 2017 Holiday Shopping Predictions to Spice up your Retail Marketing

The countdown has begun as retailers are gearing up for the most important two months of the year. From November 1 to December 31, shoppers will be out in droves — both in stores and online — ready to plunk down an estimated $923.15 billion dollars, representing almost 20 percent of U.S. retail sales for the year. Capturing those dollars, however, may prove unusually challenging, as growth in online retail visits over the past two years has been stagnant. Only certain segments, like consumer electronics and apparel, have been on the rise.

Given the stakes, brands must understand the best way to connect with consumers if they want to remain competitive — especially during the holiday season. So, if you don’t want to leave this shopping season to chance, Adobe Digital Insights’ Holiday Shopping Predictions can help you adapt your strategies to shopper behavior. Based on robust data, this annual report offers a road map on what channels to use and when.

Here’s a quick peek from our report at some digital marketing strategies that will make this season merry and bright for retailers.

1. Master mobile.
It will probably come as no surprise that mobile visits continue to grow, as this has been the trend for several years running. In fact, we expect the “mobile moment” — when mobile visits outpace desktop for the average retailer — to happen by the end of 2017. However, despite the continued growth of mobile visits, year-over-year stickiness has not improved for retailers. Additionally, while mobile visits are up, mobile revenue is down, with each desktop visit worth about four times as much as a smartphone visit.

This trend suggests that brands should prioritize converting mobile traffic this holiday season. Retailers can also improve conversion by keeping the mobile checkout experience as simple and quick as possible, by offering one-click checkout for returning customers and requesting minimal data from new customers.

2. Focus on paid search.
Our research showed that paid search is dominating revenue results, and is, in fact, eating up visit share from organic traffic. Visit share for paid search peaks around the holiday season, making it even more of a priority for retailers who want to maximize their holiday revenue opportunities.

Interestingly, search channels, including both paid and organic, convert best in the afternoon. These channels seem less prone to impulse purchases. Similarly, while most revenue from the email channel comes during the morning, visits from email campaigns see a higher conversion in the evening. This suggests that shoppers come back to their morning emails after a day’s work.

3. Expand your social presence.
Social is becoming more relevant, and brands should take note. Since January 2015, it has more than doubled in volume. What’s more, our research indicates that social and display conversion seem to spike after 11 p.m., suggesting that these are more impulsive purchases. To get the most bang from social and display, brands can target these channels with the  products and promotions most likely to stimulate impulse buying.

Finally, the other important takeaway is to organize your ad schedule on social channels so that it is not limited to the daytime. Instead, broaden your reach by taking advantage of advertising on different channels at different times of day.

Cross-channel campaigns may deliver the best tidings of the season.
With every type of device, and all the channels that are in play this holiday season, retailers who meet their customers with a strong presence across channels, and have seamless campaign orchestration across devices will gain an edge. Come November 1, successful brands will be ready to ring in the holiday season with strong digital strategies that should make the holiday shopping season a joy for customers and retailers.

Want more insights? Download Adobe’s Digital Insights’ Holiday Shopping Predictions report here.

 

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/adobe-digital-insights/use-tips-adobes-2017-holiday-shopping-predictions-spice-retail-marketing/

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