I’ll also show you the ways enterprise users of WordPress are integrating Azure’s services in order to solve common business challenges and create seamless, easy-to-use content platforms that don’t come with extra hefty price tags like other modern content management systems.

Transforming marketing with AI

In the case of content marketing, the product is your content – the words, media, discoverability, and customer experience that you use to communicate.

First off, let’s have a look at how we can enhance the quality of your digital experience for your editors and website visitors alike.

Improve the quality of your written content with the Text Analytics API

The Text Analytics API cognitive service uses AI to ingest a block of content and returns a gaggle of useful insights to help improve your content and surface actionable insights for your business.

• Key phrases: These auto-suggest tags and give an insight into how a machine sees what is written. It is useful to quickly identify main points in large swathes of documents. Also, you can add the key phrases to your content as a ‘shadow taxonomy’ in the CMS for editorial use.
• Sentiment: Measures how positive or negative the content appears. This one is really nice when it comes to later analysis of content performance.
• Entity analysis – Azure has a Named Entity Recognition service which uses public sources like Wikipedia and Bing to recognise both an entity (e.g. Bill Gates) and the type of entity (e.g. Person). Again, this can be super useful for tagging; or to start adding structured data to your content. Once that structured data is there, you can start using it to drive visualisations or enhance the presentation of your knowledge to search engines.

Let the Computer Vision API maximise the power of your images

Alongside text analytics are a host of other cognitive services that are available through developer-friendly API web services. A simple one to use for almost immediate profit is the Computer Vision API. Passing an image through this service returns an incredible array of information that the machine recognises. This includes: faces, text, colours, objects, suggested tags, how ‘adult’ the image appears to be, and the image dimensions and format.

Much like text analytics, the structured data returned from the API can be integrated in a number of ways to improve editorial quality. It can automatically suggest images from a media library, auto-input image captions, meta-descriptions and tags (both for the image itself and for the main post).

Automatically adding this metadata will have some measurable and immediate benefits. Particularly better accessibility and SEO performance through the addition of higher quality image alt text, meta-description, and captions.

Four more ways to increase editorial quality using Azure services:

1. Auto-transcribe and analyse videos for better accessibility, search engine optimisation, and discovery.
2. Using document cracking to allow your editors and visitors to search your site’s media files (PDFs, Word docs, etc)
3. Use entity mapping to help your editors (and customers) explore your organisation’s content relationships and create richer related content suggestions
4. Embed PowerBI visualisations to add interactive graphics that let your visitors really explore the data behind your content.

Optimising operations

Teams are under constant pressure to be ever more productive and innovative in a competitive business world. Especially when you need to quickly adapt to changing needs or scale to an increase in demand. This can be very stressful position to be in. But using Azure’s cognitive services, you can boost team productivity while lowering stress.

Build a chatbot in minutes

First off – customer success. You probably already have a good knowledge base in the business – often exposed as FAQs on your website. Azure’s QnA Maker let’s anyone build an FAQ-style chatbot without any need to code quickly and easily by using your existing FAQs.

With chatbots able to save 30 percent in customer service costs, this could represent a huge productivity boost for your customer service team while reducing stress and pressure. While the chatbot takes over answering commonly asked questions, your customer service team will have more time to work on value-adding tasks and provide personalised experiences for customers.

Marketing automation

On the theme of connecting your back and front office digital estates for increased efficiency and customer response, here’s a great example: integrating your CRM directly with your WordPress site. It can retrieve inventory directly from CRM to ensure your website is always up to date. Or submit customer contact forms directly to your CRM for central processing.

There are tons of ways to integrate Dynamics CRM into your website: this WordPress plugin supports a good range.

Developer productivity

A computer science degree used to be a requirement it you wanted to host WordPress on Azure. Not anymore. With WordPress images available to install on a point-and-click basis, getting going with WordPress on Azure is easier than ever.

Moreover, you’re also covered from both DevOps and spend-management perspectives. Now Github is part of Microsoft, it’s super easy to connect your Github code repository to your hosting environment through Continuous Integration pipelines.

On the other side of hosting, Azure’s service insights help you to manage and optimise your spend.

Workflow productivity

Building on the editorial quality tips above, there are also productivity gains available through leveraging the same APIs and services. For example, finding appropriate images to illustrate content can be frustrating and time-consuming for editors. The Computer Vision API gives your media library a much richer search space, saving your editors time in finding images.

One step further would be to have WordPress and Azure work together to auto-suggest images from your media library or DAM based on the written content and taxonomies of the post itself.

This same principle applies for other media like video, social media embeds and for the taxonomic classification of content too. This means you can get information out to your customers at the right time, with the right context, and in the right place

Increase productivity and business value

In this article, we’ve looked at some highly achievable and straight-forward ways to start connecting WordPress and Azure to move towards the goals of transforming products, optimising operations, and more importantly, empowering employees and engaging customers.

These tools will save employees time by automating tasks that often take employees a lot time and focus. They are then free to focus on the tasks that deliver business value and drive innovation.

By having optimised content and marketing assets ready to-go, you can quickly respond to data insights or trends in a way that will add value to the business and increase employee productivity. This makes your marketing team more resilient and they can quickly adapt to changing customer requirements.

So the messages seems clear:

• Don’t let your back office and front office be disconnected. It’s so much more impactful and profitable for them to work together.
• It’s easy to leverage your existing Azure investment to augment your customers’ digital experiences.
• Combining WordPress with Azure gives you a best-of-breed architecture content marketing platform that’s on a par with market leaders. But without the huge license fees and with far more freedom and flexibility.

Get in touch if you’re interested to find out more about how to connect WordPress and Azure.

To optimise for resilient operations in digital marketing, take a look at Microsoft’s Supporting Resilient Operations Report:

Find out more

Discover how to integrate Azure and WordPress

Learn how to support resilient operations

5 barriers to AI adoption: learnings from Microsoft’s marketing team

Grow your skills and expertise at the UK Partner Skills Hub

About the author

David Lockie’s interests lie in WordPress, open source and future technology trends. He’s the founder and CEO of Pragmatic – a top-tier WordPress agency globally, which he started in 2012. David loves working with the team at Pragmatic in delivering websites that add real value to businesses, and in turn enjoys sharing his expertise on this topic at international conferences such as the B2B Marketing Expo, WooConf and WordCamp Europe. He’s also co-chair at the BIMA Blockchain Council, sits on the SE Advisory Board of BITC and is an advisor to several start-ups.

Outside of work, David enjoys keeping fit, going downhill fast, alternative folk music, cooking delicious food, movies that involve running, jumping and shooting and spending time with family and friends, often involving a good walk and a pub.

The post How AI can help improve the digital customer experience appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Think about the last time you had a good experience. It’s typically seamless and frictionless – but the bad experiences stick with you, as does the brand association.

Customer experience is key in brand consideration and advocacy. And ultimately, as more and more of our brand experiences move online, those brands that provide first-rate customer experience will win out.

So, in this era of emerging tech, how can we use data and AI to create more personalised, immediate and intelligent interactions? And should you take a data-first or domain-first approach?

Sorting your customer experience strategy

Firstly, if you haven’t started to already, it’s important to view data and AI as part of a broader customer experience strategy and vision, and ask yourself how technology can enhance the journey. This includes incorporating what you already know about your customers with customer journey analysis and mapping. You’ll need to make sure you understand all the touchpoints across the journey your customer will make, taking into account what can and will improve the experience and resolve their problems.

This may already incorporate a foundational data activity, and once you have the foundation set you can begin to explore data and AI more deeply. But where do you start?

Focus, focus, focus

As part of your strategy, you may have loosely embraced the idea of data and AI, and potentially built a roadmap, as we often have with clients. But to deliver tangible results, start by thinking about the specific problems you want to solve:

• Do you want to improve touchpoints and share more information?
• Do you want to improve brand engagement and personalisation?
• Or do you want to optimise conversion?

Having a focus point enables you to take action within the context of your strategy.

Next up is the data

Consider what data you have and what data you might be able to access that you don’t currently. This can be a very broad area, stretching from Net Promoter Scores to more obvious data like search queries, stored website data, geographical location and historic customer data.

But with a focus point, you can drill down to the data sets you have or need to deliver a project. AI thrives on information – the more the merrier, as they say. But make it work for you.

Time is money

The beauty of AI lies in the ability to collect and analyse rich real-time customer data, allowing you to anticipate customers’ needs and deliver hyper-personalisation – reaching customers at the right time, through the right device, and with the right message. It means we can move from customer segments to a single customer view.

With the ability to action insights in real-time, you might choose to either convert a new customer, reduce costs in an existing process, or improve your reputation.

Familiarise yourself with the tech

To help understand customers faster and more efficiently, and to action the insights you gather, you’re likely going to need to build or buy solutions. This is a whole subject in itself, but getting it right could have a significant impact on successfully delivering your vision and deriving true business benefit.

In my experience, for most mid-sized businesses (£10-£100m turnover) this is as good a time as ever to look for a partner that shares your values and has similar experiences of working with companies of your size and sector.

Applying the learning

So you have your strategy, and understand the customer journey and potential frictions. You’ve looked at the data you have and considered what you might like to collect, and you have the technology solutions that might meet your specific needs. Now you’re ready to go, so let’s look at some of the applications you might consider.

1. 1. Improving customer service/satisfaction

AI-powered chatbots can intelligently engage customers to help with their journey through a website, either through conversation or nudges and prompts. They also have the availability (24/7/365) to provide quick answers to questions, resolve complaints or problems, and find the correct customer service agent.

If implemented well, including taking into account correct use cases and your brand’s tone of voice, chatbots can provide significant value:

• • Save time and money
  • Generate leads and revenue
  • Guide users to better outcomes
  • Provide ‘after hours’ support
  • Engage users in a unique way

1. 2. Personalising the customer experience

There is a reason psychologists promote the use of people’s names, and using data and AI we can engage customers on a similarly personal level, encouraging them to feel that your products, services and brand experiences are tailored for them.

AI-powered recommendation engines are capable of analysing data and adapting in real-time to provide customers with products, services and offers that are tailored specifically for them, rather than being delivered (as in the past) by simple ‘category’ alternatives.

In addition to recommendations, entire digital journeys can be personalised to a customer, with images, messages and signposting uniquely adapted to their needs and preferences.

1. 3. ‘Smart’ engagement

By a wide margin, research shows personalised content is more effective. AI algorithms can record your customers’ previous email interactions and website journeys to understand how they interact with your brand. Machine learning-driven segmentation and clustering can also help profile customers based on multiple variables, including demographics, buyer type or brand advocacy, and can provide significant insight into how to engage customers as well as when and where.

This data can then allow you to create dynamic, super-relevant, personalised adverts and emails. Using emails as an example, these can be based on details such as:

• • What blogs or other content they have read
  • How they have navigated your website
  • Reactions to previous email communications

AI and natural language processing are now also being used to write subject lines that beat human-authored subject lines in 98% of head-to-head tests.

So bringing dynamic emails and AI-driven subject lines together could supercharge your email marketing.

These are just a few ways data and AI can improve the experience you deliver to your customers.

If AI is relatively new to you or your business, it might be helpful to take a look at my previous blog How to implement AI as a mid-sized company: 5 practical steps to success. This should help you explore AI and data for customer experience in the broader context of understanding how your business can make the most of the opportunity AI brings.

Good luck with turbo-charging your customer experience programme!

Find out more

Grow your skills and expertise at the UK Partner Skills Hub

Become a Microsoft Partner

About the author

Dean has owned and managed agencies for over 16 years. In this time, he’s worked on a range of technology projects for global companies. Now, in his role as COO at a specialist health and beauty agency, The Pull Agency, he creates multi-disciplined teams that help bring the worlds of brand and technology together. Although Dean has a broad, journalistic knowledge of emerging technology, he’s most passionate about solutions that improve customer experience, applying old school marketing know-how and creative thinking with the latest technologies. He has a passion for road cycle racing, having represented Great Britain at the Under 18’s. Dean also enjoys a good Rioja and listening to Radiohead at maximum volumes.

The post How to improve the digital customer experience with data and AI appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Technology like AI, neural networks, deep learning, big data, and automation aren’t new to marketers – but how they’re incorporated into a business often is.

AI shaping the future of digital marketing and branding

Marketing without social media is unthinkable today. Adverts gain businesses significant revenue through channels such as YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter – and AI and machine learning can play a part in driving a business’s success here. Just think of online ads that ‘know’ relevant interests based on prior searches.

AI is also expanding in its intricate ways every day. Take visual searches, for instance. A customer snaps a picture of a shirt they want, and the machine ‘understands’ what it’s looking at, and provides both the exact shirt, as well as similar or relevant offers. Already we’re seeing this deployed in large retail stores – but expect to see this technology develop and transform the ecommerce and customer experience.

Creating the optimal customer experience

We live in the ‘age of instant’. We demand everything now, whether it’s online shopping, watching films, and even responses from customer services.

Chatbots are making the process of automated responses to potential buyers even easier. With natural language processing, keywords can be stored and resurfaced when used, allowing related answers to be surfaced to speed up the process.

Cortana is a great example of this. Voice recognition restricts the hassle of typing out questions and saves even more valuable time. It also allows for a level of personalisation that makes customers feel so much more welcome. Using face, voice, and fingerprint recognition to log in to your account also creates seamless access into your shopping experience. With the evolution of interactive technology, it’s a no-brainer to include this type of AI into the commercial sector.

Pattern recognition is another revolutionary part of the digital transformation. With analytics recorded and processed, it allows future recommendations that are relevant to the customer.

Imagine, a virtual machine that can offer you tailored fashion advice. Or receiving automatic notifications for price drops at your local store. All based on the data you’ve already supplied.

The future of social media marketing

I find it fascinating that careers can be made from the amount of following you have on social media. 8 weeks on a reality TV show can now equate to huge sponsorship deals that can set you for life – simply in exchange for a picture with a product.

While social media platforms are free to use, in the main, companies like YouTube are also capitalising on added features for revenue, such as monthly subscriptions. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see pay-as-you-go features added to these sort of social networks in the future. That is likely to become to pay off – paid-for premium services in exchange for fewer ads, higher quality media, and all-round a more personalised experience. That’s if every social media site doesn’t monopolise into one big brand first; a huge, single site for Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and the like.

Customer experience counts

With 95% of British people buying their items online, companies must adapt. The search pool for customers is massive, where billions of potential buyers are within reach. With a strong marketing campaign and smart usage of AI tools to assist this, any company or brand can achieve success.

AI is critical to expanding this incredible digital world we are all growing into. Brands will soon rely on these technologies to drive their sales, especially when shopping now lives on the internet.

There is a huge market within online marketing and branding, and whilst the majority of companies are taking advantage of this, there are many that could be doing more to boost business. As shopping becomes easier and more personalised, the response becomes more positive. And the happier the customer, the higher the revenue.

Find out more

Download the report: ‘Accelerating competitive advantage with AI’

Read our deep dive into the state of AI in the UK

Q&A panel: What will AI mean for retail in the next five years?

About the author

Tom Crawford is an Azure Specialist intern working on the Enterprise and Commercial sectors of the business. He has been with Microsoft for 3 months, on a year-long journey of continuous learning. Data and AI fascinate Tom, and chime well with his Computer Science studies at university. With that experience, he believes he’s beginning to see, first-hand, the digital transformation of the modern era.

The post Reimagining retail with AI appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

In order for marketing teams to reach new customers, you need to connect what you want to say as a brand to achieve your commercial objectives, with what customers want and need to hear in order to address the challenges they are facing in their day to day business. We also need to empower the whole organisation to be storytellers and help tell your business story in an authentic way to connect directly with people. This propels digital selling using storytelling, too.

“People hear statistics,” digital analytics pro Brent Dykes once told us, “but they feel stories.” ​

So, how can you infuse storytelling into your content and drive a better connection with your customer base and in turn help your employees be digital sellers?

Tip 1 – Know what storytelling is

Storytelling is the idea of creating an emotional connection with your customer first; then using that to drive sales. Fundamentally, people don’t engage with brands. They engage with people. You need to make your customer the hero and think about how you can add value to them in a way that’s relevant to the challenges they are facing day to day.

Traditionally, marketing had one goal: support the sales team selling the product. Today, it’s no longer so clear-cut. According to one study, 71% of readers say they are turned off by content that seems like a sales pitch.​

Very few consumers feel loyal to faceless businesses who see them only as data on a spreadsheet at the quarterly shareholders meeting.

Storytelling offers the chance to create a personality for your business that fully bonds with its values. This is where you must consider…

• Who you are? What you do? Why you do it? What is at the core of your culture too and bring that out in your storytelling.

The answers to these questions form the foundation of your ‘brand personality’. But, more importantly, they should authentically mirror your workplace culture. That culture might be laid-back, like in many young start-up organisations, or it might be the sort of professional tone employed by, for instance, medical or legal organisations. Whatever it is, embrace it. Identifying and owning your brand story is  where your storytelling transformation begins.

With that determined, you can start telling that story; reinforcing your core values across every communication.

Tip 2 – Focus on the hero you deserve

What’s a hero? It’s not your business – it’s your customer, and they should be placed at the heart of all your storytelling outputs. Don’t tell them why you’re great; show them how your product or service makes them great.

It’s tempting to picture your business as the customer’s saviour. Your products and services help them, after all, which puts you front and centre. The problem with this line of thinking is that it’s really not too different to reiterating the same tired message: ‘we’re great, and that’s why you need us’.  It’s like a comedian telling people ‘I am funny, laugh’ rather than telling people humorous anecdotes.

That’s a ‘story’ customers, bombarded online by brands, are beginning to ignore.

You aren’t awesome. But you help make your customers awesome.

As business adviser Chris Brogan noted, “The key is, no matter what story you tell, make the buyer the hero.”​

Focus on how your product or service enriches the hero’s life. How do you help customers overcome challenges so they can rise, triumphant, at the end of the story? That’s how you create emotional connections. Potential customers also believe previous customers much more than simply hearing from the brand, all of us look at reviews these days on anything we buy or experience.

Tip 3 – Assess your current culture, connections, and commitments

Storytelling doesn’t start with ‘Once upon a time’, but with the way your company works, and what it stands for. Understanding this – and making changes where necessary – is what lets you put forward an authentic, relatable voice, no matter what industry you’re in.

Here at Microsoft, a core part of our story is the way that we empower our employees to come as they are and do what they love, embracing a ‘learn it all’ mentality. To make that story a reality, we’ve worked hard to instil a culture of empowerment within our own team. At every level of the business, we encourage our people to learn new skills and allow them to take ownership of their work. Now, because our team have the tools and autonomy needed to create great content, they’re able to empower others. It’s our culture that informs our core messaging.

Reflecting on your own company culture can help you define what your story should be.

Once you’re in an environment that nurtures you, excites you, and aligns with your own values, authentic stories write themselves. The culture lets you be yourself. And in the age of internet cynicism, honesty is a valuable asset.

A fantastic example of authenticity is our Microsoft Blogger Series. We’ve been working to transform our people into storytellers, leveraging their expertise to help us tell our brand story in a more resonant and engaging way.

Our champions aren’t trying to be anything but themselves. They come to us with an idea, or first-hand experience, and an experience no-one else can tell, and create stories that are authentic and accessible to all readers.

This forms part of our wider digital selling efforts where we’ve pulled together a full training programme to get our employees to transform their digital presence.

Tip 4 – It takes an army of many

Communicating your company’s story isn’t a solo task. One author may write a single book, but there are thousands of books on the shelf, each one written by a different person with something to say. The same goes for your business: it takes an army of many.

If our Blogger Series and digital selling programme shows us anything, it’s this: with the right support, everyone in your company can be a gifted storyteller and digital seller.

Once you’ve defined your values and your voice, you open up an opportunity for your workforce to help build your brand through employee advocacy. They all have unique stories, ideas, expertise and views that provide a truly human connection with your audience.

Content marketing is one of your strongest assets. Encourage employees to learn the skills of digital storytelling. It’s critical in making your brand stand out in today’s digitally dominant world where all successful brands are easily accessible, humanised, and personal.

Tip 5 – Dig into data

Introducing storytelling elements into your marketing doesn’t mean sacrificing data. We now live in a world dominated by data. During his Corenote speech at Microsoft Inspire, our CEO Satya Nadella mentioned that 90 percent of the data we have today was created in the last two years. Make use of it – just be sure to give it relevance and soul.

While we recognise the power of stories – a power that’s existed for as long as we’ve roamed the planet – that doesn’t mean there’s no space for it within your digital marketing strategy.

Effective content marketing balances the two. Each element complements and informs the other, and the content plans we produce here at Microsoft. This is achieved through our content resonance study (CRS) – a quarterly report which gives us real insight into what our customers are searching for and engaging with in digital spaces.

It guides us in understanding the types of content and language that resonates with them. It studies how they talk, what they’re talking about, and what they aren’t. This lets us better create and position our content, aligning commercial goals accordingly and really thinking about how we can add value to connect with our customers on a more human level.

By focusing on resonant content over irrelevant content, we find that golden spot between what we want to tell people and what they want to hear.

All businesses are here to empower customers. What the CRS prevents us doing is wasting time on content that doesn’t ignite their passion and curiosity. Instead, the data lets us speak to them on an honest, emotional level, with the help of our employee advocates, just like every good story.

I truly believe that every person and every business, has a story to tell. How will you tell yours?

Find out more

Download the Little Book of Storytelling

Tune in to our Art of Storytelling podcast series

Hear from the experts: explore our Microsoft Blogger Series

We’d love to hear how you approach storytelling in your business and to share some of our learnings. Join in the discussion and comment below.

About the author

Great stories demand heroes, emotions, and insight. As Storytelling & Digital Destinations Lead at Microsoft UK, Victoria Oakes places these principles at the heart of Microsoft UK’s content output. In this role, she’s driven to unify messaging and content across Microsoft using insights at the heart. Through her passion for engaging copy, visual storytelling, and data-driven insights, she truly cares about content being useful, interesting and easy to digest.

The post 5 ways storytelling can fuel your digital marketing appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

AI’s potential positions it as the most powerful tech on the planet. The opportunities to transform customer experiences by using AI as a marketing team are endless. But it doesn’t end there.

We’ve now started to move beyond the hype. AI is not the domain of FTSE 250’s with teams of data scientists anymore. We have seen AI democratised – through platform offerings, intelligent API’s, and all the smarts embedded in SaaS/PaaS offerings making it easier for all organisations, no matter their size to access.

MarTech in particular has been prominent in landing AI into organisations, sometimes in isolated pockets, but these are fertile grounds to experiment on.

When human ingenuity and technology combine, for me that is the sweet spot and where the magic happens. Our partners do this incredibly well.  A few examples that illustrate this are Marmite TasteFace, CherryBot and the EasyJet Look and Book app. Great examples for marketeers on how AI can drive audience engagement, while creating compelling brand experiences.

There is no shortage of use cases and automation scenarios across your customer’s life cycle. I would encourage you to draw these out and map them. Then pick one or two that matches your strategy so you can start using AI in your marketing strategy with relative ease. For example:

Research suggests that organisations who are on their AI journey are already outperforming other organisations by 5 percent on factors like productivity, performance, and business outcomes.

But, let’s be honest, whether it is the way your teams collaborate or the way your customers engage with you – all our expectations have been raised as to the quality of those experiences in this era of digital transformation. This is disruption!

Experimentation is fun but at some point, you need to make a strategic decision around your AI adoption journey. There have been five key learnings from how we’ve used AI as a marketing team at Microsoft that I want to share to help you build your own AI road map and strategy.

These key learnings are data, platforms, partners, skills, and commercial outcomes.

Our 5 key learnings

1. Data

Great AI needs great data, you cannot build an AI strategy without a data strategy so invest in creating one first.

Data needs to be high quality, preferably centralised, and compliant. The more data you have the smarter you can become. Your data modernisation strategy needs to not only identify the data you already have but look at gaps in your data and how you can fill it. Great data is a competitive advantage, of course the cloud is a logical destination so you can maximise the tools available to you.

2. Platforms

We are using PaaS and SaaS offerings to leverage ready-made solutions. We are a marketing team, not a dev team; I do not want my team writing bespoke code.

These ready-made solutions mean we can optimise our data and work when we need to, helping us stay agile. It also frees up time so my team can get on with the most important tasks to deliver business impact.

3. Partners

This is the most strategic choice you will make. We have chosen partners who enable secure, compliant, and accessible AI.

Choosing your partners is the most strategic decision you will make. Will they compete with you, are they culturally aligned, can they deliver securely and at the scale your business needs? Think hard about who you partner with and why. What do you want to keep in-house and where will you use partner capability?

It’s important for us not to just talk the talk, we need to walk the walk too. By making sure our partners have the same views as us, we’ll contribute to a better future for all.

4. Skills

When you deploy these tools, do you have the skills in your team to interpret their output in a commercially meaningful way? Or will you partner to deliver this?

Around 90 percent of jobs in the next two decades require digital proficiency. We’ve developed digital skills courses to help everyone in the UK re- and upskill.

We also invest in upskilling soft skills – strategic thinking, creativity, and collaboration are becoming some of the most important skills for organisations to foster. Creativity creates innovation, better development, and programming. Collaboration is vital for remote teams or big picture thinking. And when AI is crunching data and outcomes, we’ll need strategic thinking and planning to action those critical decisions.

AI has the opportunity to augment our work in many different ways. And sometimes it isn’t about who understands the code the best – it’s also about developing the correct culture, strategy, and governance. The AI Business School has a range of online modules, from the more practical how-tos to strategic guides.

5. Commercial talk, not AI hype

What are you measuring? Focus on the outcomes you want and not the tools that get you there.

When using AI in your marketing strategy, it needs to be framed for its commercial impact. More effective media buying, smart lead routing, and improved customer service are a few simple examples. Think about what you want to achieve. And remember – AI isn’t something you just turn on and leave–it should grow, adapt, and improve. The ultimate goal is to infuse this across your entire customer life cycle.

Amplifying ingenuity

When implemented correctly, AI has the power to amplify our ingenuity. By applying AI carefully, thinking about what we want to achieve, my team have been able to focus their time and energy on adding business value and innovating.

This journey isn’t something you go on alone. To truly drive change, you must bring your whole team or organisation with you. Listen to their feedback and encourage them to re- and upskill so they can prepare for the future of work.

We live in an era of digital transformation. It’s not just customers who have high expectations – it’s us and our teams as well. With the barrier to entry for AI now lower than ever, it’s never been a better time to start thinking about your AI strategy. Learn more about the state of AI across UK businesses with our deep dive, ‘Accelerating competitive advantage with AI‘.

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Find out more

Explore how AI can help you deliver commercial impact

Maximise the AI opportunity

About the author

Paul has over 20-years’ experience in the technology sector across a variety of VP and GM roles. Most recently, Paul was appointed as CMO at Microsoft UK after running their UK SMB business and sits as a NED on the board of a SaaS start up.

His passions lie in building engaging workplace cultures, understanding how technology drives transformation, collaboration and creates compelling customer experiences.

The post 5 barriers to AI adoption: learnings from our own journey appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

A blog by Tom Light, focusing on apprenticeships and degree apprenticeships at Microsoft and his experience in Microsoft’s Early in Career community.

I owe a lot to the Microsoft apprenticeships and degree apprenticeships programme. Driving past the Microsoft sign and into the Reading campus on a Monday morning in September 2017, I felt an overwhelming sense of excitement and achievement. I was a tech-savvy 23-year-old, and this moment felt almost like a dream. Having not yet received my employee badge, I did briefly have to explain to security that it was my first day. But that didn’t bother me one bit – I was proud to be one of the newest members of the Microsoft family.

It wasn’t my first time visiting Microsoft UK headquarters, but it was my first time arriving as an employee – and if I’m honest, I almost took my little hatchback off-roading towards the campus lake because I was so absorbed in that slightly surreal moment. They say it’s always important to make an immediate impression. I don’t think tyre tracks over the immaculately-cut grass would have been the best stamp to leave on day one.

I had been working in a sales team at a professional football club since leaving school after completing my A-Levels when I was 18. University never felt like the right path for me. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve always been hardworking and driven, but at that time in my life that drive had steered me down a path towards starting my career as soon as possible, to have an impact on a business, to earn money, and – as I saw it – to be ‘an adult’.

Have I ever reflected on where I’d be now if I’d taken an alternative route? Most definitely. Do I regret the choice I made back in 2012? Absolutely not.

An opportunity presents itself

It had often crossed my mind that my aspiration of working for a tech giant could have passed me by. I’d always had a keen interest in Microsoft in particular, having been brought up surrounded and empowered by their everyday applications like Office and having gone through the education system immersed in a Windows ecosystem. And the fact that the main Microsoft UK offices are pretty much on my doorstep only sharpened my interest. I’m extremely lucky to have a 10-minute commute to the Thames Valley Park campus here in Reading, but I’d have travelled countless miles and sat in endless traffic for this opportunity.

That’s exactly what I saw one day – an opportunity. Looking at the Microsoft careers website, I spotted the advert for apprenticeships within the UK. At first, I clicked it more out of curiosity than anything else, but that single click was the moment that completely transformed my career.

Five years before, when I was preparing to leave school, there was a stigma attached to apprenticeships. The range of industries that offered them were limited, and they were broadly viewed as an option for people who ‘didn’t have the grades’ for university or a job that was seen as a ‘proper career path’. Sadly, my sixth form wasn’t particularly helpful for those of us who weren’t applying to universities – there was a definite feeling of isolation and a lack of support there.

The evolving apprenticeship path

I was surprised at what I found online five years later in 2012. The scope of apprenticeships had clearly evolved, and Microsoft offered a range of roles in both business and technical environments, while affording the chance to work towards Level 3, 4 or 6 (degree) qualifications.

For a while, I’d wanted to get into marketing, but the majority of roles out there were understandably aimed at university graduates. I knew I didn’t want to go back to being a full-time student, but further digging led me to the discovery that Microsoft offered a number of marketing positions as part of their apprenticeship scheme – tick!

I had recently turned 23, and the scheme was open to applicants aged between 16 and 24 (this has since been made completely open) – tick! I took a punt…

My application journey

Within a few days, I received an email thanking me for my application. As I read further, it became apparent that my application had in fact been unsuccessful as I was ‘underqualified’, despite having the relevant GCSE grades required.

Naturally I queried this, and it turned out I had submitted my four A-Levels into the GCSEs box. Microsoft kindly rectified my administrative error. They must have thought “We’ve got a right one here!” – but despite this, I was delighted to be offered a video interview. Just thought I’d throw that little story in. We all make mistakes, but we’re only human and people get that. It’s how we rectify them and learn from them that really counts.

After completing the video interview, I was thrilled to be offered a place at an assessment centre held at the UK headquarters in Reading. I was one of 10 individuals and the eldest, as I expected, but that didn’t bother me. I was part of a group of young, hungry individuals – myself in more sense than one as I’d been too nervous to eat breakfast – and we were all there for the same reason. We all knew what an incredible opportunity we had to make a positive impression and earn a role at one of the world’s largest companies.

One of the key parts of the day was an individual interview. There were a variety of hiring managers there, but it just so happened that I was interviewed by Danielle Crayton. Danielle was a Senior Product Marketing Manager for the Surface product portfolio. Although I was open to marketing opportunities anywhere within the very broad Microsoft business, being a hardware lover, my dream role would have been working in the devices team. This was my opportunity to show my passion and knowledge to an influential person within that field – and the rest, as they say, is history.

The following week, Danielle offered me a role within her team. To say I was ecstatic would be a huge understatement. After further discussions with her following the assessment centre, it became even more apparent that the stereotypical view of apprenticeships was sorely outdated. Apprentices are not tea and coffee makers. They are not assistants. They are real members of real teams with even realer responsibilities and unimaginable opportunities ahead of them.

My role at Microsoft

Over the past 18 months, I have represented Microsoft and told our Surface and Modern Workplace story to both existing and new customers at huge events like Future Decoded and BETT, as well as at many smaller first- and third-party events. I’ve also led our internal communication and readiness streams, focusing on how we can further empower our internal sales teams and partner community.

My favourite part of my position has been playing an important role in the preparation and execution surrounding new product launches. The trust and faith put in me, as an apprentice, to know things such as our product roadmap and to be able to be a part of launch planning months in advance of announcements – well, it’s most certainly not the vision of an apprentice role that I had in my head beforehand. It’s overwhelmingly beyond that.

Add all of the above and more to the fact that Microsoft have invested in my development with marketing-centric qualifications (including a Level 4 Award from the Chartered Institute of Marketing) to complement my day job. I am unbelievably grateful for everything this company has allowed me to achieve. If I had any words of advice for somebody thinking about applying to become a Microsoft apprentice, I’d limit myself to four: Just go for it!

Taking this path has been the best decision I’ve ever made. I’ve built a great network, both internally and externally; become more qualified than I was 18 months ago; and am now stepping off of my apprentice programme to join our UK Public Relations team as a Communications Manager.

When I was 23 and thought a career in marketing within the technology industry was starting to appear to be beyond me, I had no idea that it was just around the corner, ready and waiting for me.

Apprenticeships at Microsoft

Please find more information below on the types of apprenticeships we are offering, based in Reading and London, from October 2019:

• Level 6 Degree Apprenticeship – Digital Solutions Technology

4.5-year programme designed for those looking to start their careers in technology.

Digital Technology Solutions Degree Apprentice (Cloud Solutions Engineer)

Digital Technology Degree Apprentice with (Cyber)

• Level 4 Commercial Supply

2-year programme designed for those looking to start their careers in procurement in our online Microsoft Stores. You will be learning with a team of industry experts who will nurture and support you every step of the way.

Commercial Supply and Procurement Apprentice

• Level 4 Data Analyst

2-year programme designed for those who are looking to start their careers in the world of data, as part of the dynamic online Microsoft Store.

Data Analyst Apprentice (EMEA Planner)

• Level 4 Junior Management Consultant

2-year programme designed for those looking to start their careers working in a fast-paced project environment supporting, consulting and delivering projects.

Junior Management Consultant Apprentice (Customer Evidence & Advocacy)

Junior Management Consultant Apprentice (Worldwide Learning Business Management)

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About the author

Tom is a Product Marketing Manager for Surface for Business at Microsoft UK where he focusses on digital content and customer journey strategies, as well as internal communications and readiness. He is passionate about empowering others to learn and grow, using modern workplace devices as a catalyst. In 2018, Tom also received the Microsoft Early in Career Award for Marketing.

The post Microsoft Apprenticeships and Degree Apprenticeships: My Story appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Name: Sophie Marriott

University: Loughborough University – Communications & Media studies

Role: Marketing Communications Intern

I sit within the Central Marketing Organisation of Microsoft which is the hub of all the main marketing activities that occur for Microsoft’s products like Office 365, Azure and Surface. Our marketing campaigns can either be targeted towards consumers, commercial businesses, or technical audiences. I focus mainly on commercial marketing which includes targeting various business decision makers within the technology industry to help them understand how they can leverage technology to deliver better business outcomes. I work with my manager to plan, create and execute various campaigns that will help people see how Microsoft can help them achieve their business objectives. This involves working with a wide variety of stakeholders from creative agencies to our social media team and events managers. I also work with the analytics teams to report back on the success and engagement of the campaigns to see how we can optimise our campaigns for success.

What does an average week look like in marketing communications?

For me, every week looks different to the last. This is something that I really enjoy about the role because you never know what exciting project may come up that you can get stuck into. Most of the time I will be working with various stakeholders within the business and external marketing agencies to get the campaigns briefed and executed. I am mainly based in Reading, but also attend events relating to the projects I am working on all around the country. It’s a great way to network and meet customers. Alongside this, I like to keep on top of my learning with the endless amount of resources available to us at Microsoft, for example doing my Microsoft Office Specialist exams.

Could you tell us about one of your highlights of the role?

A highlight of my role was working on Bett in January 2019. Bett is the largest education tradeshow event in the UK and we were the head sponsors at the event. I had the opportunity to help with the planning of Microsoft’s presence at the event, and got to attend for 4 days. Being given the responsibility to help organise such a large event was very rewarding because I could see the impact that my hard work had on the successful running of the event. I also had the opportunity to network with a wide variety of people within different jobs, opening my eyes to the diverse career paths that people have taken. To top it all off, I even got to meet Cindy Rose, Microsoft UK’s CEO, at one of the breakout sessions that I helped host!

What has the transition from University to Microsoft been like?

The transition to working life from university was initially quite difficult as your working hours increase quite dramatically. Considering this, I enjoy the routine that working at Microsoft gives me and it didn’t take long to adjust. I am looking forward to going back to university and implementing what I have learnt this year working in a fast-paced and corporate environment to make the most of my last year in education.

What has been your personal highlight of the year?

One of my personal highlights of the year has been partaking in DigiGirlz, an intern led programme that brings Year 8 girls together at the Microsoft offices and exposes them to STEM subjects and coding. It is so important today to get young girls into technology. Volunteering for DigiGirlz made me feel like I was really having an impact and making a difference to their future. To see the students’ budding passion for technology, along with the excitement while taking part in the coding activity, was inspiring. It was an experience that I won’t forget, and I am grateful that I took the opportunity to volunteer.

Find out more

Discover what it’s like to be a Technical Account Manager

Develop your digital skills to prepare for the future of work 

Inspiring young girls to pursue STEM careers

About the author

Sophie Marriott is a Marketing Communications intern at Microsoft. She attends Loughborough University doing a Communications and Media Studies degree. At Microsoft she enjoys working in marketing, attending events and helping to create campaigns that show the value technology can have across various industries.

The post A day in the life of a Marketing Communications Intern appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

This is where customer relationship management (CRM) comes in. It’s long been at the heart of organisations’ customer strategies, and now it’s just as critical in creating compelling and personalised customer experiences. These days, not only do you need a modern CRM system, but also complete customer engagement solution. One that empowers employees with the data and the acumen to provide the best service and experiences to your customers and nurture these important relationships.

1.      Why move your CRM to the cloud?

Customers hold the power in business relationships. Therefore, moving to a cloud business application that includes CRM is a significant step in nurturing these relationships. It unlocks your ability to consistently deliver relevant and personal experiences to every customer

“If customers don’t get the experience they expect, they’ll take their business elsewhere. This means businesses must be focused on customer expectations. And if they can deliver these differentiated experiences, it positively impacts your top-line revenue,” said Kate Leggett, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research on a recent Microsoft webinar. “Customers stay with a more engaged company longer. They will buy more from you, increasing their lifetime value, and they will serve as an advocate for your company.”

To meet your customers’ needs and expectations, you must equip your employees with the technology to access important data and insights.

“As they move to the cloud, companies can leverage cloud technologies and deliver these differentiated experiences. Cloud CRM deployments give you faster time to value.”

Kate Leggett, VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research on a Microsoft webinar

A 2018 commissioned Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™study of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service found that contact centre staff are up to 15 percent more efficient, with better tools and access to rich customer data and insight. This means they can better optimise customer experiences – a value add of $5.8 million to an organisation over three years.

The study also found that employees feel more empowered to do their best work, are more likely to stay, and have higher satisfaction. Also, IT departments are more agile and able to roll out innovation faster.

2.      Gain business buy-in to ensure success

Like any other important change initiative, you’ll need a clear process in place that engages all relevant stakeholders and addresses their specific needs. You’ll need strong sponsorship and communications.

Based on experience of hundreds of projects, Microsoft has honed a best practice approach that ensures your evaluation process and subsequent migration are comprehensive yet efficient. The alignment between the business leaders and IT throughout the journey is critical, as is early buy-in.

“Shiny software and slick demonstrations alone don’t get a project signed off at the board and they don’t drive business change. It pays dividends to get the right people around the table at the outset, to agree on the key measures, steps and timings for a successful evaluation” says Mark Abery, Technical Solutions Professional for Dynamics 365 at Microsoft.

Both the Microsoft Dynamics 365 team and its cloud migration partners can work with your business to ensure that you’ve not missed any important steps and are able to reach a decision with confidence in 4-8 weeks.

3.      Remember your value

While your cloud CRM success plan is in motion, remember to keep business value at the heart of what you do.

Moving to a cloud CRM solution such as Dynamics 365 will save your business the cost of providing on-premises infrastructure and software. It will also make your organisation more competitive in a fast-moving and consumer-centric market.

Moving to the cloud offers you access to the newest functionality without the disruption or cost of upgrading on-premises applications. It also ensures your business stays up-to-date with the latest security and compliance regulations. This frees up your IT staff to focus on innovation instead of maintenance.

All of this means you can focus on the important things in your business—your customers. Plus, you get additional capabilities online that aren’t available on-premises—capabilities that make your workforce more productive and effective in sales and customer service.

“Most organisations focus on understanding the Total Cost of Ownership difference with Online. What we really need to do is ensure we expand the conversation beyond TCO and also consider the value of the additional capabilities which are online-only or online first. In addition, we should also consider the value of the increased agility online provides – delivering faster time to value. By doing this we can make a much more compelling case to move. Our business value methods help articulate this case for change,” says Robert Smith, Director, Business Value Management.

4.      Migration made simple

At Microsoft, we want to see you succeed. This is why we offer best practices, tools, and resources via our FastTrack service. The Dynamics CRM On Premises migration service is designed to make it easy for you and your business to move your Dynamics CRM 2011/13/15 on-premises solution to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Apps. You get guidance and customised support from the FastTrack team as you migrate.

Nick Latocha, Head of Data and Insights at Travel Counsellors used the FastTrack service to move his company’s CRM system to the cloud and take advantage of AI and cloud technologies.

“The process was seamless. The FastTrack team worked with us and our partner to build a custom migration plan to ensure our data moved over as easily as possible with as little downtime as possible,” he says. “We were even able to migrate earlier than planned, and with our custom migration, we didn’t hit any issues at all.”

Having the support of the FastTrack team in the migration means you can focus on driving user adoption and achieving your intended business outcomes.

5.      Futureproof your business

Our research has found that 81 percent of executives believe AI will be integral to their business in two years. 31 percent of enterprises say AI is on the agenda for the next 12 months.

Yet, only 15 percent of enterprises are currently using AI. We’re currently launching numerous Dynamics 365 AI solutions that dramatically lower the barriers for marketing, sales, and customer service organisations to apply AI and see results in the shortest possible time frame.

Best of all, whether you want to understand your customers more deeply and personalise experiences, increase sales, or optimise support operations, you will not need a data science team to get started.

For example, Dynamics 365 AI for Customer Service not only enables leaders to understand the health of their operations based on key metrics, it applies machine learning to drill down to new levels of insight. These insights enable managers to anticipate emerging issues, to understand their impact on customer satisfaction and resolution rates so they may prioritise, and to track the success of their interventions with a level of speed and granularity that they’ve never had.

Beyond better decision making, agents are liberated from the error-prone administrative burden of labelling thousands of cases, and business experts can automate operations by deploying virtual agents without relying on their IT organisation.

“Now we’re in the cloud, our focus is to improve our sales pipeline by adopting some of these technologies. The plan is to not only improve our candidate experience, but also increase our conversion rates. These new technologies are key to helping us and making it as enjoyable as possible to do.”

Nick Latocha, Head of Data and Insights, Travel Counsellors

Learn more

You can see how a better customer experience will drive real returns and you’re going to need an AI-powered solution to achieve this. Watch our webinar with our guest Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Kate Leggett, for further insight into the economic impact of moving your CRM to cloud.

[msce_cta layout=”image_center” align=”center” linktype=”blue” imageurl=”http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-gb/industry/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2018/11/customerengagement4.jpg” linkurl=”https://info.microsoft.com/UK-Dyn365-WBNR-FY19-12Dec-04-Theeconomicbenefit-AID-747401-MCW0010160_02OnDemandRegistration-ForminBody.html?wt.mc_id=undefined” linkscreenreadertext=”Listen to the webinar now” linktext=”Watch the webinar now” ][/msce_cta]

About the author

Matt is currently a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft aligned to Dynamics 365, focussing on Customer Engagement. He is fascinated by the way tech can improve marketing, sales and customer service, as well as how tech providers market and sell these solutions. Prior to his experience at Microsoft he worked at a number of tech businesses, including one of the top analyst firms Gartner, honing his client development and relationship management skills. He is currently completing an MBA at Imperial College.

The post 5 steps to move to a cloud CRM appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

With the world’s first visual travel booking tool, you can book a holiday from a photo. From idea inception to market in only six months, here’s the secret to how we made it happen—Microsoft Azure image AI technology.

Lines are blurring between marketing and customer experience. Every brand wants to launch the next big innovation, but no one really knows how to make it happen or wants to risk the budget. So how do you get useful and consumer-focused innovation live for brands?

Obviously, you need a brilliant idea to start with. But the hard part is usually what comes after your light-bulb moment.

In the wake of the recent success of Look&Book within the easyJet travel app, I will share some of the reasons we managed to get our product live in just six months.

Ideas can come from anywhere, at any time. I was on a wellness holiday in Portugal, trying to be the best millennial I could be, and was posting photos of my trip on Instagram. A comment from a friend on one of my photos caught my attention.

She mentioned the usual holiday booking intent that you often see when people post their holiday photos: “These pics though. I really wanna go!” The idea for the Look&Book app came about when my eager friend went on to describe how she was already researching the trip.

This got me thinking. If, after seeing my photo, my friend was convinced this was where she wanted to go for her next holiday, surely there must be a simple way for her to book it? In a world of visual inspiration, why didn’t we have visual booking?

The ambition then became to shortcut booking for the Instagram generation. This would allow easyJet to make the most of the inspiration that peer-to-peer social content generates.

Creating the simplest user journey possible

We needed to ensure users would have a seamless experience, transitioning from Instagram to the easyJet app. The simplest journey was to take a screenshot of the holiday photo from Instagram and upload it to the easyJet app.

We used the existing infrastructure within the easyJet app with regards to booking flights, and, crucially, dynamic pricing. If we hadn’t done this, we would have faced a major stumbling block—dynamic pricing for airline flights is so complex and time-sensitive that surfacing it within another platform like Instagram is currently impossible.

Finding the right technology

Now that we had the idea and had mapped out the user journey, we needed the technology to make it happen. Initial research involved meeting companies who did “visual search,” but it quickly transpired that no single company could offer the solution we needed. So we decided to build it ourselves as a prototype.

AI is a great tool to leverage in marketing – and not just for big data and analytics. Using apps with built-in intelligence helps create a truly personal experience for the consumer which delights and excites them.

After evaluating the technology available, Microsoft Azure came out top. With its powerful cognitive services as well as a comprehensive set of infrastructures and tools, it was the best place for us to develop the Look&Book app.

With image recognition sorted, we married this with other technology, including optical character recognition, photo EXIF data recognition, geolocation identification and easyJet’s database of airports. In this way we created a sophisticated back-end system that would quickly recognise where the photo was taken and what flights were available to get you there.

To finalise the business case and bring our idea to life, we needed to ensure the prototype worked. We tested 25,000 randomly selected holiday images and 500 Instagram screenshots. The result was an 88% success rate, plus the ability to improve on this over time.

We learnt a lot from the test, especially around ensuring parameters to catch things like duplication of place names. Who knew there was also an Ibiza in South America!

With all the results in, we were now ready to get into development.

Test, fix, and test again

Our small team spent the next four months building, testing, fixing, improving, and testing again. After extensive cycles of feedback and testing, we were finally ready to take the plunge and go live.

It’s important to always allow plenty of time for this stage. Try to predict where things might go wrong and work around them. Get as much internal feedback as possible. People who are fresh to projects will spot things that you and your team might miss.

Marketing the product

It would have been easy to layer on a complex and clever marketing campaign to this project, but an idea like this should be left to speak for itself.

Simplicity was our mantra: we stuck to the new news and communicated it in a straightforward way.

We wanted to choose media that showed the Look&Book in action, so our comms plan combined awareness with more educational, how-to content across the campaign. PR was particularly important for us, so we approached journalists across the tech, travel, and consumer industries.

It’s live—but don’t stop there

We’ve brought the product to market on iOS in the UK, but this isn’t where the journey ends. You must gather results, feedback, and suggestions to improve on what you have.

You also need to decide when is the right time to consider a further roll-out or updates. What are the success metrics to inform this decision? What could a second phase look like? It’s best to start thinking about this even before the launch, so you’re ready to act quickly when your product takes off.

It’s easy coming up with an idea—it’s much more difficult to get it to market. However, AI makes it easier for us to be able to create innovative and creative experiences. By keeping the expectations and behaviours of the consumer at heart while using technology to drive these innovations, you can create something that will cause disruption in the market.

In six months, and with the help of some of the latest and most exciting technologies, my idea was live within the easyJet travel app. Which means it’s in the pockets of about a million people in the UK.

Once you’ve got your idea, ask yourself: is this innovation going to make a consumer’s life easier? Does it work around existing/natural consumer behaviour? If yes, continue at full force.

Where will your idea go?

Top tips

• Keep it simple. Simple for internal buy-ins and stakeholders. Simple for the consumer to use.
• Keep the team small and focused but get wider feedback at relevant points in the process: show it to as many people as possible before it goes live.
• Keep your eye on the prize. Is this going to make consumers lives easier? Will it change the market in a good way? Has it got the potential to grow beyond initial launch?

Key questions to ask yourself

• How can you ‘hack’ the systems already out there? Always think of ways around technological barriers and use existing consumer behaviour and existing infrastructure.
• Do you start from scratch, or build on what exists?
• Have you proved it actually works?
• Could your parents use it without any explanation from you?
• What would make this product even better?

Find out more

Grow your skills and expertise at the UK Partner Skills Hub

About the author

Alex works for an advertising agency in London called VCCP in the social and digital team. She is fascinated with how technology is changing the way we interact with brands and particularly with ways we can make consumer journeys easier and smarter.

The post How to use AI to innovate and transform customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

AI isn’t the future. It’s the now. It’s already around us – from the auto-complete in our search engines to our sat navs helping us avoid that Monday morning traffic. And it’s more than just robots and self-driving cars. AI can help us improve our business value and respond to customers’ needs quicker too.

Digital marketing and AI are a natural fit. Marketers are leveraging the technology to help steer business decisions, improve customer experiences, and understand their audience better. Best of all, they’re saving money and time whilst they do it.

So, what are the main opportunities that AI could offer for a digital marketing team?

1. Make sense of huge amounts of data

By 2020, it’s estimated that for every person on earth, 1.7 MB of data will be created every second[1]. That’s a whole heap of data for your organisation to collect, analyse, and plan with. Too much, in fact. And this is where AI comes into play.

AI provides advanced analytics to optimise operations, deliver insights, and drive innovation in an organisation. Best of all, AI and machine learning are readily available. Microsoft’s AI platform makes it easy to innovate and accelerate solutions with pre-built or customisable options.

Try: Get hands on with AI to see what amazing capabilities you can draw from your data.

2. Understand your audience for better targeting

AI can analyse data to quickly understand your audience demographic and their buying behaviours. This means AI can help you predict their future actions and decisions. Imagine what impact this could have on your marketing campaigns.

If you were looking for organisations at the forefront of data-driven marketing, you’d find Ignition Ai. They have self-learning predictive marketing algorithms that integrate the emotion and psychology of shopping with real-time data to predict trends.

“Our machine learning writes its own rules. We’re not telling it what to do; we’re telling it the outcome we need, and it will go away and write its own logic,” says Ignition Ai CEO, James Harrison.

Running in Azure, the algorithm identifies consumers across devices and analyses their web browsing. Machine learning builds an understanding of the consumer, which lets Ignition Ai bid for advertising space and display highly targeted copy that matches each unique person. This results in more accurate ad placement, more ‘human’ conversations, and ultimately, increased profit.

“All this happens in less than 50 milliseconds and we’re able to scale the weight of advertising in a matter of minutes,” says Harrison. “It’s getting to the point where our chairman tells us to ‘tone it down a bit’.

“A ten percent improvement would be great, but we’re seeing halving of budgets and doubling of effectiveness. The results are astounding.”
– James Harrison, Ignition AI CEO

3. Employ chatbots to create a better customer experience

While 29 percent of companies use AI for predictive analytics, 31 percent are using it for virtual assistants. These assistants, or chatbots, help customers with routine questions and tasks, making it easier for them to find what they’re looking for. Chatbots are also available 24/7 so your customers are never kept waiting. This frees employees up to handle more complex tasks, and provide more hands-on service. 73 percent of customers are open to businesses using AI if it makes their life easier.

Dixon’s Carphone research found that around 90 percent of customers start their journey online, and 65 percent use their mobiles phones to assist them in-store[2]. To capitalise on the opportunity they built Cami on the Microsoft Bot Framework using Cognitive Services. She understands text and images, meaning she’ll respond to common questions. She’ll even look at pictures of items taken in-store and see if they’re in stock.

“We didn’t create any new information, we just pulled it together in a different way. And with Cami, we’ve giving customers the ability to search through it using natural language,”  says Antonia Colin-Jones, Strategic Partnership Program Manager. “The biggest thing Cami will do is help strengthen our relationship with customers. We’ll also improve our in-store operations by supporting our store colleagues to do their jobs more efficiently.”

Consumers expect a more omni-channel experience – 59 percent of customers in our 2018 Global Customer Service Report say they engage with five channels, and 75 percent expect employees to know their previous interactions[3]. Cami bridges that gap between online and in-store. Employees can look at what the customer has searched for online or added to their wishlist and improve their in-store experience. Employees can also use Cami to answer stock questions.

Try: Meet LUIS, a service that interprets normal language and understands the outcomes. A fast learner, LUIS needs little training, and gains insights based on real user-inputs.

4. Offer a personalised service

With AI on hand to help to understand your data, you can offer a more personalised service than ever before – in real time. An e-commerce store can now easily show recommendations in real-time based on the customer’s past purchases or habits. But it’s not limited to the online experience. AI can also be used in physical stores, giving suggestions that make it easier for the customer to find what they need or to help reduce traffic in aisles, giving customers a faster checkout experience. Data collected from a mobile banking app can predict when a customer needs help and a customer agent can reach out before an issue arises.

5. Take the hard work out of email marketing

AI takes all the hard work out of email marketing. Analysing vast amounts of data, it can understand the best time to contact a customer, how often they should be contacted, and the topics they’re interested in to create the ultimate personalised communication. CRM powered with AI gives you a 360° view of a customer. You can use these powerful insights to drive better email marketing campaigns to the right people at the right time.

Learn: How to reduce customer churn on Microsoft AI School.

Adopt AI responsibly to improve employee engagement

AI has the power to do some incredible things for your customer experience, but it also offers huge potential for impacting your most valuable asset too – your employees. Two-thirds of key business decision makers believe AI will bring out the best in their people. AI is here to stay – and those who use AI with an ethical approach are already outperforming those who do not by 9 percent in productivity, performance, and business outcomes.

Tip: It’s important to ensure that any concerns about AI are addressed in the early stages of planning and adoption in order to get a good return on AI investment. One way to do this is to get your employees involved in the process, listen to feedback, and be transparent with the organisation’s goals and values.

It’s clear to see the benefits AI can provide for digital marketing, from providing fast, personalised omni-channel engagement and real-time analytics, to freeing up employees to spend more time with customers or being more creative and innovative in their work.

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[1]Data Never Sleeps 6.0

[2] Dixons Carphone case study

[3] State of Global Customer Service Report

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