Google recently celebrated its 20th birthday.? Over it’s short lifetime it has become an indispensable tool that millions of people rely on everyday. Can you imagine life without Google?

Digital marketing has also developed in capability over the past 20 years. Once it was enough to simply have website, and perhaps a well-placed banner ad. However technology and consumer expectation has evolved, and there are a multitude of new ways to reach consumers.

Targeting.
You might think of Google as a search engine, but at its core, Google is the world’s most effective advertising platform.

Have you ever wondered how Google (or Facebook etc) manage to show you ads that are startlingly relevant to your needs? They use thousands of data points on every single one of us to help target the best audience for advertisements. Just like your Facebook stream is personalised to you, so are the ads you are shown on Google, based on your search and browsing history.

For advertisers it can be quite cost effective to advertise on these platforms, as your ad is only being shown to the audience you’ve selected, and that the platform calculates is most likely to respond to your ad.? With Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) you only pay when a user responds to your ad, minimising wasted budget on uninterested people.

People use Google when they are hunting for a solution to a need. They are often ready to act, so ensuring your product or service is displayed is critical to marketing your business these days. Underneath the paid ads are the organic search results – the best ranked matches for a search.??This is why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is crucial for most businesses online. You need to be there when the consumer is ready to act, and SEO is the craft of optimising a website to rank as top answers to valuable consumer questions.

Personalisation.

Do you have a mailing list signup on your website? Perhaps you send an email every month or so, keeping your customers up to date with your business.
No longer is it enough to send out a general email newsletter to all your subscribers. Consumers expect advertising and messaging to be relevant to their needs and interests. Have you ever bought clothes online? You’ve no doubt received follow up email campaigns that showcase other items you may like to purchase, based on what you have browsed and purchased before.

Their digital marketing platform tracks not only what you purchase, but also what you’ve looked at and added to your cart, and uses that data to build a profile on you in order to send an individual email – just for you. This is dynamic personalisation and email marketing automation, and it’s a core part of modern digital marketing.
However it doesn’t end there. You may go back to the website, and the homepage banner is also relevant for you, and other users who are part of your segment.

A segment is a collection of people that fall under a certain category – gender, age, time since last purchase – there are endless ways we can use data to make offers and messaging more relevant.??In fact, segmenting your data is the best way to help keep a positive return on investment for a digital marketing campaign. Your aim is to send the right offer, to the right person, at the right time, at the right price.

Retargeting.
Perhaps you’ve looked at a product in a website but didn’t purchase. Sometimes, ads for that product seem to follow you around the internet – on other websites and social media, or you might receive an email reminding you to complete your purchase. This is called retargeting.
Retargeting is a very effective way to help persuade consumers who have shown interest, but haven’t yet purchased, or taken action.??Because the retargeting is only advertising to visitors that have already shown some interest, it keeps the costs down and the conversion rate up, leading to excellent return on investment for these campaigns.

The always on generation.
That phone in your pocket is more than just a device for phone calls. It’s your 24 hour portal to the internet. As this has become the standard, consumers also expect businesses to cater for them at all times of the day.
So how do you handle this expectation? A recent trend has been the introduction of helper chat popups on websites that can answer consumer questions at any time of the day. These popups can provide customer service using pre-populated answers, or alert you if a potential customer has a query. They are cost effective and can help convert visitors to customers by enabling excellent, on demand customer service.

As technology advances, so does the way we do business online. Above are just a few of the recent trends in Digital Marketing. If it’s been a few years since you have had your site built, or tried a digital marketing campaign, call us today on 03 8525 2082 to arrange a free consultation in order to assess your business needs, and determine cost effective digital marketing strategies that can make your business stand out online.

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If you started your business more than 5 years ago, you could be forgiven to believing that online marketing was something to try out if you had a bit of spare marketing budget. Times have changed. Over the last few years, the reality of digital marketing for small business has gone from a nice-to-have to a must-have for most businesses. Consumers are more connected than ever before, and their default behaviour when looking for anything ? products, services or information ? is to grab their mobile phone and search online. Even word of mouth has gone digital; recommendations happen across social media, and online reviews can have a significant impact on your business.

Bottom line: digital marketing is more important now for small business than ever before.

We have many clients for whom we have carried out digital marketing across a wide range of platforms and strategies, many of which achieved significant increases in new business enquiries or sales. Some of our clients now receive the majority of all their incoming work through digital marketing channels.

That’s not to say that word of mouth is unimportant; it’s simply that digital marketing provides you with immediate results and a wider reach at a lower cost.

However, it is very possible to implement digital marketing poorly, and therefore not achieve the results you are seeking. That’s often why we are engaged by our clients to design, write, execute and manage digital marketing for them.

Digital marketing can have a bit of a bad reputation. Unfortunately, there are many less scrupulous service providers who use digital marketing tactics to grow their own business and then fail to deliver tangible results for their clients. Even worse, they use tactics to “game” online platforms like Google for short term gains but ultimately end up with the client being penalised.

At Contactpoint, we take an end-to-end approach to digital solutions for our clients, and digital marketing is just one part of it. It’s our holistic approach that helps us deliver real results for clients, as we take the time to discuss our client’s business needs and only then recommend an approach for digital marketing that can deliver results. We never recommend the latest digital marketing technology just because it’s flavour of the month, nor will we cheat the system to get the quick results.

Just one example of our success in delivering digital marketing results for our clients is Nortan; providers of air conditioning and heating service and installation. Via a range of activities including a great mobile responsive website, pay per click advertising and SEO, Nortan are kept very busy all year round with new incoming leads, and have grown their business significantly over the time we have been providing digital marketing services. In fact, from time-to-time Nortan ask us to pause their digital marketing campaigns, because they are too busy with new work! What a good problem to have!

We work very closely with our clients to ensure that the level of business digital marketing campaigns produce are manageable.

If you would like to revisit your use of digital marketing to grow your business, please feel free to call Heather Maloney for a chat.

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Inbound marketing (aka ‘permission marketing’) refers to the strategy of attracting leads for your business via company-created digital content. That content addresses the needs which your products or services fulfil or problems which they solve, resulting in the right people (those trying to solve that problem or fulfil the identified desire) approaching your organization, and working their way through your material in order to self-select or qualify themselves as a potential customer.

So, inbound marketing is a strategy. You need to assess whether it is a strategy that is suitable for your particular business and marketplace.

Why Inbound Marketing?

Because everyone hates being sold to … it’s that simple!

When was the last time you were on the end of a cold call, and you thought “oh yes, why not spend the next 15 minutes listening to this offer about why I should switch electricity companies?” And even if you have engaged in such a phone call lately – perhaps to the person from a very worthy charity, rather than the electricity provider – did you end up buying / donating or just wishing them a nice day?

If you are in sales, and you only have to talk to people who are already in the market for your products / services, your job is so much easier.

Inbound marketing the focus is on providing help or value, rather than making a sale. The sale will come as a natural result of providing value and solutions.

Inbound marketing also addresses the new buyer behaviour that we have seen evolve over the last decade; customers carrying out personal research and practically making the decision with regard to what they want to buy, before they ever talk to a vendor. Also, with the proliferation of paid TV, many more free to air channels, internet radio, and free video content, ensuring that a more traditional advertisement is seen or heard is a lot more difficult. This article provides many statistics showing how effective inbound marketing can be compared to outbound marketing.

Please note, I am not saying that traditional marketing no longer works … I heard a presentation from a career telemarketer just last week, explaining the benefits of lead generation via cold sales calls. You need to ensure that your choice of marketing strategy is right for your market and your ideal customers.

Fleshing out your Inbound Marketing Strategy

If you decide that an inbound marketing strategy is right for your organisation, then you need to:

1. Plan the content you are going to create in order to solve your prospects questions and engage them in their journey of discovery, building trust in your organisation, and desire for your products and services.
2. Determine which tools or platforms you will use to make your content accessible to prospects.
3. Create the content!
4. Disseminate the content and make it easy for people to find, and/or pay for traffic.
5. Measure and analyse the results, improving the content over time.

Clearly implementing an inbound marketing strategy requires effort and co-ordination of a variety of activities. Utilising a team of resources will help you implement more quickly. Tools such as a content calendar will help you to plan out the creation and distribution of your content in a logical manner.

Which Tools should I use?

Inbound marketing = making your marketing material extremely accessible so that your prospects can easily find the answers to their questions or solve their problems (i.e. find your products or services), when they are actively looking. Your content must add value, and guide prospects for whom your products and services are a good fit, towards the point of purchase. Some people will be in a hurry and will purchase immediately that they find a solution, so being able to buy from any piece of your digital content is important. Other prospects will take their time, evaluate multiple options, test you out, and then finally purchase days, weeks or months down the track. For such buyers, your content needs to educate and build trust.

The following tools are useful in implementing an inbound marketing strategy:

• Search engine optimisation (‘SEO’) – this activity is very important for ensuring that your digital content ranks above other organisations competing in the same space. Over time you want to “own the topic”, that is, be on the first page of results for every search on relevant words or phrases. SEO obviously needs content in order for search engines to point somewhere. The following types of content will deliver high ranks in the search engines the mostly quickly:
  • Blogs - either a blog on your own website, or blogs published on other popular websites, pointing back to your website.
  • Videos - most commonly distributed via YouTube, giving you access to people searching through this video search engine.
  • Reviews - usually in 3rd party platforms such as Google Reviews. However, they can also take the form of testimonials in your own website, including video reviews.
  • Website content – including online courses, guides, survey results, reports and research, white papers, diagnostic tools.
  • Press releases – often distributed via dedicated PR sites.
• Pay-per-click advertisements (‘PPC’) – whilst this might sound like traditional outbound marketing, because you can configure your ads to only appear in response to searches for specific keywords or phrases by people located in a particular region, PPC ads can be very useful for bringing visitors to your website who are trying to solve a particular problem. PPC is very useful for bringing in immediate readers of your content while you are waiting for your organic ranks (SEO) to improve. Google Adwords and Bing are the main two platforms for PPC ads, because they are the most used tools for searching for answers to problems. PPC ads must be supported by dedicated content on your website, also called ‘landing pages’. People who click on your ad will arrive on your landing page. To get the best return on your investment in that click (you are paying per click), it is important that the content delivers on the ad, and then takes the visitor along their journey of [hopefully] deciding to buy from you.
• Social media – people talk about topics on social media, as well as talking about their lives. Find where topics related to your products and services are being discussed, and then get involved in the conversation. Posting your own content in your social media accounts will also help people to find your content when they search for it in the social media platforms ? most social media platforms use hashtags (#) for helping people find content on a particular topic.
• Social media advertisements – this is PPC within social media platforms. The difference is that for some of the social media platforms, you can configure your ads to only show for people who match very specific demographics.
• Email and SMS marketing – once people have identified themselves as actively seeking to solve a problem or fulfil a desire, hopefully for your product, they may subscribe to receive future email and SMS messages from you. To inspire visitor opt-in for email / SMS there must be compelling value contained in your digital content. Often your blog content and other website content will be pushed to subscribers in a logical manner.
• Marketing automation – tools which automatically send a choreographed series of content to subscribe to learn more about your products and services. The more sophisticated of these automation tools will start and stop the delivery of your content, based on the manner in which your prospect is interacting with your content.

One of the great advantages of digital marketing tools is that they enable you to measure the interactions of people with your content, and identify where visitors are dropping off. This can help you to improve your content and marketing process over time, and therefore increase the rate of conversion of visitors to paying customers.

As part of our digital marketing services we would be delighted to help you determine whether an inbound marketing strategy is right for your organization, define and plan your strategy, create the required content, implement, and analyse the results.

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According to Wikipedia¹, people in sales and marketing positions have been talking about sales funnels since the 1920s. The sale of many products and services involve a lead time from investigation through to purchase. Having a certain number of leads at each stage of the sales funnel or customer journey is frequently used as a lead indicator of your likely sales volume at a point in the future. Marketing attempts to ensure that people entering an organisation’s sales funnel have a certain problem they are trying to solve or need that must be met, and that are aware that solutions to these problems exist. The organisation then attempts to guide the prospective purchasers through their process of research, interaction with the sales team, competitor evaluation and ultimately the purchase of that organisation’s products/services.

A well-managed sales funnel perpetuates interaction with the individuals even after they become clients. Client’s evaluations of the company, employee performance, products and services are ongoing. The sales process should nurture and support clients, leading to repurchase, renewal of contracts and referrals, that is, back to the top of the funnel.

Unfortunately, in practice not all leads will emerge from the bottom of the funnel as clients. Even the best companies will lose a few leads along the way. Astute marketers will be constantly seeking to identify and improve all interactions down through the sales funnel and seek ways to fix common leaks. Improving the efficiency of their sales funnel ranks as the second highest sales priority after closing more deals².

The Graffiti Eaters is an example of a company who understood the benefits of a sales funnel but knew theirs was leaking somewhere along the way. They came to us with an existing website, Google AdWords campaign, and frequent blog and social media content to target prospects in the early stages of the sales funnel. Relationships with existing clients were maintained through blog and social media content as well as more personalised email newsletters.

After analysing the entire cycle, it became clear that the hole in this funnel was the website. We were able to drive significant traffic to the website of people who were looking to purchase their services via first page ranks in Google search results for relevant search terms. We were able to ensure the Google AdWords ads were displayed above organic search results. We were also able to encourage relevant traffic to click on the ads. However, once traffic reached a landing page of the website, much of the traffic did not continue on through the sales funnel. Potential clients were lost and there was little to show for the advertising expenditure.

Landing pages play a key role in paid ad campaigns; they support the ad with more detailed content, and help the prospect to take action and interact with the vendor. After clicking on an ad, visitors should be directed to a page that provides a clear, specific solution to their problem in a tone and style suitable for the audience type. Once the visitor has interpreted the key messages, that visitor should be guided on how to act on this information. A clear, yet tasteful ‘call-to-action’, such as a form for requesting a quote, a booking form, a request further contact link or the option to make a purchase.

After analysing The Graffiti Eaters website, we found that the landing page provided an unsatisfactory user experience and had significant room for improvement (see image below).

A cluttered appearance, with excessive text, images and animations grouped close together made it difficult for visitors to find the key information. Style inconsistencies throughout the navigation, headings and text provided a substandard appearance which wasn’t appropriate for the predominantly B2B audience. The call-to-action comprising 3 different options was confusing, and on mobile devices, it was only visible by scrolling to the bottom of a very long page.

We analysed the top performing websites in graffiti removal and similar industries which target the same audience. A design was selected which overcame the aforementioned issues (see image below or visit www.graffitieaters.com.au/graffitiremoval/).

The text was simplified to demonstrate the key points that owners and managers of commercial properties are looking for when seeking a professional graffiti removal service. A video was provided for those who are prepared to spend more time on the page.

We provided a clear call-to-action via the ‘Get it Off Now’ button which leads to a simple form, handling both bookings and quote requests. This button is part of a sticky header, which stays in view while the visitor scrolls down the page. A second button was placed towards the bottom of the page with the label ‘Request a Quote’.

The mobile number listed in the sticky header features click-to-call functionality when viewed on mobile devices. This enables visitors to click on the number and automatically call head office. As with the booking/quote request form interactions, this is linked to AdWords conversion tracking so that we can monitor the number of leads the ads provide.

These changes are part of an overall re-design of the website which is now clean, modern and user-friendly on desktop, tablet and mobile devices, while retaining The Graffiti Eaters unique branding elements.

We reviewed the results of the AdWords Graffiti Removal ad group during April 2018 and compared it with April 2017 when the previous website was in use. The landing page gained an astonishing 242.85% more leads in April 2018 than in April 2017.

To put this into perspective, we compared the conversion rate of the Graffiti Removal Ad Group in April 2018 with global averages for AdWords campaigns across all industries³.

The campaign for The Graffiti Eaters achieved more than double the global industry average for conversions and more than triple the conversions gained from the previous website. Not only is the client receiving more leads, they are receiving far greater return on their investment.

The effect of the new design was felt throughout the website, with the number of quotes completed increasing by 44.95% and the number of new clients generated increasing by 25.53%. A great result!

The Graffiti Eaters are one of many clients we are proud to have assisted with Google AdWords management (PPC), website design, and sales funnel optimisation.

Contact us to discuss how you can increase sales by optimising your digital marketing.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_funnel

² HubSpot

³ WordStream

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A recent Contactpoint blog post described the way in which artificial intelligence and machine learning are impacting our world at large and how it works. This blog attempts to answer the question “How can business, both small and large, utilise AI to make significant advancements?” AI is certainly not a technology only available for large corporations.

I assert that there are 3 main ways that your business can benefit from artificial intelligence (‘AI’):

1. By integrating your website / app with software that has been improved by the use of AI. Such integration will significantly improve the value provided by your solution.
2. By using software that has been improved by AI for running your business, thus significantly improving the manner in which you run your business, on an ongoing basis.
3. By running your own deep learning exercises to determine the answer to a difficult question, which either improves your business performance or your understanding of your clients.

I expect that you already, perhaps unknowingly, use the outcome of AI or machine learning every day. Understanding it will help you harness it even more, so let’s explore just a few examples of each of these opportunities.

Integration
The Google search engine is underpinned by the use of AI – the more web pages it crawls, the better and better it gets at providing people with valid and useful search results. That’s part of the benefit of AI; traditional programming requires modification over time in response to the way people use it, with AI driven solutions, they learn and improve on their own.

Baidu, the so-called Chinese version of Google, allows you to upload an image, and request “similar images”. The search for similar images is not based on text around the images on a web page but solely uses the content of the images (2). Images, in technology terms, are made up of pixels of colour, which individually tell you very little. It is the manner in which the colours are combined, and the hard and soft edges around groups of pixels, which determine what is actually represented. AI underpins Baidu’s ability to find similar images – a very complex problem, and probably not something you could program a computer to perform. Traditionally the ability for a programmer to tell a computer how to achieve a goal was a prerequisite to solving that goal programmatically. With the use of AI, instead of telling the computer how to solve the problem, the program is allowed to train itself to solve the problem, getting better and better at achieving a task the more times it is performed.

We all use text search to find the things we need in Google or other search engines. It’s been possible to integrate the Google Search Engine into your website or app for many years, including restricting the search results to a particular domain or set of domains, thus providing excellent search results to your visitors without needing to write a search engine algorithm yourself. The ability to also search by images may be the differentiator that your website or app needs to deepen the value for your customers.

Other AI enriched applications that may enhance your application include:

• Voice recognition – for speech to text and voice control of your app.
• Language translation.
• Image recognition e.g. Facebook suggesting name tags for people in photos you upload.
• Route planning e.g. navigating from one place to another, taking traffic and other factors into consideration.

Clickup.com, a project management software, provides another example of integration. They announced this month that Clickup is now integrated with Alexa and Google Talk, allowing users to quickly interact with the online software by voice (3).
Google and Microsoft allow you to play with some of their AI enhanced functions via websites (4).

Operations
There are many functions that all businesses carry out. These functions are attracting the application of AI in order to make the tools used to complete these tasks, exponentially better than they have been before, and thereby attract new business.

Keeping up with the last news in your industry during your morning commute is now so much easier thanks to tools such as Voice Aloud which enables your smart phone to read an article to you while you drive (carefully of course). Your smart phone will also allow you to search using voice commands, using Google Voice Assistant or the iPhone Siri, allowing you to search hands free.
I recently asked my Android phone “Okay Google, what do I have on today?” expecting to have a list of my appointments read to me – it did that and, then started playing me 2 – 3 minute snippets of daily news recorded by various news agencies around Australia. It was a fantastic way to keep up-to-date and it “learned” that behaviour all on its own.

Google Search enables you to find relevant information, and this search is very accurate, powered by AI. It’s very important for Google’s revenue from online advertisements that Google Adwords provides relevant ads to searchers, because it is the relevance that inspires people to click on an ad, thus earning Google revenue. Similarly ads which appear in amongst Facebook news feeds are very reliable for showing your ad to the right audience, and once you have achieved excellent click through the result of Facebook’s AI research ensures that it will promote your ad to “look-a-like” audiences, based on what it knows about the people who already clicked. You can now much more confidently spend money on pay-per-click, because you can tailor your ads to specifically targeted audiences.

In a recent Contactpoint blog we talked about chatbots – the best of these are underpinned by AI, improving their results the more they are used so that they can help answer an inbound question before the human gets involved.

A number of online customer service and customer relationship management tools are now underpinned by AI. In these functions AI is bringing valuable insights as you use the tools, such as:
- Which clients are at the greatest risk of leaving you? (5)
- Which phrases and styles of interacting with customers produce the greatest sales results?
- What are the most important additional products or services to provide to your customers?

The better banking and financial management tools are now underpinned by AI to help you identify fraud (6). Similarly computer networks are being better secured from intrusion, viruses and malware now by solutions that use AI to detect unusual behaviour (7).

If your operations involve designing products and engineering, AI is making great inroads into design tools to help speed up the process (12).

Actionable Insights / Solving Problems
So far we have considered AI lead improvements to more general problems. Your business will be operating in a particular domain in which you are an expert, and in which there are very specific problems that have not yet been solved, or can’t be solved quickly & reliably for a large number of customers. This is where the power of AI may be the most potent, because machine learning / deep learning can be used to arrive at breakthroughs in your particular domain. Whilst it helps if you have lots of data in order to feed the deep learning process, for smaller businesses, you may be able to access public data to achieve the same goal, or use pre-existing neural networks to solve your similar problem.

Tools such as Chorus.ai are ready to take your organisation’s live data, in order to provide you with valuable insights in a specific operational area (8). In the case of Chorus.ai it analyses your meetings, particularly sales meetings, to help you get the best performance out of future meetings.

AI is being used to great effect by large corporations such as Walmart to quickly respond when high turnover products look like running out of stock, recently reporting a year-on-year 63% increase in sales (10).

Smaller organisations are also using AI to gain actionable insights, including a Zoo which now has a much better accuracy in predicting high attendance, and therefore staffing requirements, based on using AI to determine all the factors (not just weather) that increase visitor rates (10).

Domo is a tool created to help businesses, small and large, collate data from a wide range of sources (social media, ecommerce, chat bots etc), and help an organisation spot trends in real time (11).
In the area of product design and engineering, a concept called Generative Design underpinned by AI, is enabling faster design and many more possible designs to choose from by allowing all the constraints of the product to be entered, and then allowing the program to generate a large number of possible solutions (13).

However, for a problem more specific to your industry or expertise, you may need to perform a highly customised deep learning experiment. Once you have determined the question you need to answer for your specific area of expertise and industry, there are 7 steps in performing your own AI or deep learning experiment:

• Gathering data
• Preparing the data
• Choosing an AI model to suit your question / domain
• Training the model with data which contains the results / answers
• Evaluation of the performance of the model
• Tuning of the factors determined by the model
• Applying the model to fresh data in order to gain insights or greater performance. (1)

As a business owner or leader you should be considering the way in which artificial intelligence or machine learning can change the way in which you operate and solve your customer’s problems. Don’t hesitate to get in contact if you would like to discuss how AI can be put to work for your organisation.

Read this article to understand more about how machine learning works, and how artificial intelligence is impacting our world.

If you would like to discuss how AI might benefit your organisation, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Heather Maloney.

References:
(1) https://towardsdatascience.com/the-7-steps-of-machine-learning-2877d7e5548e
(2) https://www.wired.com/2013/06/baidu-virtual-search/
(3) https://clickup.com/blog/alexa-google-assistant-project-management/
(4) https://aidemos.microsoft.com/ & https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ai
(5) http://www.bizdata.com.au/customer-smartdetect?gclid=CjwKCAjwlIvXBRBjEiwATWAQIseaubDdIaMGue_bjuC9BZU3WLErB1Qj9u12XKmkZGZPz-UGO4balhoCaxgQAvD_BwE
(6) https://www.techemergence.com/machine-learning-fraud-detection-modern-applications-risks/
(7) https://www.techemergence.com/network-intrusion-detection-using-machine-learning/
(8) https://www.chorus.ai/product/
(9) https://www.morganmckinley.com.au/article/how-ai-helping-small-business-today
(10) https://www.clickz.com/5-businesses-using-ai-to-predict-the-future-and-profit/112336/
(11) https://www.techemergence.com/ai-in-business-intelligence-applications/
(12) https://www.engineersrule.com/solidworks-puts-artificial-intelligence-work/
(13) https://www.autodesk.com/solutions/generative-design

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The goal of achieving artificial intelligence – a computer that can learn and respond like a human – began in the 1950s(1). However it is only in the last few years that we have seen great leaps forward towards this goal. The reason for the sudden improvements is attributed to break through in an area of technology called neural networks – programming that attempts to mimic the way the brain works, and a feature of the area of machine learning.

Up until the use of neural networks and machine learning, the act of programming a computer to perform a particular task – think displaying words on a screen, adding up columns of numbers, changing an image from colour to black and white – has required that a programmer can describe in exact detail the process of achieving that task. The human brain performs many tasks, seemingly effortlessly, that are virtually impossible for anyone to describe how they are done, beyond some vague concepts and pointers in the right direction. That’s not sufficient to be able to program a machine to do the task. Consider the task of identifying one human face from another – can you describe how your loved one looks, sufficient that another person who has never met them could pick them out in a crowd with any certainty? Very difficult! This is just one example of how amazing the human brain is when it comes to rapidly processing large amounts of information. We perform many such complex tasks almost simultaneously, without even realising.

A neural network is a programmatic attempt to replicate the manner in which it is believed the brain performs complex tasks. The diagram below is a typical representation of a neural network used to carry out a particular task. As an example, consider an input being an image of a face of a person who just passed the camera, and the task to be performed by the neural network being determining whether the image is “Joe Citizen”. The first round of analysis processes the input (camera image of a face) and then passes information about that image in the form of weightings down to the next level of processing. The second level receives that analysis, performs further analysis, and then passes another set of weightings down to the next level, and so on until the end result, which is the most likely answer to the question posed at the outset (where the attributes of Joe Citizen is already known by the program)? The “hidden layers” may comprise many different layers to allow deeper and deeper analysis and greater refinement aimed towards arriving at the correct answer.

Machine learning involves allowing a computer program to learn by working through a large amount of data, which also contains the answer to a particular question e.g. data on the observations of humans who both did and did not contract a particular disease in the future. The machine learning program will build a neural network of weightings required to answer the question being posed. Then that neural network is put to work against fresh data to further refine the learning, including humans providing feedback on the program’s accuracy. Finally, armed with all that learning stored in a neural network, the program can then be applied to new, live data in order to interpret that data … it turns out, with great speed and accuracy, surpassing that of humans (1).

The above is a very simplistic description of the way neural networks operate; computer scientists involved in the use of neural networks are constantly improving their performance. Neural networks are still in relatively early days of development, and already there are many different neural network models to choose from, some better at particular problem types compared to others.

An important distinguisher in neural networks compared to “regular” programming is that the neural network can be relatively easily tuned to perform better over time, as well as “learning” from more and more data. A “regular” computer program needs to be manually reprogrammed as requirements change, again requiring someone to describe exactly what is required, and understand all the implications of that change throughout the system.

Machine learning has been applied in the last few years, with great affect, in the following areas:

• Image / Facial recognition – ever thought about how the image search feature of Google Images, or the speedy face tag suggestions by Facebook upon upload of a photo, have become so good? A person wanted for an alleged crime in China was picked up by security cameras in about 10 minutes of the wanted person entering a concert earlier this month (3).
  
  
• Navigation & self-driving cars – being able to respond to incoming information, such as what other road users are doing around you, is essential for solving the problem of self-driving cars. The amount of technology involved in an autonomous car is awesome – and it needs to be given the life and death involved. “Even if it will take some time for fully autonomous vehicles to hit the market, AI is already transforming the inside of a car.” It is predicted that AI will first bring to our cars a host of so called “guardian-angel” type features to reduce the likelihood of accidents (11).
• Speech recognition – in the last few years speech recognition (at least for native English speakers) has become very accurate, requiring very little training for a particular person. I now control my mobile phone using voice on a regular basis, because talking to my phone is much faster than typing – apparently 3 times faster according to a study by Standford University (4). Google’s latest speech-to-text system, called Tacotron 2, will add inflection to words based on punctuation to further improve understanding (5) and making it even more human-like when it is reading text to you, or responding with an answer to a question. Speech recognition in devices such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa are making simple tasks much easier. The article entitled “Amazon Echo has transformed the way I live in my apartment – here are my 19 favourite features” shows how speech recognition is being used for hands-free computer assistance in a simple home context (9). Applications of this technology are vast and life-changing for those who don’t have free hands (e.g. a surgeon at work) or are not able to type.
• Prediction – more quickly and accurately diagnosing a current situation or predicting that a current set of information is an indicator of a future state e.g. in diagnosing disease, predicting financial market movements, identifying criminal behaviour such as insurance or banking fraud (13). The ability of a neural network to process vast amounts of data quickly, and build its own conclusions with regard to the impact of one factor on another (learn) is already helping doctors to more accurately diagnose conditions such as heart disease (12). Reducing the acceptable level of inaccuracy in medical diagnosis will lead to much better patient outcomes and reduce the cost of healthcare to our ageing population.
• Playing games – a lot of AI research uses games to work out how to train a computer to learn. (8) From time to time I play an online version of the Settlers of Catan board game; when players leave the game (ostensibly because they have lost internet connection … usually it’s when they are losing!), you get the option to continue to game and have AI finish it on their behalf. It amuses me that I find myself, and others, immediately ganging up on the AI player. I mean, they won’t care if you make their game difficult – they’re a robot after all! It was actually the success of a computer to beat the best human players of the hardest game we play that heralded the success of artificial intelligence, and made the world take notice of its capabilities (14). “In the course of winning, [the robot] somehow taught the world completely new knowledge about perhaps the most studied and contemplated game in history.”

But, will the rise of artificial intelligence take away our jobs? Some say yes, others say no (6), but they all say that the new jobs created due to artificial intelligence will be different to current roles, and require different skills (7).

Worse than job loss, will AI cause a computer vs human war or lead to our extinction? Elon Musk is well known for his warnings against AI. It could be viewed that the pressure he has applied to the technology industry helped to lead to an agreement that the technology giants will only use AI for good (10).

I don’t believe that AI will ever result in a computer takeover of the world, because there is more that makes humans different from other animals … not just our ability to think. Reproducing just our ability to think, learn and make decisions, even in a super-human way, does not make a computer human. The capacity for machine learning / deep learning to significantly improve our lives, particularly in the areas of health and solving some of our most challenging problems, is exciting. However, I believe that it is right to be cautious; to move ahead with the knowledge that machine learning could also be used for harmful purposes. Computers can also “learn” the negative elements of humanity (15).

Business owners, innovators and leaders should consider how machine learning might be harnessed for your organisation in order to provide better value, predict more accurately, respond more quickly, or make break-throughs in knowledge in your problem domain. Let’s harness artificial intelligence for good! Read more about “How Business (big and small) can Harness Artificial Intelligence“.

References:
(1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/12/08/what-is-the-difference-between-deep-learning-machine-learning-and-ai/#4cc961d726cf
(2) https://hbr.org/cover-story/2017/07/the-business-of-artificial-intelligence
(3) http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-17/chinese-man-caught-by-facial-recognition-arrested-at-concert/9668608
(4) http://hci.stanford.edu/research/speech/index.html
(5) https://qz.com/1165775/googles-voice-generating-ai-is-now-indistinguishable-from-humans/
(6) http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-09/artificial-intelligence-automation-jobs-of-the-future/8786962
(7) http://www.digitalistmag.com/iot/2017/11/29/artificial-intelligence-future-of-jobs-05585290
(8) https://www.businessinsider.com.au/qbert-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-2018-2
(9) https://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-echo-features-tips-tricks-2018-2
(10) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x
(11) http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/ai-tipping-scales-development-self-driving-cars/
(12) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/03/artificial-intelligence-diagnose-heart-disease/
(13) http://bigdata-madesimple.com/artificial-intelligence-influencing-financial-markets/
(14) https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/
(15) https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist

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In the last year or so, due to the increased use of online chat, including Facebook Messenger and Slack, chatbots have become much more common. Chatbots are computer programs which interact with a customer in response to information he/she types into a chat tool / instant message program. The increased use of chatbots has lead to maturing of the tools to create chatbots, providing an opportunity for your business to utilise bots not just to provide faster help for customers with problems, but also to support sales enquiries.

Why would a customer be willing to interact with a bot?

The prime benefit for a customer is to get their problem solved or question answered more quickly. No matter how many people are added to a customer service team, there will always be times of peak enquiry where you have to wait to talk to a human.

Why wouldn’t a customer want to use a bot?

The most likely reason people would rather talk to a human is because they feel that it is harder to get their problem across to the computer, and because of that, it’s a more frustrating process and less likely to result in a satisfactory answer compared to talking to a person, whether by chat or by voice.

What to do?

To overcome the hesitation of people to use chat bots, several strategies have been used in the past including:

1. Forcing users to first use the bot – Making the first interaction/s or all interactions in your online chat tool orchestrated by the bot, and not accessible by a human, with the option after a period of time attempting to solve the problem, pointing the customer to way to get to other support options. A similar strategy was used in the past with knowledge base functionality, whereby a person submitting a support request via a form was directed to first search the knowledge base, and only then after searching, were they given the option to submit a question.
2. Pretending to be human – giving the bot human qualities, like attempting personality and humour, and giving them a human-like avatar or photo.

Neither of these strategies are very successful. People know when they are talking to a person, so trying to pretend otherwise can be felt as offensive to the intellect. Forcing people to use a bot first, again adds to the frustration of getting a result.

I believe that both chat and bots have their place in the provision of customer service. If I can get further information about a product I am considering via online chat, I am more likely to buy. It’s great knowing that I can just jump onto a chat within a website or web application, ask a question, and get an answer without having to dial up, sit in a telephone queue, and finally get through to a person. If on the way to getting my chat question answered, a bot steps in to try and help me get my solution more quickly, then I’m fine with that too, as long as I can differentiate the two types of assistance, and I can choose to ignore the advice of the bot and still get to chat to a real person, even if that takes longer.

Chatbots are great to help organisations provide 24/7 support, attempting to answer the question when an operator isn’t available, but allowing a person to take over the enquiry when the next support shift starts.

Steps to Creating a Useful Bot

When a human provides customer service the first step is to understand the enquirer’s problem. If they have heard the problem before, a proficient customer service operator can very quickly rectify the problem or provide the right guidance to the customer. Understanding the problem, of course, relies on the customer describing the problem in a way that’s understandable by the customer service person. And therein lies the difficulty. People describe the same problem in a myriad ways because they don’t always understand the nature of the problem themselves.

Take someone who has forgotten their password as an example. Whilst you may think most people would understand how to describe that in the fewest number of words, those who are less technically savvy might not realise that’s their problem. They may instead report that as “I can no longer login to your system”. In such a situation, a human being knows to quickly ask questions based on the statements made by the customer, and will glean clues from their tone and manner and the way they say those words. The customer service person could ask “okay, did you type in your username and password?” or they might say “when was the last time you logged in?” The answers provided by the customer will allow the support person to discover the root cause of the caller’s issue. If a bot is to determine the cause of a customer’s problem and the best solution, it needs to be able to interact with the customer and know the right questions to ask based on the way that a person communicates the problem. This is the challenge of programming a bot.

Step 1: Choose the Most Common Problems

Because it is challenging to program around the issues that people have, the first step when creating a new bot is to choose the most common problems or most frequently asked questions, that your customer service team currently deal with. Issues such as forgetting your password are unlikely to be the most common problems reported to your team, as such issues are likely already made easy for the customer to solve on their own. However, there will be issues that occur over and over, or questions raised on a regular basis, that you will be able to identify and solve, even if that is by pointing the customer to the right help article. Look for common categories of problems, as well specific issues and questions that re-occur.

Step 2: Document how people describe the problem

In order to program a bot to assist customers with a particular problem, you need to identify all the common ways that a person may describe the same problem. That’s when they actually know what the problem is. For example for those who realise that they have forgotten their password, there are still many different ways that a person may say that. They may say “I don’t know my password”. Or “I have forgotten my password”. Or “I have forgotten my login details”. Or “I don’t know what my password is”. Or “I need a new password”. Or “I have lost my password”. Or “Please reset my password”. These may not sound that different to a human, but to a simple computer program, they have similarities but they are all different.

You are likely to find that the one statement by a customer could actually require different solutions depending on their answers to other questions. Back to our password problem, if a user says “I can’t login” then the next question might be “Have you forgotten your password?” if the answer is no, then the next question might be “Have you forgotten your username?” and may lead to yet further questions. If the answer is yes, then the answer may have reached the end of the logical decision tree, ready for the solution.

As you document the questions that may be asked in order to discover the actual problem, you are likely to identify other questions and problems that you can solve along the way. You will need to decide how much time you will spend on these other problems based on how common they are, but at the same time, you don’t want to leave the customer hanging.

Step 3: Determine how the bot will direct the customer in order to solve the problem, or answer the question

Once you’ve worked out all the different ways a support request could be phrased by a customer and the questions you need to ask to get to the root of the problem, then you need to work out how the bot should respond. In the case of a password reset being required you may then program the bot to provide the password reset link. A password reset is a very simple problem to solve. The most common problem for you maybe something much more complicated.

The solution could be one or more of: providing a link to a help article which explains how to carry out a task, suggesting a list of possible products that meet the customer’s requirements, providing a link to a step by step screen overlay guiding the user through solving a particular problem, or staying in the chat in order to wait for a human to help.

Step 4: Test

Having programmed your bot to handle some common problems, it is now really important to test it with customers. You will gather much information about how useful it is by looking at your customer’s interaction with it.

If you give your customers the ability to rate the support they received or the help article you delivered to them, they actually may not choose to rate you, but you should still be able to see if they then needed to ask another question, or the same question in a different way.

Step 5: Refine and Extend

You should expect to continue to build on the list of questions or ways that a customer can ask about a particular problem. Over time you will also find the problems that are coming out the other end and not solved by the bot become your new most common problems. As I mentioned not all customers will be comfortable chatting, or chatting with a bot, so multiple support options should be provided.

Where can I place my bot?

Chatbots can be added into your mobile app, web application or website, but also into your Facebook page, Slack and other chat tools that are being used by your business. Where you will place your bot will help you select the tools you use to build it.

If you need help working through the process of creating a bot for your organisation, we would be very pleased to help.

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Live chat has been around for many years, and is well documented as providing quicker and more convenient customer service, leading to happier customers, and website visitors more likely to make a first time and repeat purchase. With the more recent proliferation of Facebook Messenger and Slack and other chat tools for internal communication and collaboration, customers are more and more looking for chat options to solve their problems and get answers quickly.

We have been using an online chat tool within Enudge for a year now, and have also found it to provide greater opportunity for us to interact in a timely way with prospects, and has improved our client’s satisfaction.

There are two distinct ways that chat can be used to provide customer service:

1. Real people ready to chat online to solve a person’s problems.
2. Bots – computer programs which, at their most sophisticated, respond to natural language questions to provide humans with the answers they seek, without the need for a human

Having real people responding to customer enquiries via online chat can be more efficient and effective than dealing with phone calls in the following ways:

• customer service personnel can often deal with multiple enquiries at a time, saving on-hold wait time for the customer
• the customer can submit their question, and leave their screen at the place of their question if they do have to wait, and continue on with other things without having a phone call tieing up their phone line
• if a customer service operator doesn’t respond in a certain period of time, chat tools can often be configured to request contact details to follow the person up at a later time
• providing customer support in writing avoids issues of difficulty with spoken accents and poor VoIP lines

Online chat tools also provide a range of other features over call centres:

• build a knowledge base of responses over time
• easier access to data, such as common questions, for the full customer support team and management
• ability to easily hand more difficult questions over to a specialist support person, with full details of the response immediately available
• bots contained within some chat tools can utilise a knowledge base to provide suggested answers to the customer’s question based on previous answers, thus providing the solution more quickly
• allow customer service people to more easily work remotely

There are numerous chat solutions available for adding chat to your website, web application, or mobile app. Many of these work across both website and mobile apps, allowing you to easily co-ordinate responses across all channels. The tool you choose will depend on the functionality that you require, and the platform in which it needs to operate. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you would like our help to choose and implement chat.

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Despite threading and advanced searches added to newer versions of email clients, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of email threads that are a mile deep, and segregate discussions based on projects.

The implementation of Slack into Contactpoint has helped us to solve this problem by providing a way to organise conversations into what are called “channels”. You can create ‘open channels’ to post company wide announcements, which are available to all members of the company. More confidential or private messages that needs to be exchanged between team members of a particular project can be carried out in ‘private channels’ – this means Slack allows us to create channels for different projects, topics or conversations between certain team members of our organisation. Direct messages offered by Slack, are just quicker, shorter and better alternatives to email messages. We can get a quick message to each other without having to write on sticky notes, or craft a properly structured email.

Slack has also made it quite simple to search for that link to a great resource that someone in your team posted 3 weeks ago! Slack searches can be filtered – which allows you to search only in specific channels, or only in messages from a particular team member – and can be sorted.

File-sharing, one of the basic prerequisites of collaboration, is supported by Slack which allows you to share all kinds of files in a hassle free manner by drag-and-drop or from Google drive or DropBox. The shared files can also be searched through, or starred as a favourite for later / quicker reference. Paste the link for your Google Drive spreadsheets or DropBox file along with comments, and these files will be in sync and searchable instantly. That brings me to another great feature that makes Slack a one-stop platform for collaboration. Slack can be easily integrated with a large number of apps in the market – yet another way to have all your information in sync, as it allows centralised access to all your notifications. This has greatly reduced our effort and time in switching between different tools and apps, while checking notifications. Apart from Slack’s huge collection of pre-built integrations, Slack has known to be very flexible in allowing you to build your own integrations quite easily, thereby making it advantageous for large organisations as well. Imagine your IT team receiving notifications when a new Zendesk item is created, or your team receiving a notification when when your daily web traffic exceeds a certain number of visitors. Pretty cool, isn’t it?

Integration is what catapults Slack into a category all its own. The solution enables you to centralize all your notifications, from sales to tech support, social media and more, into one searchable place where your team can discuss and take action as required. We have built our own integration with Slack so that online chat enquiries from Enudge are immediately pushed to a particular Slack channel, helping the appropriate customer service staff to see the enquiries without delay, and then see the solutions in the same place.

Slack also provides you a companion – Slackbot – to remind you of a meeting, or even remind your colleague about lunch time! Whether you have a team member working remotely, or you are working alone, Slack serves as an excellent tool to increase your productivity, by allowing you to schedule reminders, meetings, or even setup video and screen-sharing calls.

With apps for Android, iOS and Windows, all the Contactpoint team are now well-connected, and our messages are with us, no matter where we are!

Slack, is being employed for similar reasons across many large corporations as well as small businesses. For example, Oracle recently introduced Slack organisation-wide. Other tools are available, and in fact we have used other online chat tools for many years prior to implementing Slack. However, with the ease of integration across platforms, and the many add-ons which can be easily installed, Slack has quickly provided many improvements for our organisation and ways of working.

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As we wrap up the last 2 weeks of 2017, we have been considering what we are likely to see in 2018 technology. You might like to mull over this with your mulled wine and Christmas pudding (or beer and BBQ). Better still; give it some thought as you carry out new year planning.

The Top 8 things we expect to see around online technologies during 2018:

1. Increased pressure on smaller online retailers. If you don’t provide a very niche product or experience, that is, if the products you are selling online have many competitors, then your customers are likely to migrate to the larger online retailers including Amazon. The winners will be those with the most products, with the more consistently lower price, providing an easy shopping experience, and fast low cost delivery.
2. Increased percentage of market share to smart phones running the Android operating system, particularly due to the uptake of Google pixel, but also lower cost Android smart phones.
3. Increased automation of homes using internet-connected devices due to the major marketing push of Google Home.
4. Increased integration between apps to make completing the jobs you need to get done even easier.
5. Increased specialisation of apps for niche markets, again with the intention of making it super easy for people carrying out a task in a well-defined category, to achieve that task as efficiently as possible.
6. Increased online shopping and therefore parcel delivery into homes; delivery costs paid by the consumer will continue to fall.
7. Increased use of Apple Pay and Android Pay as more and more people use their smart phones as their payment device.
8. Increased development of apps that utilise AI / machine learning, making decisions on behalf of organisations in order to more rapidly provide a personalised experience for individual app users.

Feel free to contribute your thoughts!

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