AI/ML

As an IT manager, you would have handled several roll-outs and migrations, streamlined legacy systems, and upgraded cybersecurity. And now AI is staring you in the face. How ready are you to build AI apps that your business needs? Do you have in-house skills to build and deploy AI apps? Whether you are building a customer service app or a marketing app, you can adopt a systematic approach to going about it. Here are 5 key steps to building effective AI apps for your organization. 1. Define exactly what you want from your app before starting to build one Businesses across industries have started to embrace the disruptive technology of AI for their everyday operations. Your competitors are likely deploying AI chatbots to provide 24/7 automated, intelligent, customer service. But before you start investing time and resources in building AI apps, you need to answer some key questions. What is the problem you’re trying to solve? Talk with your business’s leaders. Do you want to boost sales? Improve customer satisfaction score?  As a starting step, clearly define use cases. Next, define the desired end state for each use case. This will help you estimate how much effort is required, who to involve, and whether you have adequate resources. What are your competitors doing? Understand what your competitors are doing with their AI tools and for whom. And how can you innovate further on those ideas? And of course, you need to answer one important question – can you build AI apps in-house? Do you have the necessary skills and experience in your team to do this? Based on the use cases you have identified, will you require generative or predictive AI If you don’t have the skills internally like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, look for partners and ISVs for solutions and do a thorough comparison of their offers and capabilities. 2. Define the perimeter for ethics and security As an IT manager, security, privacy, and accuracy are not alien to you. But AI amplifies the challenges and raises many risks such as bias and toxicity. AI bias: Negative bias can be caused by algorithm error based on human prejudices or false assumptions. The consequence is an AI tool that works in unintended ways. Generative AI can propagate outputs based on errors and further amplify the problem. Toxicity: Abusive language and hurtful comments can appear in AI-generated outputs. Researchers have found that assuming certain personas can amplify the toxicity of the response. Before you start building your AI app, define trust and ethics parameters. Trusted AI should be empowering, and inclusive apart from being responsible and transparent. 3. Good data is the foundation of effective AI apps If you are building generative AI apps, your machine learning models will train on the data that is fed to them. AI machine learning models train on all kinds of data. And that data needs to be clean and free of redundancy. The more data your LLMs can be trained on, the better will be the output of your AI. 4. Choose the right technology for your AI app The technology you select for building your AI depends to a certain extent on your use case. If your app summarizes text, processes language, or a knowledge base, you will need an LLM. Over time, as the LLM learns more about your business and its data, it can make logical interpretations and draw conclusions. Building your own learning model can be expensive. You will need to hire data scientists and engineers with expertise in ML and NLP. While it is a lengthy cycle, if you do decide to take this route, once your team is ready you can take the help of libraries and toolkits and integrate them into your development. Generative AI platforms and libraries ML and DL platforms: Amazon SageMaker and Google Vertex AI have built-in libraries and tools to train your AI model and support multiple programming languages. NLP toolkits: If you are building chatbots or virtual assistants, SpaCy is a great NLP toolkit for Python enthusiasts. OpenAI allows you to customize their GPTs for your apps. Deep learning libraries: If you want to build apps for speech or image recognition, you can look at a deep learning library to find a framework for building, training, and deploying your apps. Open-source libraries such as PyTorch and MXNet can be used in combination depending on your use case. Computer vision libraries: If you want your app to analyze images or video, you can use open-source libraries such as OpenCV and TensorFlow. PyTorch is another option that can be helpful. Building AI apps with CRM data If you want to build customer-interfacing apps, you will need to leverage your customer data. And without all your data in one place, that’s hard to do. You need an enterprise-grade CRM like Salesforce to make your AI app work best for you. You can connect AI models to Salesforce Data Cloud without running into a wall. With the Model Builder (erstwhile called Einstein Studio), you can bring your own model into Salesforce. 5. Build AI apps and start deploying In a recent developers’ survey conducted by Salesforce, it was found that 70% of developers use or intend to use AI for development. The biggest benefit developers see is reduced development cycles. Try AI for code generation Whether you use AI or not for code generation, you can reduce development time with the Einstein 1 platform for Salesforce. Einstein for Developers understands natural language prompts to write code in seconds. The more precise your prompt, the better will be the quality of the code generated. Once the code is generated you can accept, revise, or reject it. Einstein for Developers uses a customized Large Language Model based on the open-source CodeGen AI model from Salesforce. Use an IDE to accelerate development A web-based integrated development environment (IDE) allows your teams to work from anywhere, anytime. You can modify and debug code and maintain source control in one place.  Code Builder, the new IDE from Salesforce is preloaded with frameworks, has built-in integration with Git, and is free for admins and developers. Salesforce also allows you to integrate other IDEs with it. Follow App Lifecycle Management and DevOps practices Building and launching great AI apps need solid processes across stages of app development, along with collaborative tools for developers, data scientists, testers, and project managers. Salesforce has inbuilt AI tools like Einstein for Developers and Prompt Builder to come to your aid. DevOps Center, available on the Einstein 1 platform, can help you to maintain version control, track changes and push your build for UAT and production. If you prefer working with your own tools for IDE, project management, and DevOps, you can bring them into the Salesforce environment. Connect with an AI expert today. With over a decade of experience as a Salesforce Consulting Partner, our experts are always available to guide you through the process and answer any questions you might have regarding the potential of AI in your business.

In the rapidly evolving business environment, it is essential for companies to utilize state-of-the-art technology to stay competitive. Nowadays, forward-thinking businesses are incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into their operations, particularly through the adoption of customer relationship management (CRM) software, to automate and enhance their CRM processes. Salesforce, a leading CRM platform, has consistently been a pioneer in innovation, especially in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI). Notably, Salesforce AI has transformed the way organizations handle their customer service processes. The integration of Salesforce and AI is more than just an augmentation. It has indeed opened new avenues in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Rather, it offers a smarter, efficient, and a highly custom-made customer interaction. To know more about Salesforce AI integration, businesses should consider partnering with a reliable Salesforce consulting partner. Salesforce and Generative AI: A Dynamic Relationship As a cloud-based platform, Salesforce is highly customizable and configurable and can be leveraged by organizations to meet their unique business needs by tailoring their services. By leveraging tools like Salesforce Flow, users can automate intricate business processes, create agile service experiences, while streamlining data management. The next phase of transformation will involve incorporating the capabilities of generative AI into Salesforce, a versatile platform using Einstein GPT. This integration holds the potential to transform the way businesses function and engage with their customers How to Leverage AI to Improve Customer Service? Listed below are ways how AI can help businesses provide better service to their customers:  Improved Customization: Utilizing AI will empower businesses to deliver personalized experiences by harnessing customer data and their preferences. This will pave way for tailored recommendations, quick support, and a deeper comprehension of customer requirements. Unified Omnichannel Support: AI-driven chatbots can integrate easily with several communication channels such social media, web chat and more. This guarantees uniform interactions across several platforms, offering customers a unified experience. Intelligent Automation: AI can be leveraged to automate repetitive and mundane tasks thereby saving a lot of time that can be used up by human agents to focus on more complex and strategic activities. This will boost productivity, quicken response times, and optimize cost for businesses. Sustained Learning and Development: AI systems will keep gathering insights from customer interactions, feedback, and real-time data, which in turn will foster continuous improvement. This continuing improvement will yield more precise responses, intelligent recommendations, and enhanced overall performance. What are the benefits of AI in customer service? AI in customer service offers several benefits that can improve the overall customer experience and streamline business operations. Some of the crucial advantages include: Increased Productivity: Leading IT players believe that AI can be adopted by organizations to serve their customers in a better way. Research conducted reveal that access to AI assistants and tools can increase productivity for support agents significantly.  Increased Efficiency: Carrying out tasks manually can be burdensome for service agents. This includes tasks such as navigating between different systems to access customer history, searching for relevant informative articles, sending field staffs to service locations, and manually inputting responses. These manual processes are usually prone to errors as they are executed by humans. The integration of AI in customer service can provide intelligent suggestions to service workers drawn from knowledge bases, and customer data. A more Personalized Interaction: When a customer interacts with a chatbot, artificial intelligence (AI) has the capability to retrieve vital details, such as the name of customer, location, account type, and language preferred. If the inquiry demands the involvement of a field service technician, AI can promptly convey all relevant information to the technician, allowing them to deliver tailored service as soon as they arrive on-site. Less Exhaustion and Enhanced Morale: AI empowers agents to do away with monotonous, time-intensive tasks, enabling them to focus on tasks that demand creative thinking, problem-solving, and intricate critical thinking. These activities significantly impact the overall customer experience. Consequently, it shouldn’t come as surprise that majority of IT leaders anticipate that generative AI will alleviate workload of teams, while reducing burnout. Scalability: AI systems can simultaneously handle a huge rush of customer queries making it simpler for businesses to scale their customer service operations without consistently increasing staffing levels. A Practical Service Experience: AI has the capability to draw information from contracts of customers, warranties, buying history, and marketing data. This ensures the identification of optimal actions for agents to pursue with customers, even post the conclusion of the service engagement. The future of AI in Customer Service: The future AI seems to be quite promising in the customer service industry. In the years to come, artificial intelligence is poised to gain prominence in workplaces given the ongoing advancements in technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). Besides handling routine tasks, these AI programs will offer significant insights into consumer behaviors and habits through big data analysis. Organizations can utilize this valuable data to optimize their return on investment in marketing strategies and branding initiatives. As technology evolves, AI is set to play a key role in uplifting customer experiences and boosting operational efficiency. Final Words: The fusion of AI and Salesforce is reshaping the CRM terrain, presenting matchless possibilities for organizations to elevate both their customer relationships, as well as their operational efficiencies. This integration when leveraged by businesses enables them to position themselves at the frontline of technological advancement, ensuring they stay competitive and in agreement to the ever-changing needs of their customers. In doing so, organizations can provide value to customers and stakeholders while future-proofing their operations in this quickly evolving digital era. Organizations should consider availing Salesforce implementation services if they wish to make the most of the integration of Salesforce and AI. 

According to Salesforce research, close to 90% of customers say that a business's overall experience is as important as its products or services. In today’s competitive landscape where companies are juggling between staffing shortages and overwhelmed resources, they need to be able to do more with less.  Customer expectations are at an all-time high, and given the plethora of options available to them, anything less than an exceptional experience will lead to customer churn. Automation and self-service technologies have given many businesses across industries a significant improvement in productivity, cost savings, and customer satisfaction. In 2021, Salesforce reported that customers using its Cloud products and self-service tools such as AI chatbots witnessed a 30% increase in customer satisfaction along with a 27% improvement in agent productivity. To meet this ever-growing demand, Salesforce launched Virtual Assistant – an Einstein-powered chatbot solution built specifically for financial services businesses to automate routine customer requests faster across popular digital channels like SMS or messaging platforms. This enables agents to focus on complex cases while chatbots can promptly resolve routine service requests, such as updating credit card information, renewing subscriptions, making payments, modifying subscription plans, and more. Virtual Assistant offers multilingual support, allowing businesses to use a single chatbot across multiple geographic regions regardless of their native language. And in the future, Einstein-powered Virtual Assistants will automatically create support articles based on customer conversations. Salesforce Chatbots for financial services come with pre-built bot templates, leading to faster setup and deployment. They can streamline support and assist agents with routine questions such as “How do I calculate my tax?” or “How do I upgrade my insurance plan?” With Virtual Assistant, financial services companies can re-direct thousands of customer calls to the Salesforce Chatbot leading to significant cost savings. Salesforce Chatbots can handle thousands of concurrent conversations for queries such as loan application status, product information, insurance premium renewal, claim filing, technical support, and more, freeing up dozens of front-line agents. Salesforce Chatbots improve the customer experience by enabling seamless self-service for simple tasks, thereby significantly reducing wait times to speak with an agent. The rewards of embracing self-service technology can be substantial, and businesses need to leverage technology to scale quickly and deliver efficient customer service. Features of Salesforce ChatBots Salesforce Chatbots powered by Einstein are equipped with advanced features to solve customer issues by replying to their questions and understanding their behavior to evolve continuously. Here are some stand-out features of Salesforce Chatbots that you should be aware of before you hire a Salesforce Development Partner for its implementation. Natural Language Processing (NLP) Salesforce Chatbots use NLP to understand customer intent and provide relevant answers. This makes bot interactions more natural for customers. Multi-Channel Support Salesforce Chatbots can be deployed on multiple channels such as mobile apps, websites, online stores, social media pages, and on popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp and SMS. This allows customers the convenience and flexibility to interact with businesses on their preferred channels whenever they want. Personalization Salesforce Chatbots can personalize responses based on customer data, their preferences, past purchases, and browsing behavior, making every interaction more relevant and meaningful. Contextual Conversations Salesforce Chatbots can understand and maintain context across multiple conversations regardless of the channel, thereby providing more accurate and relevant responses to customer queries. Integration with Salesforce Salesforce Chatbots are built on the world’s leading CRM platform, allowing for seamless integration with other Salesforce cloud products. With Salesforce Chatbots, managing customer data has never been easier. Analytics and Insights With Salesforce Chatbots, businesses can get valuable insights into customer behavior. By analyzing customer interactions, Salesforce Chatbots can help businesses identify areas for improvement to enhance the customer experience. Continuous Learning Salesforce Chatbots leverage machine learning algorithms to learn continuously from every interaction and better their responses over time, improving the accuracy and relevance of responses as they gain more experience. Here are some generic features of Salesforce Chatbots. Re-direct bot conversations to human agents for complex customer queries. Understand the intent of customer queries. Rapid response times. Understand customer input and recognize errors. Available 24/7. Lead generation – collect customer data and qualify leads for sales teams. Scale customer service with personalized automation and connected customer data According to Salesforce, new features in Financial Services Cloud such as proactive service and call deflection will enable financial services firms to reduce operating expenses while delivering exceptional customer service experiences: In 2021, Salesforce customers reported a 27% increase in case resolution with self-service automation and AI-powered Chatbots (Virtual Assistant). Salesforce Chatbots automate routine request resolution across popular messaging channels such as SMS and WhatsApp, so agents can spend more time on cases that necessitate human intervention. With Customer Service Coordination, agents can collaborate in Slack to fast-track case resolution. With automated workflows and custom Chatbots, Customer Service Coordination gathers customer data and generates alerts in a central Slack channel allowing teams to respond to critical incidents faster like fraud incidents, executing time-sensitive trades, and claims processing. With the Customer Data Platform, financial services marketing teams can unify customer data from multiple sources with a point-and-click interface. This enables marketing teams to engage with customers across multiple channels such as web, email, mobile, and social media in a far more personalized way.  With Salesforce Chatbots, enhanced Insights, and Data Actions, one-on-one advisor interactions and transactions can be triggered in real time. A unified console with actionable insights and workflows for faster service New features in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud include AI-powered dashboards and Chatbots to deliver key insights: With Intelligent Agent Desktop, agents can get access to deeper customer insights from right within the console page. With Customer Identity Verification, agents can reduce the risk of fraud, and with Customer Record Alerts, Chatbots can serve up issues that customers may not be aware of when they initiate a conversation. With Analytics for Financial Services, financial services businesses can interpret customer data with insights for faster and better decision-making, eventually delivering more revenue, and strengthening customer engagement. Girikon has been a Salesforce Consulting Partner for over a decade providing unique and scalable solutions for the financial services industry. We have the necessary expertise in-house to deliver tailored experiences to every customer through self-service, automation, and AI to improve efficiency across your business. Contact us today to learn more about how Salesforce Chatbots can transform your financial services business.

In today’s increasingly connected world, data is the point on which the entire business world pivots. We are generating unimaginable amounts of data every day. And locked within these humongous stores of data are the insights that businesses can use to better understand themselves and more importantly their customers. To remain competitive, businesses need to do more than just collect data. They need to be able to capture and analyse that data and convert it into actionable insights in real time to succeed. Enter Salesforce Einstein Analytics Here are 40 reasons why Einstein Analytics is the no. 1 choice when it comes to data analytics for your business. Hit the Ground Running. Work with a someone you can trust: Enjoy peace of mind knowing that you are working with the world’s no 1 CRM platform. Cust Costs: Reduce operating costs by using a pay as you use cloud-based analytics platform. Say goodbye to expensive installation or maintenance costs, and onsite hardware. Get going quickly: Leverage powerful analytics within minutes, thanks to out of the box solutions. Cut out the fluff: Pay only for the features you use. Salesforce Einstein Analytics comes with flexible usage models, so you always have the tools you need, at a price that suits your budget. Customise your solution: Salesforce Einstein Analytics is fully customisable and can be easily tailored for your business. With Einstein Analytics, you can set up the solution that works best for you. Built-in support: Salesforce Einstein Analytics comes with comprehensive guides, tutorials, videos, and multiple support options across channels. Integrate your data: No need to depend on your IT teams to upgrade your software for data analysis. Einstein Analytics seamlessly integrates analytics tools with every application and system, giving you a coherent, integrated, easy-to-use solution that gives you faster results. Connect Across Departments. Integrate seamlessly with the entire Salesforce platform: Salesforce Einstein Analytics integrates perfectly with all Salesforce products such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud etc giving every user easy access to unified customer data. Collaborate: Collaborate across sales, service, marketing, and other teams with cloud-based data analytics that can be accessed from anywhere across any device. Unify your goals: Give your teams a unified vision and objectives they can strive for, with data that is insightful, reliable, and actionable. Generate stunning visuals: Use built-in tools to convert data into stunning insightful reports and dashboards for presentations. Get conversational: Leverage social media technology to enhance team communication, with Chatter for Einstein Analytics. Put it in context: Get consistent views across departments with embedded reports and dashboards. Be available always: Work on your data over any device, from anywhere on the planet. Analyse Your Business. Monitor team performance: Leverage real-time reports to view team performance and identify trouble areas early and optimize. Access KPIs: Discover key performance indicators across your organisation to ensure you do not deviate from the path of success. Track call-center efficiency: See customer support trends across channels right on your dashboard and make informed decisions to enhance the customer service experience. Empower teams to self analyse: Give your teams the power to measure their own performance and set new performance benchmarks. Find the Key to Sales Success. See the big picture: Explore all data in a unified dashboard. Get a 360 degree snapshot of the health of your business. Eliminate borders: Get a unified view of your business across geographies, products, customer segments and time periods, for a true picture of how your business is performing. Predict the future: View historical trends to intelligently forecast which strategies are most likely to work and which leads are the most promising. Reduce customer churn: Get detailed insights into each and every customer, deliver personalised customer experiences and ensure customer loyalty and retention. Prioritise leads: Analyse your leads to assess the likelihood of their conversion and focus on the most promising ones. Evaluate your lead sources: Discover which sources are the most productive, so you can focus your efforts where it pays off the most. Enhance the customer experience: Resolve issues and monitor customer satisfaction directly from within Salesforce, and optimise. Market Smarter. Dive deeper: Go deep into your marketing data and get a detailed analysis of funnels, campaigns, conversion rates and more across channels. Present the right message: Create messaging to attract your target audience, and get valuable insight into that audience. Be your own data analyst: Marketing data analysis is too precious to hand over to someone else. With easy-to-use tools and visually compelling reports, become your own marketing analyst. Take instant action: Act in real time with up-to-the-minute marketing data from unified dashboards. Specialize in B2B marketing: Leverage the power of unique and effective B2B marketing tools in Salesforce to stay ahead of the competition. Understand the brand experience: Analyze data to see what your customers see, and optimize the customer experience. Optimise Service. Set your priorities: Prioritise open cases with service manager, and give your teams a clear view of customers that need their attention. Evaluate your accounts: Identify accounts with the highest number of cases and highest opportunity. Connect with your agents: Get a complete view of agents and their cases, and assign notifications based on configurable conditions. Review your service backlog: Compare data and identify service trends over time to assess how service levels compare across years. Revolutionise Analytics for Your Organization. Integrate with third-party apps: Leverage advanced integration options for any third-party application and extend your analytics beyond Salesforce. Optimise your pipelines: Leverage data-driven strategies to manage your pipelines. Automate analysis: Salesforce Einstein AI is designed to automatically analyse millions of data combinations for informed actions. Data security: Share data across devices securely using the cloud platform security services trusted by over 150,000 businesses worldwide. Push the limits: Extend your analytics abilities with custom-made apps or find the right ready-made app for your specific analytics needs on the Salesforce AppExchange. Everyday, we are producing mind-bogglingly huge amounts of data. Businesses need to use that data as a foundation for data analytics, to understand themselves and their customer better, to drive enhanced customer experiences. Girikon is a Salesforce Consulting Company and has helped businesses across the globe achieve success on the Customer 360 platform. To know more about how you can turn your data into intelligent actionable insights with Salesforce Einstein Analytics, contact us today.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI) is the latest next generation technology. Generative AI tools have made it very easy for employees and professionals to compose and refine emails, fine tune presentations and reports, write code, put together social media campaigns, and fast track customer service interactions. But not everyone is able to maximize its full potential. More often than not it comes down to the prompt, the statements or questions you feed into a Generative AI tool. The better your prompts, the better will be the Generative AI response. The key takeaway If you want to get the most out of Generative AI and the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models that generate conversational language, you might want to get your hands dirty in prompt engineering. This gives the Generative AI model clearer details for what you want instead of being ambiguous. Generative AI is getting smarter as you read this, but it cannot read your mind. It can only give you responses based on its understanding of the prompt you give it. So be specific. GPT works better when the prompt is longer. The prompt, which is the question you are asking the tool, needs to be precise and contextual for it to generate the right response. And that’s the key to unlocking the full potential of Generative AI. What you need to know When writing a prompt, approach the tool like you’re having a normal day to day conversation with a colleague. Use clear language and descriptions.  The devil is in the detail. The Generative AI tools will work better for you if your prompts are precise and detailed. You can have an interactive conversation with your Generative AI tool and dive deeper into what you’re looking for. These following tips would be helpful when writing prompts for Generative AI: Write clearly and concisely so your Generative AI tool understands your specific request. Write linguistically correct, complete sentences with descriptive words, that clearly describes what you’re looking for. For precise responses, ask specific questions, and avoid questions that offer a yes/no response. Add context to your prompt. Explain what is it that you wish to achieve and define your target audience. Engage in a back-and-forth conversation. Follow up the initial response with further questions to go deeper and get even more specific and relevant responses.  What is prompt engineering? Prompt engineering is the art of asking clear, descriptive questions or providing detailed information to Generative AI tools, such as a GPT tool or chatbot, to fetch the best results. With the meteoric rise in adoption of Generative AI tools for personal as well as business use, effective prompt engineering skills can help you improve the efficacy of these generative AI tools. The more specific and descriptive your prompt, the better the AI generated results. And you can get creative like you would ask an expert of the subject of your enquiry. For instance, you can even ask the Generative AI tool to reply as someone well known, like Isaac Newton, to get a response from that individual’s point of view. Generative AI uncovers information from piles of data available on the internet. However, narrowing down your query by providing specific questions or instructions in your prompt and adding context will deliver better results. So get creative. Whether you are an expert prompt engineer or a novice in generative AI, it would be prudent to follow these 6 tips mentioned below to get the most from this disruptive technology. Be specific: For example, instead of writing, “Create a social media campaign,” which is a very generic instruction, you can write, “Create a social media campaign for an ecommerce website that sells sports apparel for tennis fans of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.” Engage conversationally: Generative AI may not understand localized dialect or colloquial language. Imagine you are speaking to a co-worker, not a computer. Use open-ended questions: Avoid question with binary responses like a yes/no response.  These prompts limit the Generative AI’s ability to surface detailed, contextual information. Set a persona: Get creative. Ask the Generative AI tool to give answers from the point of view of a public figure (past or present) like Isaac Newton or Christine Amanpour depending on the subject you want to ask about. In fact, you can even define a specific role for specific answers like an operations manager or lawyer.   Define your audience and channel: Specify in your prompt whether you are writing for millennials or GenX. Specify where the audience is going to read it – such as on a social media platform, a blog post, or on website. Ask follow-up questions: The beauty of Generative AI is that you can engage in a back-and-forth conversation with it while maintaining context. It’s akin to speaking with a human. Except that it’s not. If you are not happy with the initial response, you can ask follow-up questions to get more specific responses. This technique is sometimes referred to as “prompt chaining,” where you split your prompts sequentially to get more specific and tailored answers and use answers from one prompt to draw out the next. Use prompt engineering effectively for Generative AI products to work with you and not against you Generative AI tools are new and evolving as you read this. They are not perfect and they’re definitely not human. They are designed to make you feel like you’re having a conversation with a human on the other side, but in reality, it’s a back-and-forth with a computer that has access to heaps of data. Keep these points in mind during your Generative AI prompt writing and subsequent usage of the responses: Generative AI is not always factual. Sometimes it makes up answers, so ensure that you verify what you get. Avoid any copyright infringements. Ensure that what your Generative AI tool gives you isn’t plagiarized from somewhere. Generative AI tools do not understand nuance, local dialects and subtlety. They are not from your neighbourhood. Ensure that your prompts are as specific and clear as possible. Generative AI is not always completely accurate. It’s a fundamental reality of this technology and as a user you need to ensure that you verify any factual data or information before publishing it. Generative AI is already creating a revolution in CRM applications. Girikon is a Certified Salesforce Implementation Partner with a global delivery model. To know more about how Generative AI can work for you, connect with an expert today.

COVID has changed the way we live. Today, we spend most of our time online, looking for products and services. For marketing professionals, this translates into a great opportunity to stay connected with their audience in today’s pandemic context. But there is a catch. Customers are overwhelmed with digital information, and they are interacting with brands across multiple channels with so many options available. Which means not every interaction is attracting engagement. Today, engaging with customers is a whole new ball game. It requires faster and precise decision making about what needs to be communicated, how it needs to be communicated, when and where. The need of the hour is to deliver relevant messaging that conveys a deep understanding of the customer context. AI-driven solutions, with their ability to make intelligent recommendations, can help marketing teams make the right decisions, in quick time. They can also help marketing teams to launch contextual campaigns with personalised communication with their audience, achieving better engagement levels and enhanced customer experiences. So what exactly is AI Marketing? AI marketing is based on technology that uses machine learning algorithms to make automated decisions based on data aggregation and its analysis, along with analysing market trends and data that may impact marketing initiatives. Typically, AI technology is used in digital marketing activities where speed is critical. AI-powered marketing solutions use data to understand the best fit ways to communicate with your audience, and deliver personalised messaging at the right time, on the right channel without intervention from marketers, thereby ensuring a high level of efficiency. Digital marketers across the world today use AI to augment the efficacy of their efforts or to perform more complex tasks that would otherwise consume huge amount of time or resources. Here’s a look at how AI-powered solutions are transforming the marketing game: 1.  Smarter segmentation for enhanced audience discovery Understanding the customer is the foundation of today’s digital marketing strategy. AI-powered solutions can intelligently segment your audience. By scouring hundreds of data points across multiple marketing campaigns, AI-powered solutions can help marketers discover new sub-segments. Let’s look at an example. An outdoor hiking gear brand has an audience segment of “trekkers”. AI reveals to marketers that there are two categories in this segment – leisure trekkers and tech-savvy trekkers. With these insights, they customize their product recommendations based on the segment they are targeting. For example, leisure trekkers are shown apparel and accessories, and tech-savvy trekkers are shown the latest navigation devices or solar chargers. Identifying the right segment helps marketing teams deliver hyper-personalised marketing messages. Marketing solutions powered by AI technology can reveal unique customer traits within a segment. This can then be used by marketers to customize the marketing content and drive more engaging interactions. 2.  Accurate predictions to improve lead conversion Before the digital revolution, marketers relied on their experience and “gut-feel” to arrive at marketing decisions. AI-powered marketing solutions eliminate the guesswork by surfacing accurate, data-driven predictions and recommendations. These predictions allow marketing teams to personalise every customer journey and improving lead conversion through the marketing funnel. Let’s look at Einstein Engagement Scoring. This AI-powered feature of Marketing Cloud applies machine learning algorithms on customer data to arrive at a score for a company's email subscribers. The score tell you how likely each subscriber is to engage with your email campaigns, and eventually, to convert. The feature can also tell you the likelihood of each subscriber opening an email, click the links within the email body, or to un-subscribe. Marketers can use these AI powered predictions to build more tailored customer journeys. For instance, customers with a low likelihood of opening emails can be targeted through social media and mobile messaging. 3.  Personalised messaging across channels to drive engagement AI algorithms can use data such as browsing history, age, and recent interaction history with a brand to serve up a campaign landing page that is most likely to resonate with the subscriber. The same applies in advertising. The algorithm can use that data and serve up the right content for an ad in real time based on the user’s profile. This allows marketing teams run tailored ad campaigns that are relevant and better targeted at users, thus boosting ROI. With the evolution of technology, today’s AI-powered marketing solutions can be further targeted to help marketing teams deliver just the right amount of content. For example, Marketing Cloud Einstein has a feature called Engagement Frequency. It tells you the just the right number of emails to send out to customers and prospects for brand recall without being perceived as spam. Likewise, it also tells you which subscribers are being left out or being contacted too often. Based on this intelligence, marketing teams can customize their messaging strategy for improved customer engagement. In fact, AI-powered solutions can also tell you if a social media strategy would be a better bet than an email marketing campaign. Customers value the experience as much as the product and service, and brands will need to deliver personalised messaging across channels to stay ahead of the curve. AI can take your marketing team's understanding of your customers to the next level. Conclusion Marketing teams across industries are rapidly adopting intelligent technology solutions to improve overall operational efficiency and the customer experience and drive growth. This need for customer intelligence has ushered in a new era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) marketing solutions. With these AI-powered marketing solutions, marketing teams can get a deeper and nuanced understanding of their audience. The AI-powered insights can help marketing teams to drive conversions at scale. Regardless of the size of your marketing team, AI-powered marketing technology can help improve productivity, boost ROI, improve organizational efficiency, all while processing heaps of data your team may not have the bandwidth to deal with. If you are new to AI, even your first small step into AI-marketing like using a machine learning program to draft an email subject line and a greeting for your upcoming marketing campaign, can keep your brand ahead of the curve. It’s a small but significant step towards an AI-powered future. As a Gold Salesforce Consulting Partner, Girikon is in a great position to help you leverage the powerful technology of the World’s No1 CRM platform. To know more about how your marketing teams can use Einstein for Marketing Cloud to deliver personalised, contextual marketing campaigns, contact us today.

Imagine a scenario where a customer calls customer support only to navigate through multiple options and then being put on hold for several minutes before getting through to an agent. Only to be put on hold again as they look for answers to your problem. We’ve all had to deal with this at some point. And this is only half the story. Imagine being asked the same question over a hundred times a day by different customers. And not knowing answers to most of those questions. That’s what customer service teams have to deal with on a daily basis. In a world of fickle customer loyalty, how do businesses deliver excellent customer service? Disruptive technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) may have the answer. Let us look at 10 ways in which AI can enhance the customer experience. 1. Chatbots Customer service reps today have to deal with a large number of calls on any given day. And on top of that there’s performance pressure to reduce the average resolution time. Enter Chatbots. Not only can chatbots provide quick answers in real-time, they can also reduce the case load on human agents by resolving common customer queries quickly. 2. Cost reduction Chatbots can help businesses trim customer service costs significantly by accelerating response times, freeing up agents to work on more complex cases, and resolving a very high % of routine customer queries automatically. A great example of this is call automation, which combines machine learning and voice recognition to augment existing IVR systems while delivering a significant cost reduction as compared to human agent assisted set ups. 3. Round-the-clock support Customers want service delivered at the time and on the channel of their choice. Businesses must be available at all times to customers to support them. Automated customer service makes that possible. It allows enterprises to deliver 24/7 customer service and resolve cases as soon as they come to light. This means customers don’t have to wait for long periods for a response. Prompt case resolution improves customer satisfaction and builds trust, loyalty and brand reputation. 4. Improved human interactions with customers AI can play a key role in supporting human interactions with customers. Two of the most common ways in which AI is supporting customer service is through AI-driven messaging and email tagging. AI-driven messaging allows service reps to handle a big chunk of cases with chatbot assistants. With AI-driven email tagging, service reps don’t have to read every customer email. AI-powered tools can scan and tag emails, and direct them to the right inbox. This frees up time for service reps so they can work on more complex tasks that necessitate human intervention. 5. Personalized experiences According to Salesforce, 72% of customers want to be able to solve service issues by themselves. AI technology can play a significant role in enabling customers to find what they are looking for more efficiently. AI analyzes customer data and key metrics, and makes intelligent recommendations on products or services to customers.  AI is always working in the background, analyzing every incoming piece of data, and suggests best fit content to customers. AI enables service reps to have a better understanding of customers, so they can send relevant content to them at the right time on their preferred channel. As a result, customers are able to find what they are looking for without having to call customer service. 6. Gathering data AI-powered technology simplifies data aggregation and serves a unified customer snapshot. Earlier, AI relied on existing customer data that was fed manually. Today however, things are far more advanced. Today’s AI-powered solutions proactively request data automatically. They can easily analyze patterns in behaviour, understand customer sentiment and quickly respond to their needs. 7. Predictive insights It is critical for businesses to deliver engaging and personalised experiences to customers.  AI powered personalization makes it easy for businesses to serve up tailored products or services to customers. Many businesses around the world that have integrated AI technology into their systems to deliver relevant information to customer, have seen significant improvement in their customer satisfaction scores. This improves brand reputation and builds loyalty. 8. Deeper insights from customer data In the early days, data mining was tedious and time-consuming. Today with AI-powered tools and solutions, huge amounts of data can be captured and analysed faster than ever, to get deeper customer insight, opening up new market segments and opportunities for brands. With AI, businesses can capture every customer action, uncover their interests, and apply these insights to drive targeted campaigns. AI can help businesses get faster results, get deeper insight, and eliminate human error and bias. And freed up human resources can be utilized for more complex tasks. 9. Assisting customers to drive decision making In today’s COVID 19 context, customers spend a lot more time online. They engage with brands across devices, and personalization across every touchpoint becomes all the more critical to assist customers in making the right decision. AI-powered assistants respond to customer queries in real time, and with a deeper insight on customers, are able to serve up intelligent recommendations to accelerate decision making. This frees up agent time and they can focus on more pressing tasks. In case of service requests when the conversation between a chatbot and a customer becomes complex, the interactions is automatically handed over to a human agent with a snapshot of the entire interaction history. AI powered solutions can sense behaviour patterns based on which they can make smart predictions. 10. Simplified task management One huge advantage of customer service chatbots is that you need only one chatbot to handle literally thousands of concurrent customers. Imagine the amount of agent time that can be freed up to resolve routine issues like serving up expected delivery date of a product they ordered or when is their insurance renewal due. This has transformed the relationship between brands and customers. How many times have you hung up on the customer support line because you lost your patience wating for an answer? And how many times have your support calls been left unresolved? You are not alone. Brands around the world are proactively investigating the use of AI into their business to interact directly with customers. While human agents can get overwhelmed performing tasks when they have to deal with mountains of data, AI can deliver answers without breaking a sweat. AI can easily sift through piles of data, analyzing, searching and serving up relevant information to customers in real time. AI can analyze unstructured data at lightning speed, something a human cannot do. AI analyses data and identifies patterns, which can be easily overlooked by a human. AI has in-built Natural Language Processing (NLP) capability. It can read a support ticket and instantly direct it to the right team. Customers are growing increasingly digital today.  It is becoming imperative for businesses to integrate AI into their existing systems to acquire new customers and retain them, at scale. AI has the potential to take the customer experience to whole new level. By making the customer journey more engaging, it can help you stay a step ahead of your competition. And it also eases the lives of service reps. In many ways they are the flag bearers of your brand. Automated responses, personalization, case routing, data analysis and intelligent recommendations, predictive insights, case prioritization are some of the things AI can do without breaking a sweat.   As a Gold Salesforce Consulting Partner, Girikon has been helping organizations around the world leverage the world’s most powerful CRM platform to drive productivity and growth. We recognise that improved efficiency and quality of your customer support will lead to happier customers. To know more about how AI can help your customer service teams improve your CSAT scores, contact us today.