This article first appeared and originally published at https://blogs.oracle.com/startup/post/startups-customer-experience.
The concept of personal customer service is nothing new. Good bartenders have always remembered their regular patrons’ favorite drinks. Shopkeepers are trained to anticipate their customers’ needs.
The skill of identifying customers’ wants and desires to drive sales remains important to businesses, and now there is a raft of high-tech tools to help them gain new insights.
Here’s how companies in the Oracle for Startups program are helping their clients deep dive into analytics so they can understand customer needs better than ever before.
Helping companies listen to customers
How we speak gives listeners all sorts of clues about what we really want. DataKlout uses Voice AI to analyze customers’ intentions. Its next generation analysis software provides consumable insights for decision making and results. For example, it can be used to identify customers’ positive reactions to marketing and sales calls, allowing a sales team to focus on closure, or be used to train employees to deliver more delightful customer service, among other use cases.
Using the tool helped a client cut the cost of customer acquisition by 75%, leading to a 500% increase in opportunities for closure in a tele-sales and tele-marketing campaign, while it also increased opportunities for a car insurance company, which used the tool to identify prospects from a cold calling campaign, resulting in a jump from 2% to 8%.
While DataKlout’s Voice AI gives its customers a new technique to understand their customers’ deepest desires, it intends on going further, by equipping its clients with another in-depth tool by integrating the facial expressions in a video calls.
Understanding the whole customer
Customers are complex creatures, making predicting our actions and needs difficult. FirstHive uses a machine-learning driven algorithm, allowing its platform to ingest data from nearly every kind of customer interaction and transaction, including ERP, CRM, website, social, PoS, app, and customer care groups.
It can even absorb offline and unstructured data like social comments. The tool then builds unified customer identities and makes recommendations on what the next best action should be to enhance the customer’s experience.
The startup has worked with companies like Singapore Airlines and Unilever and has shown its tool can help enterprises earn a sixfold increase in their marketing ROI, with the right content being sent to razor sharp customer segments at just the right time.
Similarly, Pryon helps employees of enterprises find important information easily so they can do their jobs, including customer service. The startup behind the technology that powers Alexa allows users to ask an assistant a colloquial question and receive an answer in just a second. The solution applyies natural language processing to unstructured content automatically ingested from a vast range of content types.
Using AI for super forecasting
As any good service provider knows, the best way to meet a customer’s needs is to anticipate them. (Just think of that brilliant bartender or stellar hotel worker.)
Complete Intelligence runs more than 15 billion data points through an AI platform, making trillions of calculations across 1,400 industry sectors. This allows it to provide its customers in industrial manufacturing as well as the oil and gas, chemicals, electronics, food and beverages industries with a fully automated, globally integrated artificial intelligence platform to help purchasing, supply chain planning, and revenue teams make accurate forecasts.
Helping startups meet customer needs
Oracle for Startups exists to support growing companies and help them serve their customers’ needs. We know startups need reliable cloud services; that’s why we offer them a 70% discount on OCI.
We know young companies need to embrace new tech tools and scale, which is why we have a dedicated CAT team to help with migration and other goals.
We also know marketing support and introductions to enterprise customers are invaluable, and we strive to make these perks of our program a reality.
We’re also hoping to know even more about our customers by launching a global customer survey. After all, who better to inform our strategy than the startups we serve?