fbpx

Are Your Product Images Really Effective? Ask the AI.

image_memorability

What makes people buy?

Among all the questions that marketers have always been trying to answer, this is undoubtedly the most important. But the most complex, at the same time.

Marketing research has paved the way to get closer to the answer, narrowing the field to questions like "What makes a memorable advertisement?", "What makes people remember your brand and your product?". Scientific studies have established that most consumer decisions are memory based. Thus, marketers continually look for ways to make people remember their brand and products, working through memory with their ads, messages, and tv commercials.

But memory alone is not enough.

Probably many of you remember the famous tv commercial Fiat launched in 2002. The one with the catchphrase «Buonasera…». That was a great campaign, which had gone immediately viral, but it had a problem: everyone remembered the spot, but no one remembered the brand (many, not even the automotive sector).

Your ad has failed if it’s so boring that nobody notices or remembers it. But it has failed too if it’s hilarious and exciting, but nobody's able to recall your brand.

For promotional images, it's the same thing. The fact that your image is impactful doesn't mean it is effective.

For instance, let's look at this image.

memorability

If I told you that the sales target here is the pair of shoes, would you say it is an effective image?

Now, whatever your opinion, it will certainly be different from that of many other people, regardless of whether they are advertising experts or not.

The reality, in fact, is that only technology can give a clear answer to the question.

Let’s see why.

memorability_map

Applying our AI model, based on deep learning algorithms, we discovered that this promotional image is quite memorable. The memorability score is 0.834, which means that - according to the calculation logic of the model - 60% of people will remember it about 30 days after first viewing.

Furthermore, as you can see from the heat maps, the objects that are positively correlated with memorability are the white sweater on the upper left and the pink garment on the right. They are responsible for activating people's memory, unlike the other objects in the image. In other words, they would be what makes people buy.

As a result, this image is not particularly effective. Although it is easy enough to remember, what remains in people’s mind is not the sales target, but other surrounding objects.

Now think about the images you have used in your recent campaigns. Are you sure they were really the best option you had? How can you avoid using images that are not memorable and are likely to make your strategy less effective? Discover Image Memorability and learn more about your images.

Receive updates from Neosperience:

Digital Innovation In Retail – Towards An Empathic Customer Experience

alejandro-alvarez-150148-unsplash

What will the future bring for leading brands in the retail and fashion industry?

With the rise of e-commerce giants like Amazon, Alibaba, and eBay, the retail scenario is rebuilt on a digital foundation, where competition is played on the ability to meet an entirely new set of behaviors, expectations, and priorities of today's shoppers.

On-demand services and instant gratification available at any time are giving customers an ever greater control over their purchase journey and increasing their power towards brands. Speed, ease, contextual and individual relevance have passed within a few years from being valuable nice-to-have to essential must-have.

However, few are really trying to bridge the gap between insight and action, and it's the case of leading companies that are using technology to innovate their customer experience with a human-centric approach, changing how they interact and engage with today's customers.

Timberland launched a context-aware email marketing campaign, shaping ads for different weatherproof products to match each user's position and weather conditions in real-time.

Since at least 2013, Amazon takes notice of our shopping behavior and tailors recommendations for every one of us. And as we continue browsing, the fitting personalization goes on.

Even customer support has become much smarter. On companies' websites and e-commerce, chatbots and virtual assistants use natural language processing to help customers effortlessly navigate questions, FAQs or troubleshooting.

In the offline world, we see stores and shop windows coming to life with digital signage interactive systems and 3D contents on augmented and virtual reality. And even behind the scenes, store analytics is becoming a common practice that will soon have nothing on online analytics, helping retailers to better understand shoppers behavior and measure the impact of different areas in the store environment.

It is easy to see how all these applications have one thing in common: AI.

Artificial intelligence is disrupting the retail industry as it enables marketers to automate and bring on a large scale something that until a few years ago required effortful small-scale processes. That is tailor-made experiences, custom-designed for each individual.

But there is still something wrong with AI today. A missing piece to move from the now outdated customer-centric approach to a people-centric path, more consistent with the evolving needs and wants of today's shoppers. It is predicted to be the future of AI, that will progressively bridge the gap between the offline and the online world. That missing piece is empathy.

We have identified 10 key factors for an empathic customer experience. You can find them in the "Digital Innovation in Retail & Fashion" report, now free to download.

 

Schermata 2018-09-17 alle 15.40.21

Photo by Alejandro Alvarez on Unsplash

Receive updates from Neosperience:

FullSizeRender1

May 24 and 25, 2018, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: the future of technology was there, at the TNW Conference 2018, the award-winning 2-day European festival dedicated to innovation, marketing, communication, and creativity.

With 19 tracks of content, a huge variety of topics was covered: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning changing companies' businesses; Design thinking transforming our work and helping us solving complex problems: new Marketplaces growing retailers' e-commerce exponentially; Virtual and Augmented Reality making physical and digital objects coexist simultaneously; and many others.

In this wide range of specialties, what are the key insights for the digital experience leaders? Here are the three main trends we have observed.

Artificial Intelligence will turn into Emotional Intelligence
Opening the 'Machine: Learners' track, Cassie Kozyrkov, Chief Decision Scientist at Google, shares her thoughts on the decision intelligence engineering, the emerging discipline that focuses on using ML and AI to improve companies’ businesses.

In a statement, she has captured the attention of the entire audience: 2030 will be the age of emotional intelligence. The Human-AI symbiosis that will take place in the next years will shape the way brands connect with customers across all digital and physical touchpoints, making their relationship closer, personal and intimate.

That will become possible thanks to the ability for Machine Learning and Deep Learning to foster and advance brands' social skills, enabling them to change their communication style depending on what customers’ emotions and reactions are.

If the customer is in a hurry and impatient, or anxious and stressed out, brands will be ready to deliver a different experience than if s/he's calm and relaxed; just like a good seller does when dealing with customers in the store.

Context-aware Artificial Intelligence unlocks the power of Customer Experience
In a world where customer expectations are constantly evolving, 89% of companies believe that customer experience will be their primary basis for competition (Gartner, 2015). That is how Adrian McDermott, President of Products at Zendesk, started what has been one of the most eye-opening speeches of the event.

Artificial Intelligence solutions can help companies to increase customer satisfaction by providing:

- Automation, which removes repetitive work - think of an answer bot instead of a customer service professional).
- Recommendation, that uses content cues to inform decisions customers make - by offering, for example, the right information and help at the right moment.
- Prediction, able to spot trends that humans can’t see - such the expected customer satisfaction, the probability that a customer will become loyal to your brand, or that s/he will recommend your product to others.

Over the coming years, these three AI-based levers will allow leading companies to:

- Embrace a people-first approach, which means, capturing the customer behind the analytics and beyond purely objective data such as demographics.
- Adopt a growth mindset, by figuring out what their customer segments look like and A/B testing what kind of interactions they should activate across those segments.
- Deliver seamless omnichannel experiences and context-based conversations with customers, to close the gap with customers' habits and make them live comprehensive shopping experiences.

Digital communication will move to dialogue
By 2020, the average person will have more conversation with their bot than with their spouse (Gartner, 2016). What is certain is that, within the next few years, having a bot in your app and website will go from being an optional nice-to-have to an essential must-have.

If misdesigned, however, you’ll have a frustrating user interface that will drive your customers away, explains Purna Virji, Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft. Convinced that we can do much better than state of the art, she reveals us the key principles of designing conversational AI; those that she calls the "4 C's":

A. Clarity.
Mind your language, create a conversational flow and see what sounds natural. To avoid "robotic" perceptions, write for the ear and not for the eye, as the right words to create engagement and trust are not those beautiful to read but those that are nice to hear.

B. Character.
People prefer a virtual agent with an easy-to-perceive personality: it can be warm, formal, or even funny ... For example, if a customer says “thank you” at the end of a conversation, a professional bot will reply “you’re welcome,” while a more empathic bot can answer “you bet!”, and a very friendly one can say “no prob.”

But be careful: do not fall into the trap of turning the bot into a fake human. The goal isn’t for the customer to think they’re talking to a real person, so it’s best if the bot is easy to get to know, with a specific personality, but still clearly a bot.

C. Compassion.
Stepping into your customers’ shoes and making your user interface better understand and resonate with them is probably the most struggling point for today's bots. Think, for example, of their common reactions to small talk.

Even though encountering small talk is pretty common for a bot, that's where conversation often breaks. Quite simply, if a customer says "tks" instead of "thanks" it is pretty common to see the bot reply "Sorry. I do not understand”. Thus, building small talk scenarios becomes essential to avoid the embarrassing “Sorry I don’t understand.”

D. Correction.
There are lots of ways to correct an error without having to say "Sorry." One possible strategy, which also promotes sales, is to offer alternatives: if a customer asks for ordering red tulips, but these are unfortunately out of stock, instead of saying "Sorry, we are out of stock of red tulips" the bot can reply "We’re out of red tulips, would you like yellow or orange tulips instead?". After all, is that not what a good seller would do?

To conclude, this year's edition of the TNW Conference has given us significant insights that we can bring to the Digital Customer Experience environment. If “the world is machine readable,” as stated by Kevin Kelly, Co-founder of WIRED, during his compelling speech, we can add that it should be the same for customers, and for the way they think, feel and behave towards brands.

But - citing McDermott's words - “Oil has no value as you can’t extract energy from it. The same is for data. They have no value as you can’t extract knowledge from them.

That is why companies need to learn how to use Artificial Intelligence solutions to understand who their customers truly are, and thus build better products and experiences, designed for humans.

Download The 7 Pillars Of The New Customer Loyalty to define the foundations on which to build your engagement and loyalty strategy, create innovative experiences and establish a lasting and valuable relationship with your customers.

Receive updates from Neosperience:

MIT Predicts The 10 Breakthrough Technologies For 2018

breakthrough-technologies

When you talk about the future of technology, you have two different approaches. The first one is to look into the distance the way Sci-Fi writers do, working with the imagination to push the boundaries of what the human mind can create.

The second approach is to aim at a closer target, looking at what is already going on. This is exactly what the MIT does with its annual prediction of the 10 breakthrough technologies that will lead the evolution of business and society, starting from today.

The list has been published in the recent March/April release of the MIT Technology Review magazine, the reference point for everyone interested in knowing what’s coming next. This top 10 includes the technologies believed to make the most impact over the next 12 months.

"This is our attempt to alert our readers: These are the technologies that you really need to or should pay attention to next year, and also going into the next few years," MIT Tech Review's editor David Rotman told Business Insider.

What does it mean ‘breakthrough’? Scrolling through the previous 17 editions of the list, you can find a few key benchmarks for defining this term: mass commercial use, foreseeable mass commercial adoption and, most of all, the profound impact on our lives.

With the words of Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, “our annual list of 10 world-changing technologies invariably defies attempts to find an overarching theme. But a look back at the past few years shows a trend: we’re including more and more advances in artificial intelligence”.

There is no doubt that the AI will play - and is already playing - a huge role in the development of many aspects of our lives: the way we communicate and build relationships; how we work and find jobs; the strategy of businesses and organizations; how we take care of our health; the way Brands personalize the customer experience to appeal people's uniqueness.

3D METAL PRINTING

While 3D printing has been around for a while now, printing objects in other materials than plastic has been quite a dream (an expensive one). Now we are moving towards the ability to create large, intricate metal structures on demand; something that could revolutionize manufacturing, a new era for the 4.0 Enterprise.

ARTIFICIAL EMBRYOS

With the embryos, we face a topic hotly debated for its ethical and philosophical problems. And yet the research is moving faster than legislation and political debate. For the first time, researchers have made embryo-like structures from stem cells alone, without using egg or sperm cells, thus providing a new understanding of how life comes into existence.

SENSING CITY

For years we have heard about the smart city, but it is now time for an even smarter smart city. In Toronto, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs are already implementing sensors and analytics in order to rethink how we build and live cities. Sensing cities could make urban areas more affordable and citizen’s friendly.

AI FOR EVERYBODY

Artificial Intelligence is the next big thing in technology; there is no doubt about that. The only brake to its full application has always been the high costs of development. But now cloud-based AI is making the technology cheaper and easier to use, opening the market to many more companies.

DUELLING NEURAL NETWORKS

Right now the Artificial Intelligence can learn and identify things based on the processed data, but what if it could also have an ‘imagination’? Companies such as Google Brain, DeepMind and Nvidia are now matching two AI systems that can help each other to create original images, and generate something akin to a sense of imagination.

BABEL FISH EARBUDS

Google's omnipresence in this list shows that the company is not ‘just’ a search engine anymore. The Pixel Buds show the promise of near-real-time translation. The technology is still young and clunky, but it could help overcome the barrier of communication in an increasingly global world (in the wake of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

ZERO-CARBON NATURAL GAS

The brand new smart city requires a different approach to energy supply and distribution. The answer could be in a new approach to natural-gas plants, made to efficiently and cheaply capture carbon released by burning natural gas, thus avoiding greenhouse emissions.

PERFECT ONLINE PRIVACY

The most urgent issue of the digital era is the use (and abuse) of personal information. As shown by the Cambridge Analytica affair and the GDPR legislation, the road to the perfect online privacy is still long, but blockchain could help to make it faster. Computer scientists, in fact, are perfecting a cryptographic tool to carry out transactions without revealing any more information than necessary.

GENETIC FORTUNE-TELLING

Our destiny is written in our genes. This is science, not science fiction. The study of the genome can help scientists understand and predict diseases and human traits. DNA-based predictions could be the next significant public health advance, but will also pose an ethical problem. Will the next evolution of discrimination be based on genetics?

MATERIALS’ QUANTUM LEAP

What is the next step in the evolution of computing? Quantum computing seems to be the correct answer, as recently shown by the use of a quantum computer to model the electronic structure of a simple molecule. Understanding molecules will allow chemists to design more effective drugs and better materials, but the prospect of a new wave powerful computers comes with a question: What should (and could) we do with so much power?

Photo by Billy Huynh on Unsplash

Download The 7 Pillars Of The New Customer Loyalty to define the foundations on which to build your engagement and loyalty strategy, create innovative experiences and establish a lasting and valuable relationship with your customers.

Receive updates from Neosperience:

Improve Your Personalization Strategy with AI-driven Psychographics

personalization-strategy

Consumers are hugely empowered. There is no room for mediocre” said Keith Weed, Unilever’s Chief Marketing Officer, at the last European Forbes CMO Summit. “We now have the opportunity to understand people on a one-to-one basis – to get down to that individual engagement.

Marketer's challenge for 2018 and beyond will be to hyper-personalize customer relationships. Which means, creating relevant interactions to capture customers' attention, evoke an emotional connection and secure their loyalty.

The days of one-size-fits-all targeting and seeing ads for things we’ve already purchased are finally coming to an end, as the power of personalization today gives brands a real opportunity to deliver one-to-one experiences at scale. This requires a data-driven approach and, with the massive amounts of data that brands have access to today, the question is: What's more important? What really matters?

Though we are in the Age of the Customer, most of the knowledge in the science of persuasive communication is primarily focused on the "sender", rather than the "receiver". The profile of the "good seller" has been studied a lot, and so the traits and qualities of successful salespeople. For example, they are achievement-oriented, curious, and conscientious. They have a high self-efficacy, are less gregariousness and show a lack of self-consciousness.

We know much less about the characteristics of the recipient, although the real meaning of a message is what the recipient makes of it. How individuals respond to different types of communications, in fact, is strongly linked to their personality.

Think about how much easier it is for salespeople to be effective with a customer that they know personally, compared with a new customer they have never seen before. Well, this kind of knowledge, previously limited to the offline world, today extends also to the digital world.

Let's see some examples.

Extroversion and Introversion

Extrovert people are outgoing, sociable, optimistic, and talkative, while introverts tend to be reserved, quiet, and independent thinkers.

Communication tips

While extroverts respond more positively to online ads that contain persuasive appeals, so that the communication is more free and easy, with introverts you have to prove credibility, for example using objective indicators of excellence. When dealing with an introvert user, you also have to avoid hype and exaggerated information: just get to the point and use high-content samples.

Open-mindedness and Closed-mindedness

Users of the first type are more open to new information, which they evaluate based on what they see or hear. Simply put, they make up their minds based on what you show them. closed-minded users, on the other hand, tend to be more skeptical and less receptive to new information, that they judge as related to what they already know.

Communication tips

With open-minded users, you should highlight the innovativeness, novelty, and customization features of your product. With closed-minded users, it's better to focus on proven effectiveness, and your message must include demonstrations or getting them to take part in product trials.

Need for Cognition and Need for Affect

Need for cognition reflects the extent to which a person is inclined towards effortful cognitive activities, such as information search processes. Need for affect indicates one's motivation to approach or avoid emotion-inducing situations.

Communication tips

It has been demonstrated that people with a high need for affect and a low need for cognition are more attracted by affective-based messages, such the sensory experience of trying a sample of a pleasant-tasting drink. Conversely, a cognitive-based message such as reading a list of strong and positive attributes about the drink is more powerful among individuals who are high in need for cognition and low in need for affect.

Today, with the explosion of customer data that Brands can access from all digital and physical touchpoints, moving from complexity to action requires giving a new meaning to existing data and choosing those that provide the most useful insights.

To win this challenge, Artificial Intelligence with Machine Learning enables marketers to understand their customers better by overcoming obvious factors such as demographics and purchase history and getting psychographic elements from web usage patterns and social profiles. This allows to tailor persuasive appeals and provide targeted recommendations based on users' interests, attitudes, lifestyle, and personality.

How good sellers do when they are familiar with a customer, now Brands have the opportunity to offer hyper-personalized customer engagements and experiences than ever before.

What are the key psychographics to understand your customers better? How would you use them to enhance your personalization strategy?

Receive updates from Neosperience:

AWS re:Invent 2017 – Tales From The Future Of Cloud

AWS-reInvent.jpg

In the weeks leading to the AWS re:Invent 2017, we have seen many speculations about the nature of the announcements that Amazon would do during its annual event. The first few days have maintained, if not exceeded, the expectations.

There is a constant element behind all the news emerging about Amazon's Cloud: a significant shift towards the 'applications' side of the technology. Follow us as we unveil the future of Amazon Web Services and the entire Cloud world.

The general trend sees Amazon more and more focused on providing companies with technologies that increase the engagement and improve the customer experience. From this point of view, we could even dare to say that AWS is becoming more ‘customer-centric’.

This broader trend translates into a specific attention to the technologies that affect the customer behaviors online and offline (and are affected by them in return). It is easy to see that video content and AR, VR, and mixed reality have taken the center stage in the last couple of years.

Many companies are trying to take advantage of the potential of these immersive technologies, which so far have proved to be too complex and expensive for general use. The great players - Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and now Amazon - are trying to close this gap, providing affordable tools (in terms of costs and complexity) available for a broader audience.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert is the way Amazon wants to capitalize on the obsession that both customers and Brands have for video contents. The new suite, formed largely on the back of the acquisition of Elemental Technologies in 2015, is a file-based video transcoding service with broadcast-grade features:

It allows you to easily create video-on-demand (VOD) content for broadcast and multiscreen delivery at scale. The service combines advanced video and audio capabilities with a simple web services interface and pay-as-you-go pricing. With AWS Elemental MediaConvert, you can focus on delivering compelling media experiences without having to worry about the complexity of building and operating your own video processing infrastructure.

While we do not have more than the announcement right now - even though Elemental has been around for a while - there is a major strength in the proposition: the ability to create high-quality, end-to-end video processing workflows in the cloud without upfront investment for video processing infrastructure (you pay based on the duration of video that is processed and the features you use).

If you read the description carefully, you will see how Amazon is now “into competition to some extent with the likes of Google’s YouTube and its efforts to work with media companies and other creators to build and host live streams and ad-based videos. Interesting timing, given all the negative press YouTube has had over the kind of content that it’s been hosting over the years.” (TechCrunch)

The second product launched at the AWS re:Invent 2017 - this one entirely new - is called Amazon Sumerian and is, in some extent, a straightforward response to the announcements made by Mark Zuckerberg during the last Facebook’s F8 event. The topic is, of course, virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality.

Amazon Sumerian lets you create highly immersive and interactive scenes on VR, AR, and 3D applications without requiring any specialized programming or 3D graphics expertise. The scenes can then run on different hardware - Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and iOS mobile devices, while the support for Android ARCore will come soon. All this starting from the libraries of pre-built objects that make the creation effortless and less expensive.

If you look at the bigger picture, it is easy to understand where Amazon is heading: In a world where the new wave of technology has a lot of time-consuming processes behind it, Amazon aims at becoming the one who can modernize and simplify that — thereby becoming the default platform for creating applications on that new tech. Elemental and Sumerian score two points. And now the ball goes to the opponents.

For a deeper coverage live from the AWS re:Invent, you can also follow Luca Bianchi, CTO of Neosperience, on Medium.

Download The 7 Pillars Of The New Customer Loyalty to define the foundations on which to build your engagement and loyalty strategy, create innovative experiences and establish a lasting and valuable relationship with your customers.

Receive updates from Neosperience:

Soft Skills are the New Core Skills – and Technology Can Hire Them

larm-rmah-193660.jpg

Mark Murphy, the author of Hiring For Attitude, leadership trainer and CEO of Leadership IQ, has trained companies like Microsoft and IBM. In one of his research he tracked 20,000 new hires, and found that 46% of them failed within 18 months.

Even more shocking than the failure rate was the fact that 89% of the time it happened for attitudinal problems towards work and colleagues, and only 11% for lack of expertise. The attitudinal deficits included low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation, and temperament.

In today's fluid and interpersonal workplaces, skills such listening and learning from criticism, collaborating with others, working under pressure, presenting ideas effectively, and a having a positive, flexible attitude become all vital qualities for career success.

And while studying takes us on a path towards acquiring those hard, technical skills that we need to manage our job operationally, soft skills have little to do with knowledge or expertise. They are closely linked with our character.

As a combination of social competences, communication abilities, and emotional intelligence, soft skills are the spearhead of our inner nature and a direct result of our personal inclinations, which can strengthen or weaken them.

Some personality traits, in particular, have proven to be strong predictors of career success, leading to superior performances in general people’s working lives and within different jobs.

Let’s look at two important - yet not so well-known - personality traits: Internal Locus of Control, the key to success in any work environment; Need for Closure, which can have a different impact in various job functions.

Locus of Control

Locus of Control is our tendency to believe that 'control' resides internally within us, or externally, with others or the situation.

Individuals with an internal Locus of Control (called "internals") feel that they are in charge of their life and have primary responsibility for their actions, whether they are successes or failures.

Individuals with an external Locus of Control (called "externals") tend to feel more vulnerable and view themselves as victims of circumstances, fate, luck, and the influence of other people. They are more likely to make excuses or blame other people, events, or things, rather than taking responsibilities.

Having an internal Locus of Control is a source of energy, motivation, and confidence, which represents an advantage at all levels within an organization in many areas and situations. For example:

Effective Leadership. An "internal" leader is more likely to be favored by group members. One reason is that "internals" are perceived as more influential than "externals" because they take responsibility for events, emphasizing that they can change unfavorable conditions.

Taking the Initiative. Effective managers demonstrate a strong self-efficacy and an internal Locus of Control when they take steps to circumvent obstacles, actively seek information to solve problems, and usually initiate action, rather than waiting for things to happen.

Occupational Well-being. Amongst other things, Locus of Control is found to be a strong predictor of occupational health, and 'internal' employees show higher levels of job satisfaction and lower levels of job insecurity.

Need for Closure

Need for Closure (NFC) describes people's desire for a firm answer to a question or an issue and an aversion toward ambiguity.

A person with a high NFC prefers order and predictability and, in uncertain situations, tends to seek closure urgently. In contrast, a person with a low NFC tends to tolerate more, or even to look for the fluidity of uncertain situations.

In business and management, this personality trait has significant implications. For example:

Decision Making. Employees' level of NFC can serve as a useful criterion to select decision makers in organizations, by identifying the decision-making style that fits better with a job function. People with a high NFC prefer to think about black-or-white solutions and simplified dichotomization. They are more willing to make instant decisions, whereas people with a low need for closure prefer to postpone decisions and carry out a more in-depth evaluation, even if it takes extra time.

Leadership Behavior. Experimental findings have highlighted that individual differences in the desire to reduce uncertainty affect people's leadership style. For example, supervisors that are high on NFC tend to show an autocratic leadership and a preference for 'hard power' tactics of social influence, whereas 'soft power' tactics are those that managers with a low NFC value most.

Coping with Change. Because of their desire for stability and permanence, people with a high NFC feel uncomfortable with change. They are also more resistant to changing their minds and yielding to persuasion attempts. For example, high NFC levels are associated with political conservatism, an ideology whose core definition involves resistance to change.

Personality assessments have always been a common practice amongst large companies, to identify peoples' strengths and weaknesses and help HR managers decide whether or not an employee is a good organizational fit. To this end, traditional paper-based and web-based questionnaires are still today the primary tool used by companies.

Technology, however, is changing the face of the HR world by progressively, but rapidly, automating processes on previously unimaginable scales. Today's softwares can do much more than grade multiple-choice questions to measure people's technical skills.

With natural language processing and machine learning algorithms analyzing things like keywords, intonation, and body language, it becomes possible to capture more intangible human qualities. This data can then be used to create a psychological profile that allows HR managers to predict whether a person's attitudes fit with the company’s culture, values, and desired behaviors.

For the past year, the consumer-goods giant Unilever - for which about 170,000 employees work worldwide - has been using artificial intelligence to screen all its entry-level employees, and neuroscience-based games to measure their inherent traits. The company needed to renew itself, and transforming new talent recruitment by digitizing the first steps of the hiring process was a great way to do so, says Mike Clementi, VP of human resources for North America.

More and more, it has become clear that Artificial Intelligence not only improves the work processes of employees by automating time-consuming daily tasks; it is revolutionizing the HR world at all stages. Let’s look at some of them:

Hiring Process. By scanning resumes, machine learning algorithms can do initial screenings to identify the best candidates, eliminate unqualified prospects, and then create shortlists that can be organized based on specific skills, keywords or employment history.

Training Methods. By recording how an employee is responding to an ongoing training program, AI can help HR managers to better tailor future training sessions to each worker.

Performance Evaluation. By analyzing productivity data, AI can help to measure how well an employee is performing, thus becoming a supplemental tool to management decisions.

Turnover Prediction. By analyzing employee engagement data, gathered from quantitative surveys or qualitative methods, AI can determine an employee’s level of commitment or satisfaction, and better predict if he or she is at risk of leaving. That allows HR managers to decide whether to adopt some backup retention measures or provide new growth opportunities.

There have been great strides in the HR world, since technology was usually seen simply as a tool to streamline technical procedures. A turning point comes when AI applications are increasingly expanding from specific standardized, low cognitive demand tasks, to typically human jobs, such as discovering the human side of employees, from their temporary feelings and emotions to their stable personality traits.

We cannot predict the future of HR with a 100 percent certainty, but what we can see is undoubtedly a world where technology will embrace more and more the human side of people.

Photo by Larm Rmah on Unsplash

Download The 7 Pillars Of The New Customer Loyalty to define the foundations on which to build your engagement and loyalty strategy, create innovative experiences and establish a lasting and valuable relationship with your customers.

Receive updates from Neosperience:

How Augmented Reality Can Strengthen Your CX

apple_arkit_ar.jpeg

When Tim Cook took center stage to kick off Apple's WWDC 2017 conference, we knew that something was coming. A lot was discussed yesterday: watchOS 4, macOS High Sierra, iOS 11, the arrival of Siri on a hardware called HomePod.

Of all the announcements, though, the one that really resonates with the digital and marketing leaders is the launch of the ARKit: a set of tools for developers to create augmented reality apps, that has been boasted as the “largest AR platform in the world”.

The analysts have immediately considered this new platform as the definitive consecration of the AR technology for business. Apple did not show a dedicated app, but the ARKit - with its support for Unity, Unreal Engine and Scenekit - puts the AR at the heart of Apple's (and your) future.

In the 1990s, virtual reality (VR) was expensive. Smartphones made high-quality small screens, motion sensors and processors affordable, enabling the Oculus Rift to launch in 2012. In virtual reality, a virtual world replaces the physical reality.

VR immerses the user in a believable situation. Users can experience traveling the world, exploring space or seeing inside the human body. Touch elements like the floor sinking slightly as the user steps on virtual stairs add to the illusion.

Mixed reality” (MR) inserts virtual items into the physical world. Users can add virtual elements to a room or make parts of the room disappear.

Augmented reality” (AR) – what Google Glass offered before being terminated as a pioneer market experiment – is transparent and is layered on top of the natural world.

At its best, VR, AR and MR are highly social. People can play with objects together, enjoying a compelling shared environment. Some systems also map and save their surroundings, allowing users in different locations to meet in a virtual version of a real place. On the downside, users can find them overwhelming and need a rest after some time of virtual activity.

In the next 15 years, VR, MR, and AR are likely to become part of everyone’s working and recreational lives (Apple officially praised the success of Pokémon Go), and of our relationship with brands. In 10 years mixed-reality technology will be used as much as, if not more than, smartphones.

Wearable screens will replace physical monitors, and, as it happened with the smartphone, the more popular this technology become, the faster it will grow. No matter which company gets there first, virtual reality technologies are set to have a real impact on people’s lives.

Among the initial steps of this path, Apple announced yesterday its tool ARKit, which will provide advanced augmented reality capabilities on iOS. It is supposed to allow for “fast and stable motion tracking” that makes objects look like they are being placed in real space, instead of simply hovering over it.

On stage, Apple showed off a very basic implementation of ARKit: you can map the flat surface of a table and place a teacup on it with realistic perspective, drawing information from an iPhone or iPad’s sensors and cameras.

However, as a marketer, you can make much more complex experiences: imagine allowing your customers to see your products in their home before buying them. Or, if you are a luxury goods maker, show how they would be wearing your accessory. Or, if you are a car maker, dream your dream car in their box. And share their experience on all social networks.

 

Note: to this purpose, Neosperience Cloud already incorporates ARKit capabilities in the upcoming Summer '17 release, to the benefit of all our customers.

As also shown by Facebook during the last F8 Conference, the Customer Experience will soon become the new currency in VR/AR/MR. This shift from the creation, transmission, and consumption of content to the creation, transmission, and consumption of customer experience will define a whole new approach to branding and product marketing.

Now it is your turn to make the world a better place for customers and brands. How do you think it is most effective to use this innovation in your marketing and sales activities?

Download The Mobile Engagement Playbook, a collection of relevant insights that'll help you to overcome the challenges of the digital transformation and grow your business exponentially.

Receive updates from Neosperience:

Retail Apocalypse – How Technology Will Help You Survive

It’s the end of the world as we know it.” Well, at least for retailers. Today, they have to face their toughest challenge ever: Reinvent their identity, innovate their business and try to survive the Retail Apocalypse.

Easier said than done, at least judging from the rash of closings and business failures. Apparently, thousands of brick-and-mortars are shutting down, and foot traffic to retail stores is sagging. The only way to escape the fate is to tackle head on the underlying causes of the ‘Zombie Mall’ situation.

The term ‘Retail Apocalypse’ comes from the United Stated, where it began gaining widespread usage in 2016, following the closing of a vast number of American retail stores. Where are all these customers going?

Overall, over 4,000 physical stores are affected as American consumers shift their purchasing habits due to various factors.” (Wikipedia) This shift has brought to multiple announcements of plans to either discontinue or significantly scale back a retail presence.

Of course, the seeds of what we are living today were planted many years ago. At the same time, some countries have more obvious symptoms (the US, for example, where stores per capita far outnumber that of any other country).

A quick look at this chart published on Business Insider makes the idea of what is going on in this beginning of 2017:

retail-closing-business-insider.png

To tell the truth, not all analysts agree to believe this situation is so dramatic. In a recent article published by Forbes, the retail and tech analyst Paula Rosenblum states that there are at least five reasons why the ‘retail apocalypse’ is a click bait, a false scare story.

But is it? Honestly, there is one fact that none can deny (but many retailers still understate): the behaviors of customers have deeply changed in the last decade, and this evolution was driven by the technological innovation (mobile and connected devices, social networks, artificial intelligence).

With ‘behaviors’ we mean: How they search for information about services and products; how they connect with the physical and digital presence of a brand; how they compare the different solutions; how and where they finally purchase the product they have chosen.

Different behaviors demand different approaches. While the customers evolve, however, the retail brands often can not keep up with the change. To quote a post by Brian Solis
, “The concept of future retail is constantly evolving. But what is not evolving as quickly is the understanding and widespread experimentation to bring the future to life today.

The disruption of retail brings with it a critical corollary: What really matters is not what you do but how you do it. It is not the new fancy technology that you think can save your business with a snap, but how you implement that technology in the complex of activities that define your retail customer experience.

In the era of Digital Darwinism, when you stand in front of a new business challenge, you have three choices:

  • Ignore the evolution and condemn yourself to the irrelevance (Business as usual).
  • Wait to understand what others are doing and what are the real benefits (Business for the moment).
  • Take advantage of the wave of disruption to face not only what is happening on the outside, but also what is not happening on the inside (Business for the future).

The majority of retail companies usually fall into the first two categories. They do not feel the urge to change a strategy that has so long proved effective; they are scared of the investments needed to move to the new approaches; they do not recognize an ROI hidden behind the digital transformation.

Unfortunately, the hard truth is that inaction always leads to irrelevance. For each brand that fails there is another brand that gets the spotlight. The competition is tougher than ever, and the race to success is mostly a competition for relevance.

Competing solely on products, price or features is not sufficient to gain a competitive edge. The new rules of engagement demand that you invest and work to reinvent your identity - starting from the physical store - and deliver a memorable and unique customer experience, online and offline.

How can you do it? Brian Solis (again) gave a significant speech a couple of months ago, talking about the ways for retailers to survive the apocalypse. The first step is to adopt a (new) human perspective and compete for customer experience, the main differentiator in the digital era.

We want to leave you with the video of that speech, not before pointing out the element that we consider the most critical: Invest in the trust economy, be transparent, and earn reciprocity through the facilitation of open engagement and commerce.

Download The Mobile Engagement Playbook, a collection of relevant insights that'll help you to overcome the challenges of the digital transformation and grow your business exponentially.

Receive updates from Neosperience:

How Artificial Intelligence Is Disrupting Your Organization

artificial-intelligence.jpg

Whoever reads a science fiction novel ends up thinking about smart machines that can sense, learn, communicate and interact with human beings. The idea of Artificial Intelligence is not new, but there is a reason if big players like Google, Microsoft or Amazon are betting precisely on this technology right now.

After decades of broken promises, the AI is finally reaching its full potential. It has the power to disrupt your entire business. The question is: How can you harness this technology to shape the future of your organization?

Ever since the human has learned to dream, he has dreamed about ‘automata’, objects able to carry out complex actions automatically. The mythologies of many cultures - Ancient China and Greece, for example - are full of examples of mechanical servants.

Engineers and inventors in different ages attempted to build self-operating machines, resembling animals and humans. Then, in 1920, the Czech writer Karel Čapek used for the first time the term ‘Robot’ to indicate artificial automata.

The rest is history, with the continuing effort to take the final step from mechanical robots to intelligent machines. And here we are, talking about a market expected to reach over five billion dollars by 2020 (Markets & Markets).

The stream of news about the driverless cars, the Internet of Things, and the conversational agents is a clear evidence of the growing interest. Behind the obvious, though, we can find more profitable developments and implications for the Artificial Intelligence.

Back in 2015, while reporting our annual trip at the SXSW, we said that the future of the customer experience goes inevitably through the interconnection of smart objects.

The AI is a top choice when talking about the technologies that will revolutionize the retail store and the physical experience we have with places, products, and people.

The hyperconnected world we live in has a beating heart of chips, wires, and bytes. This is not a science fiction scenario anymore; this is what is happening, here and now, even when you do not see it.

The future of products and services appears more and more linked to the development of intelligent functions and features. Take a look at what has been done already with the embedded AI, that can enable your product to:

  • Communicate with the mobile connected ecosystem - Just think about what we can already do using Google Assistant on the smartphone, or the Amazon Alexa device.
  • Interact with other smart objects that surround us - The Internet of Things has completely changed the way we experience the retail store (and our home, with the domotics).
  • Assist the customer, handling a wider range of requests - The conversational interfaces, like Siri and the chatbots, act as a personal tutor embedded in the device.

As the years pass by, the gap between weak and strong AI widens increasingly. A theory revived by a recent report by Altimeter, not by chance titled “The Age of AI - How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Organizations”.

The difference can be defined in terms of the ability to take advantage of the data to learn and improve. Big data and machine learning, in fact, are the two prerequisites of the modern smart technology.

So, on the one hand, we have smart objects that can replace the humans on a specific use case - i.e. to free us from heavy and exhausting duties - but do not learn or evolve in time.

On the other hand, we have the strong AI, the most promising outlook: An intelligence so broad and strong that is able to replicate the general intelligence of human beings. It can mimic the way we think, act and communicate.

The “pure AI” is aspirational but - apart from the Blade Runner charm - this is the field where all the tech giants are willing to bet heavily. The development and implementation of intelligent machines will define the competitive advantage in the age of AI.

According to BCG, “structural flexibility and agility - for both man and machine - become imperative to address the rate and degree of change.” As you can see in the following graph, you should look at the AI through four lenses:

  • Customer needs
  • Technological advances
  • Data sources
  • Decomposition of processes

AI_BCG.jpg

First things first. It is important to incorporate the technological advances, gather the different data sources, and map the different processes involved. However, it is way more important to start from the basics, the customers.

Many types of research tend to focus on the tech-side of the moon but there is something you should never forget: everything starts with the customer. This is the pillar of every organization, and it is not going to change because of smart machines.

Know your customer” means that you must to understand their needs, desires, pain points, and behaviors. Your business potential lies in the acknowledgment of the centrality of people.

The AI is a tool, not the purpose. The ultimate purpose is to create the best customer experience, blending technology and emotions so that you can engage your customers, monetize the opportunities, and increase the relevance of your brand.

Everything is connected to the customer:

The opportunity (and risk) of AI is not just in a device that will play a song or order tickets to a concert. The value of systems based on machine learning is based on their ability to sense, communicate, learn, act, and adapt over time and to connect with other systems that do the same so that they can anticipate and act on a range of needs - be they related to medicine commerce, service and support, or customer experience.” (Altimeter - The Age of AI)

Altimeter-Age-of-AI.png

Now that the boundaries between what is human and what is artificial blur, there is one last element that you should never forget. The relationship with your customers is grounded in trust.

Transparency (in the use of data, in the management of the real-time interactions) is essential to win the distrust when the distinctions between human, AI-assisted, and AI interactions could very well disappear.

As Pedro Domingos, the author of The Master Algorithm, once said that the “Artificial Intelligence is not so scary as it seems when it translates into artificial smartness.

Download The Mobile Engagement Playbook, a collection of relevant insights based on many years of Neosperience's expertise that'll help you to overcome the challenges of the digital transformation and grow your business exponentially.

Receive updates from Neosperience: