Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 13 | Page 44

FEATURE: COGNITIVE CRM W ith this in mind, the first generation of CRM systems emerged which helped by building up a central customer hub where a customer’s relationship with the organisation would be visible to everyone within the company. This provided information that empowered marketing, sales and customer service functions by providing them with the appropriate tools and data to perform one simple task “serve the customer”. However, traditional first generation CRMs relied on the structured data about the customer captured across multiple systems within the enterprise, based on which decision making for marketing, sales and customer services was reliant on human Intelligence. With increased build-up of structured data and advances in business intelligence technologies, a new class of CRM called ‘Analytical CRM’ emerged. This however required building up, predictive analytics and statistical models, which although not an impossible task required deep technology, statistical and business acumen. But again these models were based on structured data for ‘what if’ analysis and forecasting. With the explosion of social media a new stream of unstructured data emerged in the form of Facebook posts, blogs and twitter feeds among other social platforms. This led to the emergence of socially integrated CRMs mostly reliant on enabling communication across said platforms. A commonly agreed upon statistic is that around 80 per cent of all data being generated globally comes in the form of unstructured data. This is a significant amount, and making sense of it requires an intelligent model mirroring human cognition. Thus, traditional CRM’s are ill equipped to make sense out of this plethora of data. Human Interaction however remains vital. Customer perception is shaped by the tone of the agent handling the customer call regardless of data patterns available along with a sales COGNITIVE COMPUTING, HOWEVER, PROVIDES A PROMISE TO SOLVE PROBLEMS OF TRADITIONAL CRMS. IT IS THE LATEST BREAKTHROUGH IN TECHNOLOGY PROVIDING NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING, MACHINE LEARNING, HUMAN SENTIMENT ANALYSIS, TONE ANALYSIS AND TRADE OFF ANALYTICS 44 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com