Best Practices Award Template - Luminoso(web/mobile self-service, chatbots/virtual assistants,...
Transcript of Best Practices Award Template - Luminoso(web/mobile self-service, chatbots/virtual assistants,...
FROST & SULLIVAN BEST PRACTICES AWARD
Customer Value Leadership 2019
AI-ENHANCED NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING SOLUTIONS - GLOBAL
BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH
© Frost & Sullivan 2019 2 "We Accelerate Growth"
Contents
Background and Company Performance ...................................................................... 3
Customer Impact and Business Impact ................................................................. 4
Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 7
Significance of Customer Value Leadership .................................................................. 8
Understanding Customer Value Leadership .................................................................. 8
Key Benchmarking Criteria .................................................................................. 9
Customer Impact ............................................................................................... 9
Business Impact ................................................................................................ 9
Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices ............................................................................................................... 10
The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards .................... 11
Research Methodology ...................................................................................... 11
About Frost & Sullivan ............................................................................................ 11
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Background and Company Performance
Industry Challenges
An Era of Rapid Technological Change
Exponential technological change, characterized by trends such as digitization and deep
learning, are fundamentally changing how businesses gain and retain customers.
Companies that don’t embrace the digital revolution that is gaining speed will pay a heavy
price.
Consider what has happened in the retail space of late.
Over the course of just two months back in 2016, the consequences of not keeping pace
with today’s rate of change became particularly clear. Back in March, 2016, buckling under
pressure from mobile and online competition, retail giant Sports Authority filed for
bankruptcy. Weeks later, in May, 2016, Aeropostale also filed for bankruptcy, and according
to analysts, the primary reason was that it couldn’t keep up with fast-changing consumer
behaviors and the speed of emerging fashion trends at the same rate as its online
competitors. And then that same month, UK-based BHS also filed for bankruptcy. According
to reports, the company had fallen far behind its digital competitors and fast-changing
consumer trends. The consensus among retail analysts was that all three of these
companies failed to digitally transform quickly enough, which resulted in lost ground to
more tech-savvy competitors.
Clearly, understanding which digital technologies are required today, and which will be
important tomorrow, is critical for developing an agile and digitally transformed enterprise
capable of acting and reacting to all the perpetually changing data – all the digital flux – fast
enough to matter. The need for new models and processes is clear.
After all, according to authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their 2012 book,
Race Against the Machine, we’re in the early throes of a “Great Restructuring,” a time when
“our technologies are racing ahead, but our skills and organizations are lagging behind.”
In 2019, this new reality is manifesting itself through automated customer engagements
(web/mobile self-service, chatbots/virtual assistants, automated SMS, proactive outbound
customer contact, and finally IVR and speech). These applications both divert contacts from
agents but they also shorten conversations. Automation is also occurring within the contact
center through voice biometrics screening, desktop automation (including logins and call
dispositions), guided assistance, knowledge management, and robotic process automation
(RPA).
CX as Competitive Differentiator
As a recent Frost & Sullivan report on conversational AI articulated, by 2020, customer
experience will overtake product and price as the number one way for companies to
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differentiate themselves. US companies are now losing more than $83 billion annually due
to poor customer experiences, an effect compounded by the reality that it costs six to seven
times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one.
Yet, while consumers punish poor experiences by taking their business elsewhere, they
also reward companies that get customer experience right: 74% have spent more with a
business due to a history of good service. These statistics emphasize the importance of
synergizing customer experience with marketing and sales, to enhance both retention and
revenue generation.
Most organizations also understand the direct correlation between customer experience
and business performance. The question is how to make those experiences pay off even
more through higher revenue per interaction. Smart companies are achieving just these
types of results through new tools, including artificial intelligence (AI) and Natural
Language Processing technologies, that help better understand and more effectively
engage with customers.
Customer Impact and Business Impact
Clearly, the customer experience (CX) is a key part of today’s competitive battlefield.
Luminoso Technologies, based on over ten years of research at the Media Lab at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was founded in
2010. The company applies AI-based natural language understanding (NLU) technology to
assist clients with improving their CX. It does this by automatically pulling the most
relevant themes from any open-ended text data.
Customer Purchase Experience
Luminoso has found that too many companies lack an understanding and appreciation for
the nuances of natural language understanding (NLU). And too often, they initially attempt
to develop their own natural language solution through Open Source methods,
underestimating the complexities and difficulties involved in such an undertaking.
Attempting to research and study the ins-and-outs of natural language processing is an
endeavor fraught with traps and pitfalls.
It’s only after so many of those companies inevitably fail at their attempts that they
ultimately turn to Luminoso. Ironically, those are typically the clients that most appreciate
what Luminoso has to offer. Such companies become truly informed buyers that
understand that oftentimes Open Source methods are not what many companies think
they are. In essence, Luminoso’s customers discover that they are buying an optimal
solution that addresses both their unique needs and their unique constraints.
Customer Ownership Experience
As Luminoso notes, its products leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI), natural
language understanding (NLU), and machine learning (ML) to accelerate the speed with
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which clients can understand and derive meaning from text. And Luminoso’s use of
QuickLearn technology has a distinct advantage for users in that it reflects how customers
actually talk (the QuickLearn tech is based on ConceptNet, a system which describes over
28 million relationships about the world in multiple languages; this includes the ability to
ascertain not only what specific words and emojis mean, but the emotions they’re
associated with as well).
Moreover, because the company also uses Transfer Learning technology, it has the
advantage of being able to work with even tiny amounts of data. The end result is
“common sense natural language.” This type of AI-infused natural language is gaining
traction and having a real impact on businesses.
The software product set comprises the following:
Luminoso Daylight – Its core offering. Automatically analyzes all feedback so that
clients can discover hot topics, identify top complaints, track critical trends over
time, and act on those insights (ie, “What’s going on with the product, what’s in the
data set?”).
Luminoso Compass – Intelligent automation and routing. Makes it easy to
categorize and classify data into digestible topics and auto-respond to high volumes
of streaming data in the form of support tickets, call transcripts, or chatbot data (ie,
“Route customers where they need to go based on a trouble ticket”)
Luminoso Conceptual Search – Intuitive search. “A combo of the above two
offerings that possesses the ability to peruse a catalogue of information and guide
customers.”
Luminoso’s product set is particularly strong when applied in areas like product reviews,
surveys, and support tickets. In other words, in situations where documents have a lot of
information that form patterns (typically not things like boilerplate legal documents,
radiology reports, or things that are computer generated). Usually, the documents are
written by a person for a person.
Luminoso also is integrating data with more visualization features into their product
solutions. And as trouble tickets are handled by different vendors all over the world,
Luminoso can actually help tell client companies what makes some agents better than
others. Finally, the ability to work with mixed data sets (structured and unstructured)
truly helps clients understand which data has the most impact (what’s driving higher or
lower ratings, for example).
Customer Service Experience
Luminoso has aimed to steer its technology solutions toward helping organizations
improve the CX in altogether new ways. The company understands that people are often
overwhelmed with the sheer volume and speed of today’s omni-channel conversations,
and that reams of incoming unstructured information presents a very real challenge for
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organizations trying to make sense of it all.
Luminoso’s solutions therefore mine for insights from troves of otherwise untapped
customer feedback (such as support tickets, open-ended survey responses, or reviews),
turning masses of disjointed information into valuable and actionable intelligence that
improves customer service practices and product plans. Uniquely, the company offers
capabilities in fourteen languages (including, Japanese, Indonesian, Chinese, and
Russian).
The company’s solutions are particularly relevant for CX teams that may want to sift
through Voice of the Customer (VoC) information; HR departments that want to gain more
insights on employee feedback so as to improve employee engagement; design and
developer teams that seek instant feedback on products after Agile deployments, for
example; game developers looking for insight into their latest releases; financial
institutions firms that want to discover how well web portals are functioning, for example;
healthcare providers that want to confirm that new services are working as anticipated;
contact centers making sure that inquiries are routed correctly (to a human being or
automated system). All these examples have clear returns on investment (ROI) by way of
increasing satisfaction and lowering costs.
Brand Equity
Early on, Luminoso’s objective was to democratize the use of natural language and data in
the enterprise, to make information relevant and useful in new ways. Its target companies
tend to be large with significant amounts of customers – enterprises that can benefit from
a new paradigm.
And yet all throughout its evolution, Luminoso has separated itself from most competitors
in the natural language realm, many of which tend to be Big Data-focused, working with
huge data sets but lacking the capability to solve very specific problems for companies
that also might have smaller sets of data to work with. Many competitors also tend to be
strictly focused on English language specifically, to the exclusion of other languages.
In other words, Luminoso is a company gaining in prominence as a somewhat unique
entity which appeals to companies across industries that receive text-based feedback
about their products or services and seek to quickly and automatically discover business-
changing answers to questions often hiding in complex data sets. In this sense, Luminoso
is an ambassador for the potential impacts natural language processing can have for
enterprises now and in the future.
Operational Efficiency
To best understand the operational efficiency of Luminoso’s products, Frost & Sullivan
went through an impressive client demo that featured thousands of comments and ratings
from customers related to some 50,000 products. During the demo, the Luminoso product
produced “concept clouds” that grouped together terms associated with each other (the
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size of a word represented how important the system judged that concept was to the data
set). The colored concept cloud adjusted and morphed depending on the metadata. That
metadata clearly allows clients to zero-in on useful information and adapt to shifting
circumstances accordingly.
Frost & Sullivan found that scanning through tailored visuals revealing newly relevant data
was highly efficient. Clients can leverage both Luminoso’s U.S. cloud product and a
separate cloud product for the E.U., which complies with the new requirements around
GDPR (Luminoso also sells a private cloud and on-prem model).
Growth Potential
Luminoso can offer Voice of the Customer solutions (for example, to spot defects in a
recent software launch) as well as Voice of the Employee solutions (for example, an online
retailer dealing with employee churn), and has a few clients using both solutions
(hospitality is a vertical where there tends to be significant crossover, for instance).
Annual contracts are based on the number of documents clients consume.
Currently, the company is seeing particular opportunity in the following industries –
Marketing
Consumer Finance
Retail
Consumer Electronics
But there also are emerging industries such as mobile gaming that have considerable
potential for Luminoso. Because the “language” in gaming (lingo and “gamer talk”)
changes all the time, along with new updates and features (such as emojis), gaming
companys’ systems need to be able to understand what that ever-shifting information
landscape means and then get the routing correct while keeping players engaged.
Luminoso is a company offering solutions that can ascertain the sudden changes that
happen in gaming in real-time.
As a final vote of confidence, in December, 2018, Luminoso received an additional $10
million in Series B funding.
Conclusion
With its strong overall performance, Luminoso Technologies has earned Frost & Sullivan’s
2019 Customer Value Leadership Award for its AI-Enhanced Natural Language
Understanding solutions.
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Significance of Customer Value Leadership
Ultimately, growth in any organization depends on customers purchasing from a company
and then making the decision to return time and again. Satisfying customers is the
cornerstone of any successful growth strategy. To achieve this, an organization must be
best in class in 3 key areas: understanding demand, nurturing the brand, and
differentiating from the competition.
Understanding Customer Value Leadership
Customer Value Leadership is defined and measured by 2 macro-level categories:
Customer Impact and Business Impact. These two sides work together to make customers
feel valued and confident in their products’ quality and performance. This dual satisfaction
translates into repeat purchases and a lifetime of customer value.
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Key Benchmarking Criteria
For the Customer Value Leadership Award, Frost & Sullivan analysts independently
evaluated Customer Impact and Business Impact according to the criteria identified below.
Customer Impact
Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value
Requirement: Products or services offer the best value for the price, compared to similar
offerings in the market.
Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience
Requirement: Customers feel they are buying the optimal solution that addresses both
their unique needs and their unique constraints.
Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience
Requirement: Customers are proud to own the company’s product or service and have a
positive experience throughout the life of the product or service.
Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience
Requirement: Customer service is accessible, fast, stress-free, and of high quality.
Criterion 5: Brand Equity
Requirement: Customers have a positive view of the brand and exhibit high brand loyalty.
Business Impact
Criterion 1: Financial Performance
Requirement: Overall financial performance is strong in terms of revenue, revenue
growth, operating margin, and other key financial metrics.
Criterion 2: Customer Acquisition
Requirement: Customer-facing processes support the efficient and consistent acquisition
of new customers, even as it enhances retention of current customers.
Criterion 3: Operational Efficiency
Requirement: Staff is able to perform assigned tasks productively, quickly, and to a high
quality standard.
Criterion 4: Growth Potential
Requirements: Customer focus strengthens brand, reinforces customer loyalty, and
enhances growth potential.
Criterion 5: Human Capital
Requirement: Company culture is characterized by a strong commitment to quality and
customers, which in turn enhances employee morale and retention.
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Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching,
Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices
Frost & Sullivan analysts follow a 10-step process to evaluate award candidates and
assess their fit with select best practices criteria. The reputation and integrity of the
awards are based on close adherence to this process.
STEP OBJECTIVE KEY ACTIVITIES OUTPUT
1 Monitor,
target, and
screen
Identify award recipient
candidates from around the
world
Conduct in-depth industry
research
Identify emerging industries
Scan multiple regions
Pipeline of candidates that
potentially meet all best
practices criteria
2 Perform
360-degree
research
Perform comprehensive,
360-degree research on all
candidates in the pipeline
Interview thought leaders
and industry practitioners
Assess candidates’ fit with
best practices criteria
Rank all candidates
Matrix positioning of all
candidates’ performance
relative to one another
3
Invite
thought
leadership in
best
practices
Perform in-depth
examination of all candidates
Confirm best practices
criteria
Examine eligibility of all
candidates
Identify any information gaps
Detailed profiles of all
ranked candidates
4
Initiate
research
director
review
Conduct an unbiased
evaluation of all candidate
profiles
Brainstorm ranking options
Invite multiple perspectives
on candidates’ performance
Update candidate profiles
Final prioritization of all
eligible candidates and
companion best practices
positioning paper
5
Assemble
panel of
industry
experts
Present findings to an expert
panel of industry thought
leaders
Share findings
Strengthen cases for
candidate eligibility
Prioritize candidates
Refined list of prioritized
award candidates
6
Conduct
global
industry
review
Build consensus on award
candidates’ eligibility
Hold global team meeting to
review all candidates
Pressure-test fit with criteria
Confirm inclusion of all
eligible candidates
Final list of eligible award
candidates, representing
success stories worldwide
7 Perform
quality check
Develop official award
consideration materials
Perform final performance
benchmarking activities
Write nominations
Perform quality review
High-quality, accurate, and
creative presentation of
nominees’ successes
8
Reconnect
with panel of
industry
experts
Finalize the selection of the
best practices award
recipient
Review analysis with panel
Build consensus
Select recipient
Decision on which company
performs best against all
best practices criteria
9 Communicate
recognition
Inform award recipient of
award recognition
Present award to the CEO
Inspire the organization for
continued success
Celebrate the recipient’s
performance
Announcement of award
and plan for how recipient
can use the award to
enhance the brand
10 Take
strategic
action
Upon licensing, company is
able to share award news
with stakeholders and
customers
Coordinate media outreach
Design a marketing plan
Assess award’s role in
strategic planning
Widespread awareness of
recipient’s award status
among investors, media
personnel, and employees
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The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best
Practices Awards
Research Methodology
Frost & Sullivan’s 360-degree research
methodology represents the analytical
rigor of the research process. It offers a
360-degree-view of industry challenges,
trends, and issues by integrating all 7 of
Frost & Sullivan’s research methodologies.
Too often companies make important
growth decisions based on a narrow
understanding of their environment,
resulting in errors of both omission and
commission. Successful growth strategies
are founded on a thorough understanding
of market, technical, economic, financial,
customer, best practices, and
demographic analyses. The integration of
these research disciplines into the 360-
degree research methodology provides an
evaluation platform for benchmarking
industry participants and for identifying those performing at best-in-class levels.
About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, helps clients accelerate growth and
achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's
Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's growth team with disciplined
research and best practices models to drive the generation, evaluation, and
implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages nearly 60 years
of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses, and the
investment community from 45 offices on 6 continents. To join Frost & Sullivan’s Growth
Partnership, visit http://www.frost.com.
360-DEGREE RESEARCH: SEEING ORDER IN THE CHAOS