Digital Marketplaces Unleashed
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Furthermore, cognitive capabilities can help banks extract meaningful patterns from data about markets, customers, partners and employees – and use information to better anticipate change and shape the future. At the Royal Bank of Scotland they are using Watson to help customers who are contacting their call center. By developing a Watson powered Chatbot, they are able to offer their customers a personal, ever present and powerful route of contact with the bank. Watson services are continuing to break boundaries in the core areas of speech and language to ensure chatbots are truly effective for the future. Financial service organizations are embracing cognitive computing to transform internal operations and the way they interact with customers to produce a data driven approach to decision‐making and a tailored approach to customer engagement.
Industrial
Eighty‐three percent (83%)1 of oil and gas executives believe that cognitive technologies will play a critical role within their industry as a response to significant disruption in energy prices, reserve replenishment, high resource development costs and constantly changing health and safety regulations. Amid this disruption, oil and gas companies need to focus on their capabilities on discovering key insights to decide the best actions to take at a rapid rate. Cognitive computing is tackling these challenges, transforming the discovery and decision making, enhancing the way business is done. Cognitive systems will help bridge the information gap and avoid leakage of valuable data insights.
Heightening the ability of finding new data insights cognitive systems are learning from the best engineers to uncover new ground and unearth new insights and connections from the information spread across an Oil & Gas organization. For example, Woodside, based in Australia, is integrating cognitive technologies across their enterprise for a variety of functions such as to scale an engineer’s knowledge and analyze large volumes of data to rapidly help produce better informed, timed and expert decisions in one of the world’s harshest working environments.
Retail, Travel & Hospitality
Continuing to advance what Watson can do, cognitive capabilities have been embedded into new form factors and interfaces, changing the way businesses interact with their customer, most notably in retail, travel and hospitality. Today’s self‐service options in retail environments are typically tablets or kiosks, limiting the scope of how truly interactive and intuitive a customer experience can be. With an avatar based interaction of robotic assistant, users can have a more natural conversation in which their words, and even their gestures and expressions, are understood. Robots for example offer a multi‐dimensional experience between human and machines, expanding beyond the traditional two‐dimensional interfaces that have existed for over the last 60 years. Watson‐enabled robots can understand, reason, and learn as well as express and read emotional cues. They combine the intricate ability to understand the nuances of natural language, including intent and intonation, with physical achievements, such as gesturing through body language and eye movement, to reinforce an understanding of what’s being expressed.
Japan’s SoftBank Robotics are leveraging cognitive capabilities in their Pepper robots to allow systems to make sense of the hidden meaning in data that traditional computers cannot comprehend – including social media, video, images and text. SoftBank is using Pepper as a shopping assistant and concierge, among other applications. Various hotels are piloting robots with Watson to serve as a concierge. Imagine having a conversation with an AI in order to get answers about the hotel (e. g. where is the pool? when does breakfast start?), dining recommendations, directions, and information about local attractions. With the combination of Watson technologies and WayBlazer’s extensive travel domain knowledge, they are delivering an on‐line personalized experience more emblematic of the interaction one would have with a travel agent.
Communications
Cognitive systems are shifting the way Communication Service Providers (CSPs) interact with their customers through the use of interactive, intelligent, augmented service support. CSP customers have increasingly high expectations relating to access, service, quality and experience, driving the need for providers to change the way they work. Leveraging insights from cognitive systems can help organizations put the customer at the center of their service and operations, aide market forecasts and help determine next best actions, in order to address these growing trends.
With the swell in mobile traffic, CSPs are being pushed to invest heavily in new generation mobile and data networks, whilst, at the same time, mobile revenue growth is expected to slow. Advances in cognitive computing can help bridge the gap between data quantity and data insight, helping locate the proverbial needle in a haystack, identifying new patterns and insights and significantly transforming the way in which customers interact with their providers at every touch point.
Public Sector
The public sector faces significant challenges of meeting the ever increasing demand of services, living up to citizen expectations and defending their systems and infrastructure from constant security threats. These challenges are exacerbated by budgetary pressures and the constraints of resources. The digital age has helped the public sector move forward their data driven approach to decision‐making, yet government organizations struggle to unlock the full potential of this data and keep up as it grows rapidly in volume, variety and complexity.
Cognitive computing is transforming the way Government and Public Sector organizations operate by discovering insights from healthcare, to public intelligence to education. Over 80% of government officials, familiar with cognitive computing, believe it will have critical impact on the future of their organization with a further 87%2 believing it will play a disruptive role in their organization. In one case, career advisers are getting help from cognitive systems to discover the root cause of a chronically unemployed citizen’s struggle to find a job. At the other end of the spectrum, in California, USA, organizations like OmniEarth are leveraging Watson’s advanced processing, learning and visual recognition capabilities to quickly make sense of an extensive collection of aerial images allowing them to analyze drought‐stricken lots, looking for specific areas where water usage could be scaled back. Elsewhere, cognitive systems are enabling intelligence agencies to identify patterns and trends currently invisible to traditional systems. Cognitive can be embedded into every process, every application and every organization.
Education
Data‐driven cognitive technologies will enable personalized education and help improve outcomes for students, educators and administrators. Traditional classrooms contain students of ranging abilities and favored learning styles, making it an inherently difficult task for anyone to target curriculum towards such a diverse ability‐set. Cognitive systems are able to extend the capabilities of educators by providing deep domain insights and expert assistance through the provisioning of information in a timely, natural and personal way. IBM are teaming with organizations like Sesame Street to transform early childhood learning. Research shows that a significant extent of brain development occurs in the first five years of a child’s life, making this window critical for learning and development3. Sesame Street has over 45 years of deep expertise gained through research and more than 1000 studies on how young children learn best. Watson’s ability to absorb, correlate and learn from huge amounts of unstructured data and then deliver very personalized educational experiences will help transform the way in which kids learn and teachers teach.
Sesame Workshop and IBM are collaborating on a wide variety of interactive platforms and interfaces for use in homes and schools. The two companies are working with leaders in the education and technology community to allow continued refinement based on feedback and domain expert
ise. Watson’s natural language processing, pattern recognition, and other cognitive computing technologies will enable highly personalized learning experiences which are intended to complement the roles that parents and teachers play in early development. Watson will work to continuously hone and improve educational activities by studying and adapting to the aggregate experiences of anonymized groups of students. Cognitive systems, capable of driving adaptive learning, are already being welcomed by the teaching profession, with the notion of having prescriptive diagnostic programs, allowing teachers to better understand individual students.
27.3 Conclusion
27.3.1 Cognitive Is Changing the World We Live in
Cognitive systems can understand, reason and learn to interact more naturally with human beings than traditional systems. Augmenting and scaling expertise, cognitive computing is here – and this transformative technology is becoming ubiquitous in the day‐to‐day working of the business world, fundamentally changing how we perform our jobs, engage and interact with others, and learn and make decisions. Organizations across all industries and in every continent are already leveraging cognitive capabilities to uncover significant business value, transform the fundamentals of their organization and help solve some of society’s greatest challenges.
Footnotes
1 http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=XB&infotype=PM&htmlfid=GBE03747USEN&attachment=GBE03747USEN.PDF.
2 http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=XB&infotype=PM&htmlfid=GBE03714USEN&attachment=GBE03714USEN.PDF.
3Shonkoff, J. P., Phillips, D. A., & National Research Council (U.S.). (2000). From neurons to neighborhoods: The science of early child development. Washington, D.C: National Academy Press.
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2018
Claudia Linnhoff-Popien, Ralf Schneider and Michael Zaddach (eds.)Digital Marketplaces Unleashedhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49275-8_28
28. From Tweet to Chatbot – Content Management as a Core Competency for the Digital Evolution
Alexander W. Jonke1 and Jo Barbara Volkwein2
(1)KPMG AG, Munich, Germany
(2)KPMG AG, Düsseldorf, Germany
Alexander W. Jonke (Corresponding author)
Email: contact@alexwjonke.com
Jo Barbara Volkwein
Email: jovolkwein@yahoo.de
28.1 Digital Evolution Changing the Business World
The past decades have been a time of digital evolution. The term describes the continuous transformation and adaptation of businesses to the opportunities of digital technologies [1], or the adaption of digital transformation to the next stages. In this process, companies try to continuously optimize their workflow and maximize customer satisfaction in order to generate higher profits. Thus, businesses need to keep up with the latest technologies. Table 28.1 provides selected examples of changes in the business world over the past years due to the digital evolution. Table 28.1Examples of changes in the business world due to the digital evolution
From
To
Demand analysis
Push & pull innovation
Rigid development
Agile development based on feedback
Strict division of tasks
Culture of change and initiative
Steep hierarchies
Open communication
Delegation of narrow tasks
Innovative leadership
Focus on implementation
Giving directions
Focus on business scenarios
Diversified portfolios
Development of existing business segments
Simultaneous vertical and horizontal development
These examples demonstrate that technology as well as people and processes are affected and influenced by the digital transformation, referred to as ‘digital evolution’. The digital evolution is an ongoing phenomenon, which includes continuously evolving technology [technology], increasing digitalization of processes [processes] and shifting labor skill sets towards digital jobs [people]. As a consequence, technology has started to evolve quite fast, requiring a rearrangement of processes and finally a cultural adaption of the people in between.
28.2 Content Management from a Current Perspective
From a current perspective (2017), ‘content’ includes all forms of information presented in the form of text, images, graphs and sounds, which are published on a website [2]. Content management in turn describes the systematic preparation and processing of information. The distinction between content and layout is an integral part of content management [3]. Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, TYPO3 and Drupal are envisaged to easily manage digital data and offer a variety of solutions, depending on the needs of users. The success of content management can be measured for example by how accurate the published information is and how easily users can find a website on the World Wide Web [4].
Reading about content management frequently raises the issue of ‘owned’, ‘paid’ and ‘earned’ media, which hereafter is important to further investigate the role of content management in the digital evolution. Owned media describes content that is published on the brand’s ‘owned’ channels (e. g. website, mobile site, social media, or blogs). The brand manager has complete control, but it is difficult to acquire new users with it. Paid content is used to illustrate information about the brand, including advertisements and higher rankings in search engines. It is useful to raise awareness, but the information is not always trusted by readers. Earned media embodies all the information that users publish about you such as mentions, likes, shares, reposts, tweets and feedback through your own, or third party websites.
28.2.1 Content Management and E‐Commerce: How Products Become Content and Content Becomes a Product
Since the beginning of e‐commerce, the internal and external communication of brands has shown steep increases in mostly all forms of digital media. Nowadays, it is not sufficient to solely use one digital marketing instrument in order to reach the target, but different channels such as display advertising, social media, e‐mail marketing, have to be taken into consideration, to name but a few. The precise orchestration of all instruments used, including owned, paid and earned media, in an efficient manner is the solution to digital success.
One way to reach the target is arranging an e‐commerce shop in an influential context by using the instrument ‘content management’. With content management, a brand can tell its story and connect it to its products – in short: is practicing ‘content marketing’. Some brands might not even know that they have already implemented content marketing which can be realized through upsell or cross‐sell opportunities such as writing an article or a blog post about an important topic and suggesting the related products on the page or giving more information to the customer on the product page by putting links to related blog posts and indirectly linking more products [5].
In Germany, several best practice e‐commerce brands such as Zalando and Saturn (e. g.) demonstrate how to use and implement purposeful content marketing: ‘Turn on’ is Saturn’s online magazine giving illustrative information without too much technical detail in easily understandable language. Even though ‘Turn on’ might not be the best form of storytelling, it follows an exemplary content strategy: Saturn has clearly identified its target group as well as their interests and tailors content accordingly. On doing so, Saturn positions itself as an expert of entertainment equipment in the long run. Fashion magazines are a dime a dozen. But fashion magazines which are connected to sales as a marketing instrument are rare. Zalando’s ‘Zalando Lounge’ is one of those magazines where website visitors can buy even fashion at a cheaper price or in special sales during “unique
sales campaigns” from time to time [6]; to mention but a few examples.
The reason for content management is perfectly plain: content can drive conversions of e‐commerce websites, which means that content can drive sales by making a website more appealing for search engines (SEO) as well as easier to find and more valuable for internet searchers who might be (potential) consumers [7]. It is just as important to remember that increasing traffic, in the end, does not automatically mean better conversion rates. According to HubSpot, only companies with a plan focused on conversion are twice as likely to see a large increase in sales [8]. With this in mind, besides SEO content, marketing can raise brand, product and service awareness