Outsourcing has been a practice of companies big and small, major and minor, for a long time now, and that process is being streamlined through innovations in artificial intelligence, as seen in companies such as Findability Sciences’ BPO services.
BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing, and its meaning is in the name—it is the outsourcing of a business process, such as IT services. A BPO company specializes in connecting businesses to outside workers.
Many companies outsource because it can lead to lower costs. They rely on foreign workers who will work longer hours for lower wages, can do work overnight, if the sun is up for them while yours is down, and in can stay productive in the case of disaster in the company’s location.
Even the most dedicated outsource worker is still subject to the regular human weaknesses, like getting fatigued after a certain number of hours of work, and, yet worse, being unable to work around-the-clock, 24/7/365. Wouldn’t it be nice if people could do that?
Humans are prone to error, unfortunately, and this is doubly true for tasks that may be repetitive and, honestly, mind-numbing, such as data entry.
If you were told that you could choose between two workers for outsourcing, one of whom works in 8 hour shifts and starts to become especially error prone after a lunch break, or another that works nonstop in 24 hour shifts and has a more or less constant rate of error that is much, much smaller than the other worker, who would you choose to outsource to? Let us also mention that the latter works for much less money.
We guess that you would go with the latter. The answer is simple: The workflow of the second worker far surpasses the first worker, and at a reduced price. Would it matter, then, if we were to tell you that the second worker was not a human, but an artificial intelligence tool that is indefatigable and works at an inhuman rate?
We will go over a few of the most common outsource jobs that AI is expert at taking over.
Customer outreach is one of the biggest areas of outsourcing. You might think that a nonhuman agent communicating with human customers is a recipe for disaster, in which case we should like to enlighten you about the Turing test. Way back in 1950, Alan Turing proved that computers can autonomously hold conversations with humans.
The idea behind the Turing test evolved into an entire field of artificial intelligence called conversational computing, which offers some of the best automated customer outreach tools for businesses.
A conversational computing platform could be something like a chatbot that you put on your company’s website, the “Hi, may I help you?” text box that pops up to visitors. Such a chatbot would be able to answer customer questions at any time of the day, and would be trained to respond to the FAQs seen across your customer base. Whether answering questions, recommending products, or helping aggrieved customers.
Another form of conversational computing is email outreach efforts. An AI tool can personalize emails to different customer segments within your customer base, so that your email marketing efforts, such as promoting certain products, are tailored in the most effective way.
Speaking of marketing efforts, marketing research is an excellent task to outsource to AI. One of the best AI services available for this purpose is persona modeling, which offers you cognitive insights into your customer base. This is accomplished by combing through thousands upon thousands of customer records, general market research data, your customers’ self-authored social media posts, and other relevant data.
What is in turn offered is customer profiles, or persona models, that represent the most dominant likes, dislikes, preferences, opinions, etc. across your customer base, making your outreach efforts more well-informed.
In addition to telling you about the cognitive or personality traits across your customer base, it will be able to tie these traits to further segmentations such as biggest spenders or most frequent shoppers, giving you insight into how to appeal to your most valuable customers.
Summary
If you are thinking about outsourcing certain tasks, be they repetitive or just overwhelming, you should really consider artificial intelligence solutions. Digital transformation is increasingly seen in all aspects of business, and the areas of customer outreach and market research are among them, not to mention more generally dull and fatigue-causing tasks like data entry.
Reach out on Findability Sciences’ website to learn more about how BPO can leverage AI.
Recent Comments