The customer journey: people hear about a thing, learn about it, try it, buy it, get help with it, and talk to others about it so that other people hear about it and the cycle begins again. At its heart, it’s an ongoing natural language conversation between thousands or millions of customers and a small number of customer experience, marketing, and data professionals within an enterprise.
Companies wish that they were able to quickly understand what millions of people are saying to and about them, especially in surveys, reviews, social, and web chats. They want to be able to react strategically and respond immediately with a range of actions: targeted information, incentives, refunds, and personalized messages.
Call centers are not the solution. They don’t connect across all of the available digital channels, such as social. Neither do they roll up to a dashboard at a strategic level—we still don’t really know what people are saying, and we cannot personalize each interaction and response as much as we would like. Chatbots are not the solution either. They’re too rigid and limited in what they can do. They are really just a cost-of-ownership Band-Aid on call centers. Customer feedback automation focuses first on how customers are reacting in numbers, not in words.
Ben Vigoda discusses idea learning, a promising new approach to AI that enables CX, marketing, and data professionals to understand their customers no matter where they’re posting, chatting, or commenting—helping them take impactful actions for their customers and ultimately, their business. Join in to learn how new machine learning technology is making this possible.
Benjamin Vigoda is the CEO of Gamalon. Previously, Ben was technical cofounder and CEO of Lyric Semiconductor, a startup that created the first integrated circuits and processor architectures for statistical machine learning and signal processing, and a cofounder of Design That Matters, a not-for-profit that, for the past decade, has helped solve engineering and design problems in underserved communities and has saved thousands of infant lives by developing low-cost, easy-to-use medical technology such as infant incubators, UV therapy, pulse oximeters, and IV drip systems that have been fielded in 20 countries. Lyric Semiconductor was named one of the “50 most innovative companies” by Technology Review and was featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, EE Times, Scientific American, Wired, and other media. Lyric was successfully acquired by Analog Devices, and Lyric’s products and technology are being deployed in leading smartphones and consumer electronics, medical devices, wireless base stations, and automobiles. Ben has won entrepreneurship competitions at MIT and Harvard and fellowships from Intel and the Kavli Foundation and National Academy of Sciences and has held research appointments at MIT, HP, Mitsubishi, and the Santa Fe Institute. Ben has authored over 120 patents and academic publications. He’s serving on the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) steering committee. Ben holds a PhD from MIT, where he developed circuits for implementing machine learning algorithms natively in hardware.
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