That’s an obviously nonsensical leading statement. Why on earth would you build your own CRM in today’s everything-as-a-service world? You just wouldn’t, would you? Not now anyway — 20 and score years ago, you probably would have, but not any longer.
So, in the same vein, why would you build your own Conversational AI Platform?
That’s literally what some companies are suggesting is the smart approach to AI. I think that’s the last thing you should be doing. Read on and I’ll explain why.
Closing the CRM analogy, today, there’s about 7,500 CRM’s available. I only know that as we needed one for Ambit, and our analyst conducted an exhaustive search. Exhaustive is right, he needed a full minute off afterward to recover.
One, or maybe many of these CRM’s, will cover all your current and imaginable future business requirements. Some of them are even quite nice to use. So why on earth would anybody want to build their own? (Note, there’s a huge difference between build-your-own and configuring a platform to suit your requirements.)
Today, we’re at that interesting point in history where many companies are exploring the prospect of designing, building and managing their own conversation platform.
Why?
We’ve been building this conversational AI Platform business called Ambit for two years now. We’ve built smart bots for Vodafone, ACC, Tower, Vector, KPMG, and many, many others. I’ve discussed Conversational AI with literally hundreds of business leaders, and the customer experience they’re wanting to create is, largely, similar.
They want a human-like conversation, they want the ability to do a hand-off to a human operator, pluck data from a corporate data-source; all pushed out through one of a handful of channels (voice, avatar, chat). Plus, they’d like a few other clever things that suit their own organisation’s requirements.
Unsurprisingly, the business problems we’re trying to resolve are similar.
- We all want better customer visibility and ideally, intimacy; but without the associated high cost to serve (the 1–1 paradigm).
- We want the ability to serve our customers and prospects 24 hours a day, seven days a week through the channel that our customers prefer to use.
- We want to record and report all of our customer interaction and gain individual and collective visibility of these customers.
- And we want to be able to dynamically change the contents of conversations and dialogues with customers.
All of these challenges (and many more), are resolved through the Ambit platform.
We’ve invested two years and an engineering team of 10 peoples’ efforts to build this. All the problems you face, we have faced and fixed, or are resolving right now.
They’re challenging and gnarly, and expensive to sort. So why anyone would want to build their own is beyond me. It’s unfathomable. But then we know the real cost and effort to get this far in our Conversation AI Platform journey.
Of course, a generic platform is a starting point. What varies is the customer journey you want to create, the tone of voice and the personality you want to convey. It just so happens that we, and our partners, are amazing at this bit too.
Just ask us – our team would be delighted to have a conversation about Conversational AI… with you.
