Nokia backs the bot revolution

Nokia has introduced a number of new artificial intelligence-driven offerings, taking another incremental step towards network automation and the widespread use of bots in customer services.

The team has launched a number of new services targeting the targeting high-growth segments of the software and services market. Firstly, Autonomous Customer Care is focused on machine learning-powered interactive care bots to automate high-volume service issues. Secondly, the Analytics Office Services suite is targeting such areas as customer experience, data monetization, service operation centres, data science and network automation.

“As the next step in our strategy to build a standalone software organization at scale, we are making major investments in our software and service capabilities that will help customers build strong digital businesses,” said Bhaskar Gorti, President of Applications & Analytics at Nokia.

“We want to eliminate the need for customer service calls by avoiding issues in the first place. We also want to give service providers the ability to better understand and contextualize consumer needs.”

The Autonomous Customer Care is essentially a bot which aims to predict and resolve service issues before they happen, such as poor DSL or Wi-Fi performance. Using machine learning-capabilities, Nokia claims up to 70% of service issues (that dreaded up-to qualifier again) can be detected and resolved before it impacts the customer.

The team has also incorporated natural language processing capabilities which can interface with consumer intelligent assistants, such as Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, and Facebook Messenger. It’s essentially a trouble-shooter for customers meaning mundane or simply problems can be dealt with, allowing the more complex issues to be passed to a customer service agent. Nokia claims 80% of issues can be dealt with by bots, but this will be almost exclusively dependent on user-acceptance of bots as a customer service alternative.

Research from Oracle last year predicted a huge change in the way organizations interact with their customers. In a survey focused on responses from marketing professionals from across the EMEA region, 78% of brands anticipate customer experience will take place through virtual reality and 80% see chat-bots playing a greater role, by 2020. Nokia would also seem to buy into this narrative, anticipating the decline of human interaction.

The Analytics Office Services suite hopes to address the skills gap in the data scientist arena. It’s essentially outsourcing data science, designed to help CSPs understand how to use analytics to improve customer experience, monetize services and run better Service Operations Centres. Customers will be able to tap into the expertise of data scientists and automate their networks better.