Nokia Brings Machine Learning to Customer Experience

Ask just about any marketer out there, and he or she—depending on who you ask—will tell you that the best customer experience is vital to ensuring the best chance of customers returning. That's put a particular new demand on customer experience purchases, and Nokia recently brought out a new line of tools to help on that front.

Powered by machine learning algorithms developed via Nokia Bell Labs (News - Alert), the new tools—a set of updates to Nokia's Motive Customer eXperience Solutions (CXS) software lineup—are geared toward not only offering a better customer experience, but also cutting costs, a combination that's hard for any reasonably astute business to pass up.

The slate added not only the Nokia (News - Alert) Motive Service Management Platform (SMP) 7.0 to the system, but also the Motive Care Analytics (CAL) 2.0 system, which each brings new options to the table. SMP 7.0, for example, offers the Dynamic Intelligent Workflows system, which yields the best sequence of tasks that resolve issues on a variety of fronts as rapidly as possible. That means less time to go from “there's a problem” to “problems solved,” and that improves everyone's day. Meanwhile, CAL 2.0 matches up the various help desk calls with current application topographies, which helps find unusual patterns that may call for unusual responses.

Nokia's system has already delivered some noteworthy value; help desk calls related to outages, a major problem by any standard, were down 85 percent in some cases, and truck rolls that weren't supposed to go out were down as much as 90 percent. Even better, the average call handling time was down between 5 and 15 percent, which added up over a long enough period to entire days of calls saved.

Nokia president of applications and analytics Bhaskar Gorti commented, “Traditional customer care may only address a small part of a larger problem and the time-consuming, step-by-step troubleshooting process can lead to customer frustration and the risk of lost business. By providing the earliest possible detection of network issues and streamlining help desk and self-care interactions, these new Nokia solutions reduce IT and care costs, and result in happier, more loyal customers.”

A better customer experience commonly means more customers returning for that experience. In many cases, customers will actually choose a better experience over lower costs, which makes it clear just how important this concept is to the customer base. Fixing problems rapidly makes for a great experience; customers understand that problems come up, but customers also want problems fixed quickly so as to cause minimal disruption.

With Nokia's systems, problems can be better spotted—perhaps even before the customer knows there's a problem—and if a system is going to have problems, better to have problems no one even notices.