Afiniti had the honor of receiving the inaugural Hero Award for the ‘Best Use of AI in Enterprise’ at the 39th annual GITEX Technology Week.
GITEX, the biggest technology show in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, brought together over 100,000 visitors from 140 countries to discuss the trends shaping technology today, including smart cities, future mobility, 5G, and artificial intelligence.
For the first time ever, GITEX hosted an awards ceremony to celebrate the industry disruptors and technology leaders at the forefront of the digital transformation. The inaugural event honored ambitious projects from all corners of the tech ecosystem across 9 key categories.
Afiniti’s Chief Marketing Officer Chris Farmer proudly accepted the award on stage from Josh Constine, Editor at Large at TechCrunch.
“GITEX is the leading space where technology and innovation are discussed in this region, it’s an area where we are starting to make strides in and so this is really exciting for us. This is our first year here, and so to be part of GITEX and getting involved with the awards has been an additional benefit. We are extremely happy to be here celebrating with everyone,” said Farmer.
Last week, Caroline O’Brien, VP of Data Science at Afiniti, spoke on the artificial intelligence panel at the Vogue Codes Sydney Summit.
Joined by Rachael Rekart of Soul Machines and Samantha Wong of Blackbird Ventures, Caroline and her fellow panelists sought to decode and demystify AI for the audience.
Four major learnings, as outlined by Vogue, were:
AI is being used in fashion
“Amazon’s fashion lab has machines creating new fashion. That’s right, machine fashion designers.” – Caroline O’Brien
AI finds tasks humans find hard, easy and vice versa
“Machines are better at things that humans find really difficult. But they can’t do simple things, like pick things up. For example, in finance, trading is now largely algorithmic. Creativity is harder to do away with.” – Samantha Wong
AI requires teamwork
“To make effective AI products requires many different skill sets. Diversity in AI teams is really important and there is a role for many different backgrounds within them.” – Caroline O’Brien
AI is moving towards reading human emotions better than humans
“Our digital humans are hyper-realistic. They’re really perceived as more engaging, more effective, not only because of AI and emotional intelligence but also voice, video, text, image in one interaction. For example, if I text my boyfriend that ‘I’m fine’ he doesn’t know if I’m really fine without my inflection.” – Rachael Rekart, on pioneering digital humans.
All in all, it was a valuable opportunity to explain a topic that many still find mystifying, and to use Afiniti as an example of how a diverse, cohesive team makes an AI product successful.
The solution creates significant productivity and cost benefits for contact centers and a rich customer experience for callers
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — April 11, 2019 — Based on its recent analysis of the global AI-powered customer routing solutions for the contact center market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Afiniti with the 2019 Global Visionary Innovation Leadership Award. Afiniti cultivates empathetic and personalized interactions by utilizing machine learning algorithms to identify subtle patterns of human behavior and pair customers with contact agents in unique ways. It enhances both operational effectiveness and the overall customer experience (CX) by increasing the rates of retention and up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Therefore, by optimizing service-to-sales, it delivers measurable improvements in enterprise profitability and customer service.
“Traditionally, call distribution assigns an incoming call to the next available agent. Afiniti’s platform, in contrast, enables real-time optimized pairing of individual contact center agents with individual customers by identifying subtle patterns of human interaction,” said Mohamed Alaa Saayed, ICT Industry Director & Fellow. “When an agent is free, the solution evaluates the nuance of his/her behavior to predict their suitability for the call. The AI layer also examines the traits of callers in the queue before they are assigned to an agent, mostly out of sequence.”
Conventional performance-based routing (PBR) strategies are skewed toward higher-performing agent groups, which results in significant adverse long-term consequences, such as rising attrition levels, lower overall contact center performance, and inefficient use of higher- and lower-performing agents. Afiniti’s solution fosters excellent client and agent satisfaction. Its technology-agnostic solution is known for fast deployment—on average less than eighty days—and those deployments are now moving even faster where Afiniti is natively installed within its clients’ infrastructure.
Afiniti integrates with a client’s customer relationship management (CRM), sales, and telephony systems at the back end, allowing it to route calls and then trace them when they result in a sale. Typically, the company allocates no fixed costs to the client and charges no per-seat or per-month pricing. Most of its clients do not pay for the hardware, software, or even a service fee; it presents a complete ‘zero-cost-to-try’ model. Overall, Afiniti reports that it often delivers between 4 percent and 6 percent performance enhancements across revenue, cost, and CX metrics.
“Afiniti’s ease-of-use, scalability, and business agility are a result of its integrations with the solutions of industry leaders like Genesys, Cisco, Aspect, Avaya, and Altitude,” noted Saayed “The company services a comprehensive range of sectors including financial services, hospitality, insurance, retail, satellite, TV, telecommunications, and utilities. With more than 150 installations in 21 countries, the company has impacted more than 1 billion interactions of approximately 600,000 optimized agents in various verticals. Its superior value proposition is expected to drive an even greater number in the coming years.”
“We are honoured to receive this award and have Frost & Sullivan recognise the results our unique technology is delivering to our clients today,” said Chris Farmer, Chief Marketing Officer at Afiniti.
Each year, Frost & Sullivan bestows this award upon the company that demonstrates excellence in growth and customer value. It recognizes the superiority of the product/service as well as the overall customer, purchase, ownership, and service experience offered, which has resulted in the recipient company seeing above-market growth and greater share of wallet. The award lauds the growth, diversification, and sustainability strategies of the company.
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.
About Afiniti
Afiniti Enterprise Behavioral Pairing™ uses artificial intelligence to identify subtle and valuable patterns of human interaction in order to pair individuals on the basis of behavior, leading to more successful interactions and measurable increases in enterprise profitability. Afiniti operates throughout the world and has measurably driven billions of dollars in incremental value to its clients.
Afiniti has over 150 deployments in major enterprises across a range of sectors, including telecommunications, insurance, financial services, hospitality and healthcare, and has optimized more than 600,000 agents and 700 million customers. Afiniti’s technology continually learns and improves, analyzing 1.3 million interactions every day to refine its pairings. For more information, please visit https://www.afiniti.com.
About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today’s market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion.
Contact:
Kristen Moore
P: 210.247.3823
E: kristen.moore@frost.com
Source: Frost & Sullivan
Last week at the O2 Partner Awards, Afiniti was named ‘Best Partner for Innovation’ in 2018. We truly appreciate the O2 team and their recognition of our long-standing, successful partnership.
Afiniti and telecommunications provider O2 first partnered in 2015 and have forged a strong relationship in which Afiniti EBP™ intelligently routes approximately 3 million calls per month placed to O2 on the basis of behavior. As a result, O2 is seeing $20 million in annualised incremental revenue, 8% churn reduction, and 15,000 annual incremental saves.
We look forward to continuing to provide our partner with measurable gains in profitability and customer satisfaction.
Attendees included Ian Hayhoe, Gareth Turpin, Malcolmn Cubitt, and our own Caroline Langan, Davide Caramelli, and Jay Duffy.