Technology firms have deployed new AI-backed analysis tools to aid track customer behaviour and help retain them through deliberate product and service strategies that meet their preferences.
Finnish telecommunications and tech firm Nokia last week stepped up forays into the Kenyan market with its recently launched Ava Fixed Network Insights, an artificial intelligence-powered tool, that helps telcos predict which customers are highly likely to leave their network due to dissatisfaction, in Kenya.
The tool, which Nokia launched in September last year, is already in use by several telcos in the United States and Europe and is now targeted at local mobile network operators and internet service providers.
Atul Purohit, head of technology at Nokia’s cloud and network services division, told Business Daily that in the US and Europe, the product has been shown to reduce customer churn rate (rate of leaving the network) by at least two percent.
“Churn prediction is meant to ensure that there is no churn because the rate of customer acquisition is always higher than the rate of customer retention, it’s a thumb rule in the telco world,” Mr Purohit said.
“The same solution is used in a few other geographies and we’re trying to showcase it to Kenyan operators as well.”
The churn predictor uses AI to analyse customers’ interaction with the provider’s products to tell if they are having a good experience or might want to switch to the competition.
It tracks things like buffering on an internet service, complaints through emails, texts, or calls, and tracks purchase trends and habits.
Indian software-as-a-service (Saas) company Zoho, has also deployed a similar tool for smaller and medium-sized companies in Kenya, to help them keep their customers satisfied.
Zoho’s regional manager for East Africa Veerakumar Natarajan said the tool, which was introduced last month and launched this week, is a response to a growing need in the customer service space.
Integrated into their customer relationship management (CRM) platform, the AI-enabled tool also analyses customers’ communication with the company to determine their sentiment, which can be used to predict their satisfaction with the business’ services.
“Customer service is an evolving industry. Everyone is always thinking what better we can do to make sure that my customer stays with me. And that’s where the analytics tool comes in,” he said in an interview.
But while both solutions seem to seriously infringe on consumers’ data privacy, both Nokia and Zoho say the analysis does not collect any unnecessary data from customers but uses only information provided by the companies, which is mostly just communications or data available on the CRM, for instance, such as purchases among others.
“For customer sentiment analysis, it’s only the customer communication that we analyse, and their behaviour in terms of purchases, we’re not looking into their personal behaviour or anything, so there’s no breach of data privacy,” said Mr Natarajan.
