Mary Lennighan
The promise of artificial intelligence to drive marketing campaigns has been well-documented, but realising its potential is not as simple as it might seem, particularly when speed is of the essence, as is often the case for telecoms operators keen to push special offers or retention deals out to their customers.
But one company believes it has found the solution: bringing together the capabilities of AI with a human element that enables it to test out multiple marketing offers and measure the results against strategic outcomes… ultimately hiking profitability for the customer.
It is the human domain expertise that brings the potential value of AI to real world applications
Toovio, which is sharing its latest product release: iOS Closed Loop at CLOUD CITY in Barcelona this week, is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that provides its customers with actionable data to help them serve their own customers.
“AI is mysterious and compelling but in reality it is the human domain expertise that brings the potential value of AI to real world applications,” says Toovio CEO Josh Smith. Bringing the two together means speed, Smith says, which is vital in this space. “In order to solve for insight latency we must move faster than the ever changing underlying customer behaviours,” he says. “A lot of money, time and risk is involved in marketing tech investments. Let’s make them work by driving incremental results.”
Toovio’s reference customers in the telco space include Tigo in Paraguay and GT&T in Guyana, both of which reported strong response rates to its campaigns and sizeable revenue growth. Speaking particularly of Tigo, Toovio noted that the firm was struggling with the labour-intensive nature of campaign optimisation and the cost burden of manual customer segmentation. “Everything was happening too slowly,” so that by the time the telco had launched a new offer into the market, it had already lost its effectiveness.
The Toovio app helps companies with similar challenges, removing the need for them to shell out for technology licences or systems integrators in order to gain what it terms insight latency; in short, it enables them to use their data, quickly, and without huge cost. Crucially, it’s opex, rather than capex.
Toovio requires CPU/RAM configurations for both high scale parallel processing and big data memory intensive procedures, which makes the flexibility of the public cloud a must.
“Data is the common language but not all speak it,” Smith says. “For those product and channel owners which hold such valuable human domain expertise we must cultivate data on their behalf through empathy. We must show them where their expertise fits and how they can merge with AI.”
