Technology Reseller v09

01732 759725 BULLETIN : TRENDS 6 Voice assistants set to revolutionise commerce Voice assistants will become a dominant mode of consumer interaction over the next three years, according to Capgemini’s Conversational Commerce report. Its survey of more than 5,000 people in the US, UK, France and Germany reveals that the proportion of consumers who would rather use a voice assistant than a website is set to rise from 24% today to 40% in 2021. Over the same period, the proportion who would prefer to interact with a voice assistant than visit a shop or bank branch is set to rise from 20% to 31%. Voice assistant users currently spend 3% of their total consumer expenditure via voice assistants, but this is expected to increase to 18% in the next three years. Survey respondents say they would be willing to spend 5% more with a brand following a good experience with a voice assistant. www.capgemini.com Prioritise the customer experience for growth Businesses that focus on the customer experience are more likely to outpace their competitors, argues Adobe in its Digital Trends 2018 Report . According to its research, organisations that take a cross-team, customer-centric approach to customer-led initiatives are nearly twice as likely to exceed their business goals as those that don’t. Similarly, organisations that employ tools to streamline workflows between functions are 62% more likely to achieve better business performance. The study states that top-performing companies are almost four times as likely as their mainstream peers to have invested in a highly integrated, cloud-based technology stack that gives them a detailed view of the entire customer lifecycle, from acquisition through to retention. The report’s authors add that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly important factor, with organisations that use AI tools to create real-time personalised experiences for their customers being 50% more likely significantly to exceed their business goals. www.adobe.com Inefficient software plays a major role in slowing down an organisation’s ability to detect and respond to cyber threats, reveals a study by security intelligence company LogRhythm. In a survey of 751 IT decision-makers from the US, UK and Asia/Pacific, over one third said their teams spend at least three hours a day on tasks that could be handled by better software. A majority said the average cybersecurity professional wastes as many as 10 hours a week due to inadequate software. Chris Brazdziunas, VP of products at LogRhythm, believes AI could provide the answer. He said: “Applying AI throughout the threat lifecycle will eventually automate and enhance entire categories of SOC activity and enable increasingly effective detection of real threats. AI can continuously learn what is normal and evolve to register even the subtlest changes in behaviour models that suggest a breach might be occurring. By eliminating the noise and accurately detecting true threats, AI enables organisations to minimise false positives and be more productive.” Less than half of all the organisations surveyed use some form of AI to combat cyberthreats, but among those that do, more than 90% believe it has improved the effectiveness of their cybersecurity operations. www.logrhythm.com AI to make cyber-security professionals more productive Could do better Organisations in the education sector are most reliant on paper and furthest away from paperless working, claims mobile data capture service provider WorkMobile. Its survey of 1,000 workers shows that employees working in the education sector rely the most on paper (80%), followed by the finance sector (68%), and the construction and utilities industries (67%). One third of businesses in the education and construction and utilities sectors have still done nothing to reduce their paper consumption.. www.workmobileforms. com/research-and-whitepapers/ VR headset market shifts focus Shipments of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets are expected to reach 59.2 million units in 2021, up from 9.6 million in 2017, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker. To date, the entire market has been propped up by low-cost VR screenless viewers, such as the Samsung Gear VR. However, IDC expects this category to lose share as previous champions of the category scale back on their smartphone plus headset bundles and shift focus toward tethered and standalone solutions. It forecasts VR screenless viewers to account for 14.8% of the entire market in 2021, down from 58.8% in 2017. (HoloLens photo courtesy of Microsoft) www.idc.com Automate sales or lose ground to competitors Sales professionals who use a CRM system are wasting an average of six weeks a year on manual administrative tasks, claims contact centre technology provider NewVoiceMedia. According to its research, 76% of sales reps manually update CRM records after a call, spending an average of 34 minutes a day on data entry. In addition, the average sales person spends 24 minutes a day manually entering prospects’ phone numbers. Six out of 10 sales reps surveyed say their business would benefit from investment in CRM software and ‘inside sales’ technology. NewVoiceMedia warns that businesses that fail to automate risk losing ground at a time of growing investment in sales enablement technologies. In a September 2015 survey by Forbes Insights and Brainshark, 55% of executives said they were investing in technology to improve sales productivity. More than half are investing in analytics (54%) and CRM (53%) software. www.newvoicemedia.com ByCapgeminiDigitalTransformation Institute Digital Transformation Institute Conversational Commerce WhyConsumersAreEmbracingVoiceAssistants inTheirLives