Category: General Content

Amazon Launches New “Amazon Connect” Service To Transform Call Centers With A.I.

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Amazon has launched a new service on its Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform that aims to leverages its AI smarts to transform call centers. The new service, dubbed Amazon Connect, uses the same technology used by Amazon.com’s own customer service system to route and manage calls using speech recognition and artificial intelligence. This will allow callers to simply state their issues instead of having to listen to long lists of menu options and figure out which one is closest to what they need. The service works with existing AWS services such as DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Aurora, as well as third-party CRM and analytics services.

What Brands Need To Do
This new service comes at a time when more and more companies are starting to experiment with AI-powered solutiAons in their business and marketing practices. In January, Toyota launched a campaign that is partially generated by IBM’s machine learning program Watson, and last month, H&R Block integrated Watson into its tax filing system to helping people maximize their tax returns. As AI and machine learning technologies continue to develop, brands need to explore the kind of enhanced customer service and product recommendations that AI-powered CRM solutions are set to bring.

 

Source: Business Wire

Facebook Chatbot Offers Discounts On Prom Tuxedo Rentals Based On Grades

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The Black Tux, a startup specializing in online tuxedo and suit rentals, has created a chatbot that hands out discounts based on school grades. Available on Facebook Messenger, the Suit Up Bot “uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) via the Tesseract OCR engine” to scan the report cards that customers uploaded and authenticate them for potential discounts. (In our test, the bot couldn’t recognize the random report card we found online but proceeded to offer up a code for $20 off at The Black Tux’s website.)

What Brands Need To Do
This new chatbot is a fun example of designing ecommerce chatbots. Inspired by the nostalgia of receiving rewards for good grades, the discount scheme fits well with the brand’s young adults-centric customer demo. As consumers continue to embrace messaging apps and chatbot services, brands need to consider developing useful bots with distinct features and personalities to reach customers on the popular messaging apps they’re already using.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building chatbots to reach consumers on messaging interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The NiroBot we built in collaboration with Ansible for Kia is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.

If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

Source: US Weekly

Header image courtesy of The Black Tux

Amazon Plans More Brick-And-Mortar Stores To Sell Electronics And Furniture

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
As reported by the New York Times, Amazon is “exploring” the possibility of opening more tech-powered brick-and-mortar stores to sell furniture, home appliances, and consumer electronics. Augmented reality-powered tools will be installed in the furniture store for a virtual preview, whereas the planned electronics store that would be similar to the concept of Apple Store, but with a “heavy emphasis” on hardware and services like Echo speakers and Prime Video.

Amazon has already opened five physical bookstores across the country, with more planned to open later this year, including one in Manhattan. In addition, the ecommerce giant is also nearing the opening of its cashier-less grocery store concept of Amazon Go.

What Brands Need To Do
Make no mistake, Amazon is determined to make major inroads into the brick-and-mortar retail market after dominating the ecommerce market for years, and it has all the customer data and retail technologies to back it up. This imminent grand entry should sound the alarm for all retailers and CPG brands who rely on traditional retail distributions, who should have started preparing to compete with Amazon in the offline world yesterday. Walmart, for example, announced the launch of a tech incubator focused on virtual reality and artificial intelligence to boost its retail smarts. More retailers need to start equipping themselves with new technologies in order to deliver a digitally enhanced retail experience and fight off Amazon’s advances.

Source: New York Times

Google Assistant Can Now Tell You When Your Food Will Expire

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Over the past week, Google Assistant gained about a dozen new actions (voice-only apps for Google Assistant, akin to skills for Alexa and Cortana), enabling new features and functions for Google Home and Pixel phones. One standout among this batch is one created by Chefling, a fridge-monitoring app. By enabling this action, users can share their grocery list with Chefling to allow its Google Home action to tell you when food in your fridge is likely to expire or suggest recipes based on ingredients in your kitchen.

What Brands Need To Do
Normally, Google Home users can ask Google Assistant to add grocery items to a Google Keep shopping list, but Chefling expands that use case to cover the post-grocery shopping activities. And Google Home’s voice-based interface makes it a perfect companion in the kitchen, where hands-free interactions are often preferred. When creating voice-based apps for voice-based smart devices, brands need to think about the extra value they can offer to enhance the user experience and establish a touchpoint with customers that are quickly embracing voice-activated digital assistant services.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed with Drizly for Miller Lite is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.

If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Header image is a promotional image for Google Home 

Sephora Partners With ModiFace To Break Down Makeup Looks In AR

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Sephora is betting big on augmented realities. The beauty retailer is working with AR technology provider ModiFace to perfect facial recognition technology for virtual makeup features in its mobile apps for customers to digitally try on products. According to Bridget Dolan, VP of the Sephora Innovation Lab, the technology can break down one virtual makeup application into a step-by-step layering process, while maintaining critical accuracy and reaching mass scale.

In its mobile app, Sephora has fleshed out its augmented reality offerings with a newly launched Virtual Artist tutorial feature that aims to drive purchases via virtual sampling and step-by-step tutorials. Once they are done with the AR-enabled tutorials, an “add to cart” button allows the testers to add products featured in the tutorials into their shopping carts.

What Beauty Brands Need To Do
Increasingly we are seeing beauty brands incorporating AR technologies into their products and services. L’Oreal’s Makeup Genius app and the BeautyU app from Covergirl are good examples of how beauty brands can leverage the advanced capabilities of smartphones to provide extra utility throughout the consumer journey. Beyond driving sales, those digital tutorials also help brands to collect behavioral data on individual user’s beauty needs and interests so as to better serve their customers with personalized offers.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience working with beauty clients to create and implement digitally enhanced retail experiences. The recently-opened NYX Cosmetics store at Union Square is a proud showcase of our team’s work in this space and elevated NYX as one of the most innovative digital beauty brands of 2016 named by WWD. If you’d like to learn more about how your brand can develop and implement digital-driven solutions to modernize your beauty retail experience, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: Glossy

What Apple’s Acquisition Of Workflow Means For Future Conversational Platforms

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Apple announced on Thursday that it has acquired Workflow, an iOS automation app that lets you sync up apps to create quick shortcuts and automated actions, such as uploading the pictures you posted on Instagram to your Dropbox, or sending an automated message to someone when you crossed something off your to-do list. Apple is not shutting down the app for now, and is instead making it free to download. But it seems safe to assume that sooner or later Apple will be integrating Workflow’s cloud-based app automation capabilities into IOS, therefore opening up a lot of new possibilities for users to set up customized automation integrated with the core iOS features such as Siri and screenshot.

What Brands Need To Do
Beyond improving the accessibility and user experience of iOS devices, this acquisition also hints at what the future of Apple’s strategy for Siri and home automation might be. By adding Siri support, Apple could vastly expand Siri’s capabilities and make it easier for users to customize their experiences. As major tech players rush to build out AI-powered, voice-enabled platforms, as Amazon is doing with Alexa, Google with Google Assistant, and Microsoft with Cortana, Workflow will give Apple a much-needed boost in creating a user-friendly entryway for customizable voice experiences.

For brands, this means two things. One, there are opportunities in creating automation recipes that help integrate your branded app or web-based services into the iOS ecosystem so as to expand your reach and provide users with extra value. In addition, brands also need to prepare for the rise of conversational interfaces and figure out an authentic brand voice to reach customers.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed with Drizly for Miller Lite is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.

If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: The Next Web

 

Chase Enlists Eric Clapton For Its First Facebook Live Event

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Chase has jumped on the Facebook Live train with a plan to live stream performances from rock legend Eric Clapton’s upcoming tour on its Facebook Page this weekend. The bank is sponsoring Clapton’s North American tour and plans to broadcast four songs from the concert at in Inglewood, California this weekend exclusively on its Facebook page. Like most brands using Facebook Live, Chase will rely on push notifications to drive tune-in for these live performances.

What Brands Need To Do
Brand marketers looking to enter the livestreaming arena should take a cue from this partnership and learn to amplify their sponsored events. Branded live streams during big media events offer brands a great shortcut to get their content in front of a mobile audience in real time. Previously brands such as GE and Toyota have leveraged live-streamed events to amplify their sponsorships. Therefore, brands that wish to stay connected to consumers need to figure out what content their customers would want to see and find the right live-streaming platform to reach them.

 

Source: AdWeek

Header image courtesy of

Adobe To Supercharge Retail Management With HoloLens Apps

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Adobe has created three apps for Microsoft HoloLens that aims to supercharge retail management via data visualization. As reported by ZDNet, the trio of new AR apps consist of:

• Traffic paths. Using the HoloLens, store managers can view augmented data above the floor of a store showing what percentage of people have traveled down those paths. This would likely be recorded with beacons or cameras.

• Digital mirror overlays. By overlaying graphics onto a smart mirror, a store manager can see information about user demographics, such as how many items have been tried on in which color, and how many of those purchases converted

• Giving voice agents an augmented display. Screens provide a canvas for rich information display and interactivity that isn’t practical with voice output, at least today. By taking advantage of a virtual display, HoloLens users can interact with an agent such as Cortana and see visualized analytic information about their businesses wherever they might be in a room.

What Brands Need To Do
These new AR apps developed by Adobe highlight the potential of augmented reality in business use cases, granting retail managers the superpower of understanding customer behaviors and traffic patterns in stores in real time, which, in turn, allows them to more effectively allocate their resources and offer better customer services.

This retail use case is but one of the many ways augmented reality will transform the customer experience and help brands blend their digital assets into real-world scenarios. As AR technology continues to develop apace, more brands need to start thinking about ways that they can leverage it to create an enhanced customer experience with contextual and personalized offers.

Source: ZDNet

 

Microsoft Licenses Patents To Toyota For A Seat In Connected Car

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Microsoft has officially joined the connected car race by announcing a new “auto licensing program” that lends its proprietary technologies in navigation, entertainment, and voice recognition to automakers, Toyota is the first partner to license Microsoft’s technologies, but the Japanese company offers no detail on exactly what it plans to use the patents for.

Up until now, Microsoft has relatively taken a back seat in the connected car development compared to its arch-rivals Google and Apple, revealing last year that it has no intention to build self-driving cars. This new licensing program seems more likely to offer components that can help auto brands to build a Windows-powered in-car infotainment system a la Apple’s CarPlay, which is a considerable step-down from the ambitious ”Windows in car” concept it had planned.

What Brands Need To Do
Regardless of its level of sophistication, this move by Microsoft serves as the latest harbinger in the transformation that the auto industry is going through. According to the estimation of market research firm Gartner, Inc, there will be a quarter billion connected vehicles on the road by 2020, enabling new media opportunities to reach customers while they are in the car. As connected car becomes the next battleground for consumer attention, brands should seize the opportunity to reach in-car consumers with personalized value offers through the dashboard and integrated digital channels.

 

Source: The Verge

Sony Sponsors NCAA “Boss Button” For March Madness Viewers To Promote PlayStation Vue

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Sony took a fun and unorthodox way to promote PlayStation Vue by creating a branded “Boss Button” for basketball fans who are watching the NCAA March Madness games at work. Also known as a panic button, the Boss Button allows slackers watching the game on NCAA’s site to quickly switch to a normal-looking PowerPoint file titled “Progress Score” whenever someone important walks by (this doesn’t work in offices with an open floor plan, obviously). If they happen to take a second look at the presentation, they will find that it is actually an ad for PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT TV streaming service. NCAA has been putting Boss Button on their online media player for March Madness games since 2006, but this is the first time a brand has been integrated into this goofy feature.

What Brands Need To Do
This is a cool example of how brands can think outside the box to reach customers in unexpected places. At a time when ad blockers and ad-free streaming services are helping millions of viewers avoid ads, brands and media owners need to take proactive measure and experiment with new ways, such as sponsored content and native integrations a la this Boss Button, to win back the eyeballs.

 

Source: ReCode

 

Header image courtesy of Sony and NCAA