By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) has the scope to completely revolutionise the workplace and customer relations.

This AI-assisted approach is being pioneered by Freshworks, a software company that provides services for customer-facing solutions and employee solutions.

For customer facing solutions, Freshworks provides customer support as well as salesforce and marketing automation – all integrated into a single unified suite. For employees, it has ITSM (IT service management) and ESM (enterprise software management) solutions which are suitable for employee self-service functions, allowing them to monitor their applications.

Prakash Ramamurthy, chief product officer at Freshworks said the company provides its clients with AI that is easy to use.

For example, AI can help agents dealing with customers. 

“The way you respond to the customer with their angst needs to be perfect. It needs to be more empathetic,” Mr Ramamurthy told Talking Business.

“So (that could entail) even helping our agent take some basic sentences and rephrasing them in a more benevolent fashion.”

Another way is for the AI to examine the data to collect insights and make these available for agents and administrators.

“If I am a customer support person and I am interacting with somebody, after that conversation I should get something saying: ‘This the quality score for you. You did well on sentiment, you didn’t do so well on crisply answering the question’.

“For us, AI is an enabler for our end users. It’s an enabler for our administrators.”

AI complements customer service

Mr Ramamurthy said AI could assist both agents and customers in situations where the customer is not getting the answers they want and they ask to speak to the manager.

“The agent can use ChatGPT to summarise the conversation in five or six bullets so that the supervisor sees the context and within a few minutes, knows what it’s about so they will respond better to the customer,” he said.

Mr Ramamurthy said AI could also help companies deal with email marketing and ‘FAQs’ in response to questions from customers. This would be absolutely crucial for marketing departments.

“It will make the agents be more productive, it will be able to help the employees get all the services that they need in their channels of choice, whether it’s Slack or Teams,” he said.

“It will make interactions with software more intuitive and therefore it makes everyone more productive all around,” Mr Ramamurthy said.

“The whole process gets better because AI brings the right insights, it guides the agents for what their next best action is and it helps them interact with information that can be brought to bear in a more productive fashion.

“We are going to move to conversations, not clicks,” Mr Ramamurthy said

“AI is going to make it more conversational, and more importantly, AI will tell you these are your top three problems.”

www.freshworks.com

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-19-interview-with-prakash-ramamurthy-from-f

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By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

ROBERT WILKINSON, CEO of Cyber Marathon Solutions, is warning that passwords are now very much at risk, thanks to machine learning.

Mr Wilkinson said it had become a continual battle for IT teams to get people to better secure their passwords.

He said the traditional advice on securing passwords has been how long the password is, whether it has an expiry date and how complex it is.

Now, however, a large number of companies like Microsoft are saying that might not be the best way to secure passwords.

“In this day and age, what you might be better doing is coming up with potentially shorter passwords,” Mr Wilkinson told Talking Business.

“Microsoft recommends shorter passwords because people will remember them. They still recommend some complexity in the passwords, and they also talk about not having them expire. 

“The reason they say that is because people are people. If you have to sit there and remember a whole bunch of different passwords that are a mile long, you’re going to try to make it as simple as possible for yourself.

“So what happens is when you have those long passwords, you make them pretty simple so reasonably simple to guess, or reasonably simple for a machine to guess,” he said.

“So if you have a rule that says it has to be changed every 30 days, what people will do is have the exact same password and change the numbers which is also very obvious and makes it easy for them to be cracked.”

Passwords plus multi-factor authentication

Mr Wilkinson said passwords these days have to be part of a system which includes multi-factor authentication.

“You need to have user education to tell users why it’s important to have a password that is unique for the services they’re looking at rather than spreading it across every single thing they log into,” Mr Wilkinson said.

He said that while he suspects passwords “are not going away” there are other security options to passwords.

These include biometric identification from the phone, like finger prints or face scans, multi-factor tokens that can be put on key rings – and some companies issue people with digital certificates on their computers that authenticate them.

Mr Wilkinson said Microsoft ATP (Advanced Threat Protection), for example, includes vulnerability assessments in addition to anti-virus protection and built-in AI that allows users to spot threats that are emerging. This is a subscription service that comes with Office 365.

Microsoft prepares businesses with ‘ATP’

Microsoft ATP can also help IT and security staff by keeping track of what happens on a machine and categorising some of the things it detects.

“You can imagine if you’re a business owner and you have 100 machines trying to force feed stuff to your IT teams, you can start missing things,” he said. “What ATP can do is start prioritising those things and make it easier and quicker to respond to them.”

Mr Wilkinson said ATP incorporates a lot of automation and it can be integrated with other applications such as security or IT ticketing systems.

He said companies can deal with cyber security by having a plan to start with and implementing user education.

“That’s what most companies skip to their detriment,” Mr Wilkinson said.

“You need to make sure the users have an understanding of the types of issues they may face because not everyone is an IT person,” he said.

“It’s going to be a surprise for some people to see how easy it is to breach an organisation by working through a user.”

www.cyberms.net

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business-37-interview-with-robert-wilkinson-from-cyb

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By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>>

DOMAIN Group, which lays claim to being Australia’s leading property marketplace – incorporating  a variety of brands and tools – is building data partnerships with agents and developers.

Domain Group head of its Commercial, Developers and Agency division, Ivan Curic, says it is to make sure Domain can tap into their data – and Domain’s – to create a more compelling proposition for their customers.

“It’s very competitive but we have a unique audience that’s very engaged with our products and platforms. We want to make sure we can articulate that to agents and consumers,” Mr Curic told Talking Business. 

“It’s about making sure once audiences come to our site and platform, they’re engaged. They’re engaged with different products, they’re engaged with different services. We really make sure we maintain that stickiness.”

Mr Curic’s skills are in media, broadcasting and customer relationship management (CRM). Domain has audiences that are engaged with products and brands and real estate agents want to access those audiences to sell their listings.

From newspaper classifieds to modern digital search

This audience ‘stickiness’ highlights how Domain is now a fully-fledged digital business, having starting out as a classifieds business in the Fairfax days.

He said this allowed Domain to work with agents who understand how consumers want to review property and engage with those properties.

“They fully understand their buyers better than us some times,” Mr Curic said.

“Agents are now moving to SaaS products for their purchase funnels. It’s really part of their sales and marketing mix.

“Two parts of their role is making sure they’re out there acquiring that stock and then on the other side, selling it to potential buyers.

“So every bit of competitive advantage they can get makes a difference for them.”

Will AI play a major role in future?

 Mr Curic said it was too early to tell how artificial intelligence would impact most sectors.

“But obviously we want to make sure we’re at the forefront of those capabilities and make sure we can get full value out of that,” he said.

Data is a key part of Domain’s business. It maintains data on all properties and listings.

“We make sure we use it effectively to drive positive outcomes for agents and making sure we have the right buyers for those listings for them,” Mr Curic said.

“For me, as a business it’s really challenging because there is so much data out there,” Mr curic said. “How do you make sure it’s meaningful in a concise clear manner?

“But it’s a challenge for most businesses. I don’t think there’s a business out there that doesn’t have challenges with how effectively they utilise their data.”

Mr Curic said real estate agents understood the importance of having data that has an impact.

“It’s about them making sure they’re using their database to merge with other portals, and ourselves, and other marketing channels, to make sure they can qualify those leads and put those properties and listings in front of the right audience that are going to engage or react to that property” he said.

“They’ve got their own databases that they really use and nurture, making sure they use it as part of their media mix.”

He said this was where agents worked with Domain.

“We’ve got 7 million people coming to our products and platforms every month. We’ve got a rich set of data and they use that effectively across a lot of our products.”

www.domain.com.au

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business34-interview-with-ivan-curic-from-domain

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

DOMAIN’s head of customer solutions, Angus Ferguson, says his team provides the technology for real estate agents to scale up their businesses without the paperwork and numerous trips to the office.

They also show agents how to get return-on-investment (ROI) out of technology by identifying customers who are more likely to invest in the property.

Mr Ferguson, who started out as a real estate agent, developed the technology years ago to address one of the big issues real estate agents faced: every time after an auction, whether the property was sold or passed in, the agent had to call four data houses – Domain, REA, Property Data and Core Logic. 

“If you had 10 auctions on that Saturday, you’re potentially making 20 phone calls to report your auction results,” Mr Ferguson told Talking Business.

“So what we did was we build a tool that allowed us as agents, in the very beginning, to scribe bids on an iPad. So we built technology to allow us to write down the bids, translate that into a number, store it and then send that sales price to all the different data houses.”

From there, he then transitioned out of his real estate business into a start-up tech business with his business partner.

“Agents started coming to us and saying ‘You guys are good at solving problems and building price out of that. Can you look at other parts of our processes?’ ‘’

The product his company built out of that was a digital compliance tool, allowing the agent to go into the living room of a client with the all compliance documentation on their iPad to sign up a listing. The compliance tool allowed the agent to speed up the efficiency of the compliance, taking up less of their time, making them more productive, and create digital contracts.

The business was then sold to Domain.

He now runs a team of about 100 people offering a range of products for the real estate industry such as Price Finder, which is a data product, and LeadScope to help agents identify their next listing faster.

The technology has allowed Domain to transition from a listings business to a high-tech technology company. A marketplace for the real estate industry.

“The challenge and strategy for us is how do we create a connected suits of solutions that allow our customers to seamlessly transact a lot more efficiently than they did yesterday” Mr Ferguson said.

“Really what that means for us is…what we hope for and strive for, is that we build the best workflow through technology and we have an open ecosystem that allows them to plug in their tools as well. They’ll be able to transact more properties by not necessarily putting more cost in an that allows us to have more listings on site.”

Domain’s customer segments include governments, banks, buyers, vendors, investors and landlords.

Mr Ferguson’s core customers are real estate agents. His aim is to help them scale their businesses with a minimum of paperwork and trips to the office.

www.domain.com.au

www.leongettler.com 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business32-interview-with-angus-ferguson-from-domain

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