Many banking organizations have a "voice of the customer" program for capturing insights via surveys and such other signals as speech analytics and digital behaviors. Many have also implemented a "voice of the employee" program relying on similar signals. Yet few bring these together in a meaningful way. They are missing an opportunity. Business units with top quartile employee engagement see customer ratings that are 10% higher compared to units in the bottom quartile, according to a Bain & Co. survey from 2016.

New York-based insurance provider Travelers, with 30,000 employees and 2021 revenues of about $35 billion, is in the business of risk. Managing all of its facets, of course, requires many different approaches and tools to achieve beneficial outcomes, and Mano Mannoochahr, the company†s SVP and chief data & analytics officer, has a crow†s nest perspective of immediate and long-term tasks to equally strengthen the company culture and customer needs. We needed to think about those disciplines together and make progress to maximize the benefit to our customers and our business overall.†Another focus is on finding and nurturing talent. It†s a pressing issue not unique to Travelers, but Mannoochahr sees that in order to deliver on those disciplines advancing analytics to foster a healthier business, he and his team recognize the need to cast a wider net. This is kind of a team sport for us, so it†s not just data scientists but software engineers, data engineers, and even behavioral scientists to understand how we empathize and best leverage the experience that our frontline employees have, as well as position these capabilities in the best way so we can gain their trust and they can start to trust the data and the tool to make informed decisions.

Artificial intelligence is a transformative tool in the workplace -- except when it isn't. For top managers, state-of-the art AI tools are a no-brainer: in theory, they increase revenues, decrease costs, and improve the quality of products and services. But in the wild, it's often just the opposite for frontline employees who actually need to integrate these tools into their daily work. Not only can AI tools yield few benefits, but they can also introduce additional work and decrease autonomy. Our research on the introduction of 15 AI clinical decision support tools over the past five years at Duke Health has shown that the key to successfully integrating them is recognizing that increasing the value for frontline employees is as important as making sure the tools work in the first place.

Legion Technologies, the pioneer in AI-powered workforce management, announced the availability of the Legion Rapid Recovery Program, a no-cost service that helps companies quickly recover from the recent UKG Private Cloud ransomware attack. This new Program allows UKG Private Cloud customers to resume the accurate capture of employee time clocks and re-start communications with their frontline employees – within 48 hours – eliminating the need for manual timekeeping processes and enabling them to ensure their frontline employees can get paid, accurately and on time. "Ransomware attacks affect more than just the organizations that are targeted. Hourly employees also suffer, as they inevitably worry about the impact an attack will have on their ability to get paid," said Michael Spataro, Chief Delivery Officer for Legion Technologies. "As Legion's mission is to turn hourly jobs into good jobs, and improve the lives of hourly employees, we wanted to help everyone impacted by the recent ransomware attack on UKG Private Cloud customers – hourly employees, their managers, and their employers. With the new Legion Rapid Recovery Program, they can resume operations within 24-48 hours."

Many companies seem eager to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, if for no other reason than to be able to let their employees, customers, and business partners know that they're on the leading edge of technology progress. At the same time, a lot of businesses are looking to enhance the experiences of customers and channel partners, in order to increase brand loyalty, boost sales, and gain market share--among other reasons. Some have found a way to combine these goals, using AI-powered tools to improve the way they deliver products, services, and support to their clients and business partners. G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers began its foray into AI and machine learning in January 2020, when it partnered with Microsoft to better understand the AI and machine learning components within Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. With guidance from Microsoft's data science team, "we spent time understanding the environment, required skill sets, and began ingesting various data components within Azure ML to provide predicted outcomes," says Brian Balzer, vice president of digital technology and business transformation at G&J Pepsi.

There are three primary solutions for cultivating and maintaining CX: artificial intelligence, omnichannel and continuous intelligence. ORLANDO, Fla. -- Customer experience (CX) is not another name for customer service or even user experience. CX is a digital strategy that CIOs often overlook. "Everyone is in the customer economy," said Gene Alvarez, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, while speaking at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, Florida, in October. Government CIOs are servicing citizens, banks have clients and the military has soldiers, for example.