One of my team mate once asked me 'Why is it that inbuilt
features in Siebel are called 'Out of the Box'? That's when it struck me that
the new generation really think OUT of the BOX and not within the box. So has
Siebel moved ahead and put on the innovation hat. The roadmap shows machine
learning and artificial intelligence in the next 5 year plan. But should we be
waiting that long. What are the use cases in these area which we can look out
for?
With these thoughts I started searching the web and to my
surprise found a number of initiatives and plugins already in use in this area.
And these are some of the basic ones that most of our clients would ask for. So
here is a glimpse of what I found.
Search Using NLP (Natural Language Processing)
'To Err is Human'. But we have divine machines which forgive
that and help us to go beyond. Gone are the days when even a case sensitive or
spelling mistake type in Siebel fields would refuse to give the results for
you.
Search is always one of the basic and essential feature in
any application including Siebel. In the latest Siebel version IP16, the OUT of
the Box (really inbuilt feature) has the ability wherein user can put the
search value without selecting the input field in a list applet and the result
will fetch all the items where a match was found in any of the fields exposed.
This is a real cool feature. But what if user could use the natural English
language to fetch his result. Something like 'Give me Opportunities that are
due next week' OR 'Get me all contacts of XYZ customer'. Looks far-fetched, but
no its there and implemented.
'Source: https://medium.com/@SoftClouds/next-generation-search-in-siebel-e15dac3857f2'
The query put in plain English by the user is sent by the
plugin to NLP engine which is turn frames a query that Siebel understands and
fetch the data for us.
Performance Improvement using AI
Everyone who has worked in Siebel has at some point or the
other come across performance issues where the screen just does not move.
Number of hours are spend on breaking our head over the complex SQLs churned
out by Siebel engine. A condition added here or a configuration changed there
and a number of other setting are tried to improve the performance. If nothing
happens with that we turn to the infrastructure to enhance the same. All
these are time consuming and tedious process. Well 'lo and behold' there is a
solution implemented with Artificial intelligence. Beyond the traditional one
dimensional data base index, the solution looks at creating multi-dimensional
semantic index based on artificial intelligence. This is based on a
self-learning process employing neural networks. The solution also claims
to be minimally invasive without touching the application.
'Source: http://www.dimensio-informatics.com/files/dimensio-dl/dimensio-siebel-flyer-EN.pdf'
A similar AI based approach has been used for improving
performance of Product econfigurator using data that Siebel has been collecting
day in and out.
'Source: http://www.crmantra.com/insight-article-1-12.html'
The possibilities and area of improvements with the new buzz
words of AI, ML and NLP seems endless.
Siebel Server Management
All Siebel projects have a support team which need to work
either 24*7 or such extended time frames to monitor the system and make sure
that everything is up and running. What if we could feed the huge amount of
data and built a solution using Artificial intelligence which can do a
self-learning to bring up your server or components, correct parameters or do
performance tuning. This can be done on the run without a human intervention
and can be added to the data repertoire to fix a similar situation further.
What if such a huge data and intelligence is available for a new client upfront
and can be used from day one.
Well some of us indeed will end up losing our jobs. But all the more
the reason to reskill ourselves.
Few other big ticket items in the area includes Virtual
Customer Assistance, Predictive analytics for sales and marketing, Sentiment
analysis, social monitoring and Unassisted training solutions.
This whole stream looks to be just a tip of an iceberg. The
coming years are going to be disruptive as these technologies evolves and
strengthens CRM much beyond its current scope.