Whether it’s a slice of cheese, pepperoni, veggie…thin crust or thick, takeout or delivery, it’s hard to say no to pizza. No matter how you slice it, with approximately $2,222 spent per person on pizza annually, it easily holds the crown of the top food for American consumers. International markets are also booming with double-digit growth in many countries with no signs of slowing down. However, the pizza landscape is shifting, and not just with the ever-changing list of toppings, but with a transition to omnichannel CX, including pizza bots. Enter Ocular Technologies.
Ocular Technologies is a South Africa-based customer contact solution provider that leverages Bright Pattern’s platform and other business partners to implement the best service for its clients. Ocular deploys an agile team, using the latest software and hardware, to always be at the forefront of technology. So when a South African pizza chain wanted to implement AI through Bright Pattern’s platform using IBM Watson, Ocular Technologies stepped up to the challenge.
Fast service has always been a hallmark of pizza delivery. One way to speed up the process is to utilize digital channels, like messaging apps, text messaging, and SMS, for ordering. In fact, ordering pizza through digital channels accounted for 55% of all sales last year. Seeing this trend, Ocular Technologies decided to further speed up the process by deploying pizza bots.
Here’s how it works:
- Sign in to Facebook Messenger
- Type an emoji of the pizza you want 🍕
- Your order is then sent to be made and delivered (based on your preferences)
“In this day and age, there’s been a lot of vision of performing tasks without speaking to a human…and we’ve been a little bit ahead of the curve,” explains Jay Lutchman, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Ocular Technologies.
Pizza isn’t the only area where Ocular Technologies is ahead of the CX curve. The company is also working on speech analytics and physical analysis.
Speech analytics uses AI to scrub data and keywords from thousands of calls and create patterns to better understand the customer. Using this data, Ocular Technologies can determine if customers are satisfied with their experience and in what areas they need to improve. Whereas an entire QA team can analyze about 1% of the calls, automated speech analysis can evaluate 100% of all contacts on every channel.
In the case of physical analysis, Ocular Technologies is working to provide clients with a real-time look at their customer’s environment and translate physical cues into actionable tasks.
“A customer may go into a bank and put up their hands in frustration. Using IBM Watson Visual Recognition services, we can analyze the body language and if needed, use the Bright Pattern platform to send a supervisor to handle what may be a difficult situation,” explains Lutchman.
But it’s not all about bots, AI, and machines—there is still a need for humans. However, instead of focusing on mundane tasks like answering phones at a pizza restaurant, agents can now perform more detail-oriented duties.
“We don’t want to get rid of the agents…we just want to make their lives easier,” Lutchman explains.
