Artificial Intelligence is the future. Global AI software spending is expected to grow from $10.1 billion in 2018 to $126.0 billion by 2025. AI, or the ability for technology to take over cognitive processes and decision making that can lead to more impactful outcomes, can benefit almost every industry and sector.
We’ve seen successful AI practices benefit many organizations. A host of benefits can be realized by Posts which primarily fall into these three categories:
Without a doubt, AI holds great promise in helping Posts optimize the operations and performance of retail stores across any postal network.
Why does AI make such a difference? Consider your best run post office – your “perfect” post office – operated by your most effective manager. Think of their productivity and profitability. What if you could leverage their best practices to replicate the effectiveness of that office across the entire postal network? Almost every postal network finds there is a delta between where they are operating, and where they could be operating by applying insights gained from those ideal locations. The right AI solution can help leadership by collecting data from a variety of sources –
such as postal locations, mobile apps, retail partner systems, self-service kiosks, and others – and analyzing that data to create recommendations that lower costs, add sales, and make for improved customer experiences.
The business case for an AI solution usually writes itself. For example, discovering that you can reduce staff on certain days while keeping sales consistent, or that adding a self-service kiosk at one location can improve transactions by 15%, are just some of the outcomes realized through a successful AI strategy. Once postal operators understand how practical AI tools and machine learning can help them to realize a greater ROI, the question then becomes how to go about setting up that program.
Building a solution is initially attractive, but most leaders realize time and costs will quickly add up. To create a secure, scalable, and future-proof platform, real data scientists are needed. Those professionals are in high demand, and expensive to attract. Behind those people should be an innovative strategy. The program you develop needs to make an impact quickly. Your team needs to collect data, build machine learning and AI tools, develop algorithms – all of that can take months or even years. Posts who try to build this capability often find that attention is taken away from their core business and that all they’ve ultimately done is create an expensive distraction.
On the other hand, Escher’s AI solution removes all this complexity, enabling your Post to receive the benefits of AI more quickly. And our solution is an integral part of our customer engagement platform, purpose-built for profitably transforming customer experience for Post and logistics organizations. The platform was created through years of working directly with Post, and is designed to be stable, secure, and scalable. We understand how post offices grow and how customer engagement and AI solutions alike need to expand and perform in order to grow alongside the network. Downtime can cause serious issues when it comes to technology platforms that enable your business. We have built-in redundancies for outages, weather events, or other disruptions. Through multiple deployment options – on-premise, cloud, or hybrid environments – Escher offers a channel-agnostic and centrally managed suite of customer engagement applications, built just for Posts.
Just imagine your perfect post office. Now imagine that you could replicate that success across your entire retail network. That’s one of the many goals of AI – and we can help you achieve it. We’re actively engaged in conversations with Posts around the world on how they can best leverage AI. We welcome the opportunity to discuss AI with you as well if you’re looking to reduce costs, increase sales, and enhance the customer experience across your postal network. Get in touch with us today.