Why Customer Experience Matters to One of the World’s Largest Cement Producers

Robin Meyerhoff — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 06:12:16 +0000

As one of the top cement producers in the world, creates building materials and services for customers across four continents. But even giants like CEMEX, headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico, recognise that in a digital world, they must provide a modern, personalised experience to customers.

CEMEX began its digital transformation three years ago by analysing how technology could help engage customers more effectively. According to Ricardo Chapa, head of Digital Architecture and Emerging Technologies, “When we began our digital transformation, our top management realized that we excel in creating high-quality products efficiently. But at the same time, they recognised that we needed to be better at dealing with our customers.”

Selling primarily to large construction companies, CEMEX wanted to offer a top-notch B2B eCommerce solution. To start, the company mapped the customer journey and identified customer pain points. That exercise — combined with design thinking sessions and agile development based on feedback from customers and business leaders — led the company to create .

“We developed CEMEX Go from scratch. It’s a cloud-based e-commerce solution completely tailored to our customers’ needs,” Chapa explained. CEMEX Go was created to address customers’ complex and often very specific requirements for the construction market. The platform is now used globally and processes around 60 percent of customer orders — and that number is growing.

In 2001, CEMEX created Construrama, the largest network of retail stores for building materials in Mexico and other Latin American countries where CEMEX has a presence. The Construrama network was developed to strengthen CEMEX distributors, support local hardware store owners, and expand the company’s presence in the construction industry. Through the network, CEMEX can sell products to individuals doing construction projects; however, the company realized it needed to modernise the online experience and create digital offers for the network.

To jump start the network’s e-commerce strategy, CEMEX selected , part of the �鶹ԭ�� C/4HANA solution portfolio. With the solution, store owners within the network now have an online presence they did not have previously and can reach more buyers.

The site was launched in just four months and has been live since 2017. To scale the project, the company launched a pilot in Guadalajara then added new features every few weeks, eventually rolling it out across the country. The new digital network has increased customer convenience and satisfaction.

Previously, orders were made via physical visits or telephone, and the customers did not have visibility into new products that stores might offer. Now, clients can see the complete catalogue and order products through the application. They can also have online conversations with an executive if they have questions. Moving forward, CEMEX wants to add a chatbot to assist customers with orders and other recurrent tasks. The IT team also used learnings from the B2B project to develop a B2C eCommerce application for Construrama, which went live last year.

The Construrama team reports that both the B2B and B2C sites have been working well, with sales increasing monthly. Moving forward, the team is implementing digital marketing tools. “We’re newly focused on digital marketing and we think that it will help us bring new customers to the portal,” Chapa said.

CEMEX has been long-time �鶹ԭ�� customer and uses �鶹ԭ�� ERP globally. The company updated its suite with , based on in-memory database technology, in the Philippines and plans to use the lessons learned there to decide on its global strategy.

This article first appeared on the Global News Centre.

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Top 2020 AI Trends: Why People Actually Want More Machines in the Workplace

Susan Galer — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 00:50:22 +0000

will soon be everywhere, and we will learn to love them for all the right reasons. That is my prediction after seeing the latest research about these fast-evolving technologies. Read on for a quick update on 2020 AI trends from leading industry analysts.

Expect Booming Growth for AI and Machine Learning

Begin with the big picture: analysts said that AI — with a particular emphasis on machine learning — will eventually infiltrate just about every existing technology. predicted companies will invest over $265 billion worldwide in new intelligence technologies by 2023.

Slightly further out, researchers predicted that AI will be inescapable by 2025. These analysts saw AI as a “key ingredient” in 90 percent of business software applications. They also said that over 50 percent of user interface interactions will incorporate AI into computer vision, speech, natural language processing, and augmented and virtual reality. analysts called automation “a force-multiplier that will disrupt economic opportunity for many… a dynamic already underway that will pick up substantial speed and scope and requires attention now.”

AI: Fastest Route to Victory

One pervasive theme in 2020 AI trends was speed, or as many analysts called it, “hyper-automation.” analysts predicted that hyper-automation will spread big-time, notably into more traditional knowledge worker tasks. By 2024, IDC said AI-fuelled enterprises with “proactive, hyper-speed operational changes and market reactions, will respond to customers, competitors, regulators, and partners 50 percent faster than their peers.”

Regarding customer experience (CX), researchers saw near-real-time experiences becoming table stakes for most industries as companies were pressured to build matching real-time customer experience signals. Forrester researchers predicted that CX leaders will manage a “portfolio of automation experiences, from the building and testing of data to the delivery and perceived value (or lack of value) of those experiences.”

Humans Plus Machines: The New Norm

Here is the kicker, and it’s heartening to us humans: researchers said that AI and machine learning will not completely replace people because “AI-driven autonomous capabilities… cannot match the human brain’s breadth of intelligence and dynamic general-purpose learning. Instead, they focus on well-scoped purposes, particularly for automating routine human activities.”

analysts picked up the human-machine thread, predicting that work will depend on “a symbiotic relationship between [hu]man and machine. This is not a [hu]man-led, machine-do structure; instead it will match leadership, decisioning, and executive tasks across robots and machines that best deliver the desired outcome.”

Additionally, about those 90 percent of enterprise applications that IDC predicted will be chock-full of AI, the same researchers said most will “deliver incremental improvements to automate processes and replace heuristic or rule-based techniques to make applications smarter and more dynamic.”

How Machine Learning Benefits Daily Business

There are many places in the business where a strategic dose of AI and machine learning will quietly, yet dramatically change how people work and companies operate. These include order to cash, design to operate, customer experience, and procurement.

In this demonstration at the event, I saw how image-based recognition helped automate the procurement experience. It showed how a buyer ordering everyday equipment – such as a laptop, keyboard, or mobile device – would not need to type in product names or model numbers. The buyer could simply take a picture of the product on their mobile device and the algorithm would quickly find the exact product or suggested comparable items from the supplier catalogue.

“This just one example of how we’re applying machine learning in small steps in hundreds of places across �鶹ԭ�� solutions,” said Jana Richter, chief product owner of �鶹ԭ�� Leonardo Machine Learning Applications. “It doesn’t completely change procurement, but brings automation and convenience where it counts — in this instance, to image-based purchasing.”

What the AI Future Holds

�� latest surveys, respondents who wanted AI to help with tasks outnumbered those who wanted AI to completely take over tasks three to one. That is likely because the same respondents ranked, in order of importance, their top-three reasons for using AI as: automating repetitive or manual tasks, improving customer experience, and reducing costs.

As for where people come in, analysts advised workers to learn core skills, adapt to new working models, and “understand what it means to be ready and fit for the future, maximising their ‘Robotics Quotient (RQ).’” For the uninitiated, Forrester coined the term RQ, which scores someone’s ability to work with machines.

Naturally, analysts have caveats about AI’s growing prevalence, but that’s for another article.

This article first appeared on �鶹ԭ��’s global newsroom.

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