IN A world where most products and services are being commoditised, there’s a sense that there is little businesses can do to differentiate. The ‘experience’ that you create for your customers is something that is unique, hard to replicate and drives bottom line revenue.
First, let’s start with what is marginal gains. The concept was popularised by Sir Dave Brailsford, head of Team GB Cycling. He took over at the helm at a time when British Cycling hadn’t won a gold medal in its 76-year history.
His idea was that by breaking down performance and improving each element by one per cent, the sum of parts could increase performance.
The idea isn’t without its critics. In fact, Sir Bradley Wiggins, a key member of the Team GB cycling team, called the idea of marginal gains rubbish. He instead preferred to focusing on getting the fundamentals right: go ride your bike and put the work in.
For me there is truth in both views, you can’t achieve marginal gains without getting the fundamentals right. For example, United Airlines who fly over 150 million passengers each year, their policy of “involuntary de-boarding” led to the now infamous video showing a passenger being forcibly dragged off an overbooked flight.
The fact that United lost $250 million in stock value, fascinated me and the team at Adoreboard. In an experiment to explore the link between customer emotion and stock value, we used Adoreboard’s Emotics, an artificial intelligence (AI) emotionally intelligent system, to look at over 25,000 social media posts to the United Airline customer care social media handle.
Notably, the results show a negative correlation between disgust and sadness with the stock price. As the stock prices decreased we could find a link to higher levels of disgust customers expressed towards the brand. Also, customer joy was highly correlated with the stock increase.
If United Airlines had looked at the human experience of the 3,700 passengers involved in involuntarily de-boarding compared to the 150 million passengers a year for its vision of customer experience could it have created a different outcome for its shareholders?
For me, AI is a marginal gain that businesses locally can use to gain differentiation, particularly in customer experience. With breakthrough technologies like Liopa using machine learning to decipher speech from lip movement in an era of Alexa and Siri.
Or b-secur, which is revolutionising the way people experience technology in the connected world using unique heartbeats. These could be the marginal gains we need to position Northern Ireland as an emerging global player in AI.
So be more Dave Brailsford, look at the individual components of your business and ask yourself how AI help you achieve more. There could well be gold in sight.
:: Chris Johnston is chief executive of Adoreboard. He is among the speakers at BelTech 2019 (www.BelTech.co) on April 11 and 12 in Titanic Belfast
