Unhappy customers? AI 
should have warned you

The current fuss around artificial intelligence (AI) is all about the content it can produce, the data insights it can give, and the time it can save. But long before ChatGPT and Google Bard, AI was being embedded in the basic business concept of customer satisfaction.

Over the past few years, for example, Dell Technologies has been rolling out an ecosystem of tools for management of tech support cases. It includes a machine learning model that predicts the cases most likely to result in dissatisfied customers, or DSATs. The DSAT Predictor not only warns when a customer may be about to get disgruntled but increases internal visibility of cases that need human intervention by an agent before it becomes a real problem.

Now, that same technology is being built in Dell computers and other devices, to alert the company of customer problems even before the customer is aware that something is about to go wrong.

“We are building in a lot of that artificial intelligence,” Dell’s general manager for Southern Africa, Doug Woolley, told Business Times this week. “Support Assist is one of the product sets that we’ve rolled out where we do predictive analytics around when the product potentially could break.

“Using AI, we watch a number of metrics, for example in a server, and we work out when we think that mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) is going to happen.”

MTTF is a maintenance metric that measures the average amount of time a non-repairable asset is likely to operate before it fails. Dell enhanced its capacity in this area three weeks ago by acquiring Moogsoft, a company that uses AI to provide a common platform for all monitoring tools and data sources from across a company’s infrastructure.

“We analyse and predict when it’ll happen, and then we send out a support engineer to go to the customer and do the swap-out of the physical hardware,” says Woolley. “Moogsoft will talk to even more automation, and automate the whole platform as a service.

“A lot of what we try to do is building AI into our systems to take away the menial tasks, and get into a predictive state. A big buzzword today is infrastructure-as-a-code – changing processes into automated processes with less people. I think a lot of our acquisitions will be built around how we drive automation into business so that people can focus on the core stuff.”

As always in the world of information technology (IT), it’s not as simple as flicking a switch or merely hoping that someone is going to rescue you from a hard drive failure before it happens. Woolley says it’s all about a partnership. But it’s also about a strategic mindset.

“The more that you utilise our tool sets, the more we can take over IT operations. The more we can automate IT operations, the more businesses can focus on their core business, which means that you can get into innovation, you can get into application development, you can get into changing your business processes, so you automate into the business level rather than at the IT level.

“IT operations will become an automated process. It’s going to happen very, very quickly.”

Of course, this is all about the business customer. At what point does the consumer get the experience of using a computer and Dell picks up that it’s about to fail?

“We’re building a lot of that tech in already, but people don’t always switch it on. You start in the business environment, we make it robust, and then you roll it out into the consumer space. Already a lot of that benefit is there in terms of patch management, security management, optimisation, built in out of the box. It’s a learning curve for all of us.”

* Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram on @art2gee