Q&A with Mark Halstead, Managing Director at iCumulus

Mark Halstead, Managing Director at iCumulus is a senior executive with 20 years of Media / Advertising industry experience, a high profile pioneer of digital media experienced within Australia, New Zealand and SE Asia.

Mark is a hands-on team manager with proven track record of profitability and revenue growth within high growth industries, start up companies or divisions.

MEDIA 7: What are you passionate about?
MARK HALSTEAD:
Being someone who’s been an entrepreneur and in the digital media and advertising industry for a long time, we’re passionate about our innovation within this sector and how technology can really drive us further into increasing revenue.

M 7: Do you believe that marketers should revamp their strategies with technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to increase their efficiency?
MH:
Absolutely. There’s an application that we think is suitable for everyone but I think it has to be the right time and the right fit based on where it’s best applicable. So now that people are starting to learn more about it and think about it, there’s absolutely an application for AI within marketing.


"There’s absolutely an application for AI within marketing, now that people are starting to learn more about it and think about it."

M 7: How does Nitrobots help marketers in sales scheduling and sales services?
MH:
Nitrobots is a conversational AI platform and it has been built to help within the sales enablement. We’re talking about particularly in the acquisitional/new customer space within digital. So, where consumers have opted in to receive a call primarily, we work in a space where it’s very much a human to human sales process. What we’ve done with our platform is develop it so that it nurtures leads to connect the prospect with a human at a time when they’re most likely to buy the product.

M 7: With 20 years of experience in media and advertising industry, do you believe that multi-channel campaigns build a strong base for companies in any geo?
MH:
Absolutely, although I’m not sure it’s necessarily limited by geo. I think that for the time being, because we’re talking about conversational AI for the Nitrobots, we’ve decided to focus only on the English language. It’s hard enough to master the human natural language in one language. To that language we’re going to progress with English by itself, but that’s not to say that the powers of translation won’t come in other geos in time.


"Nitrobots is a conversational AI platform and it has been built to help within the sales enablement."

M 7: How does iCirrus assist marketers in their direct response campaigns?
MH:
Our training platform is designed to identify prospects based on targeting criteria. Once we identify the prospects, we use a lot of data profiling that allows us to identify these prospects and then present an advertising placement to them. We use a mixture of email, social, and online data capture processes.

M 7: Do you believe conversational AI like chatbots are the most efficient customer support agents replacing the traditional ones?
MH: 
I think it’ll be a while till they fully replace but we’ve designed our customer service platform to work on the more menial tasks. So, what we’ve found is consumers will be asking existing customer service agents for very simple things such as, “How do I reset my password?”, “When is the delivery?” “How can I track my order?”

Basically because of the volume of these tasks, it’s very simple for the bots to be able to step in and answer these queries and questions without the need of any human engagement at all. The secret to this – to enable a very good customer experience is that hand-off process. The minute we can identify that the bot is not copying or answering the queries as they’re supposed to, the ability to have a human on standby at that process of handing over we��ve managed to create that into a seamless process.


M 7: What have you learned from your experiences?
MH:
Pretty much growing everyday – it’s such an early stage but the beauty is we’re working in a space where a lot of background work and heavy lifting have already been done by other customer service agents in the past. So, wherever there’s scripted FAQs or complaint handling or documented process the bot can step in pretty well. So, that enables us to train the bots in a very short time and really have customers don’t do any more extra work than provide us the logs or scripts from their current processes.

ABOUT ICUMULUS

iCumulus is a new-age global fulfilment platform, leading the revolution of e-commerce, turning it into a totally shared & unified global economy. iCumulus connects your business to a network of global logistics providers, creating a unique shared ecosystem with the most competitive shipping rates. Unlike traditional logistics providers, iCumulus scales not by assets, staff or inventory, but by connecting true demand to supply ensuring best consumer experience.Our comprehensive cloud based e-fulfilment platform manages all distributions, purchasing, into store and consumer deliveries at no additional cost. We want our customers to be free to deal with what's important to them - service their customers, allowing them grow sales and reach new markets.

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Icumulus

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