E63 - Ben Nichols - Improving Customer Experience with Natural Language Processing in Banking

Ben Nichols is the Head of Product at IMS, Inc. Based in
Liverpool, New York, IMS, Inc. is a fully integrated service
provider of Conversational AI, Robotic Process Automation (RPA),
Payments, Print, Electronic, and Mobile Communications.


Ben is also an Adjunct Professor of Data Science at Syracuse
University, where he conducts lectures on Natural Language
Processing, Database Design, and Scripting for Data Science.


Prior to that, Ben was Senior Director of Customer Insights at
CB4, an AI tool that helps retailers uncover and fix the
costliest in-store issues.


At CB4, Ben led a team of insights managers, sales solution
architects, and data engineers who were responsible for
multi-million dollar customer retention, customer upsells, and
fulfilling new revenue goals.


Before CB4, Ben worked in multiple data intelligence and business
analytics roles at organisations like IBM and Morgan Stanley.


In this exclusive episode, Ben Nichols shares with us the
following aspects of his life and career:


Talking from his past experience, he shares with us his views
on the differences between working at a large organization vs
working at a startup.

He also explains a few pros and cons for each scenario.

The state of the sync between academia and the industry in
terms of developing data talents.

What are the challenges that academia faces in this
regard?

How conversational AI and hyper-automation technologies are
being used in the financial sector.

What are the real-life benefits the credit unions and
community banks are getting from this technology?

How other industries can also use and benefit from these same
tools and technology.

Ben also shares his philosophy on product development and
management and why we always need to see the bigger
picture.

What are the current capabilities of Natural Language
Processing (NLP) and chatbots

How cross-channel integration can be fostered using NLP for
enhanced customer experience.

What are the avenues of NLP Beyond chatbots?



If you are a senior executive working on utilizing NLP
technologies for enhancing your customer experience, or if you
are an engineer working in analytics product development and
management, this is the episode you should not miss!


More links about the guest


LinkedIn:


https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-nichols/  



What is one book that he would gift to his younger self:


How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren



https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/567610.How_to_Read_a_Book


Organisation:


https://imsdirect.com/



BusinessAnalytics, CustomerExperience, DataScience,
NaturalLanguageProcessing(NLP), ProductDevelopment,
ArtificialIntelligence(AI), MachineLearning(ML), DataAnalytics