Bocconi and Amplifon together to innovate customer experience with artificial intelligence

Amplifon e Università Bocconi hanno firmato un accordo per l’istituzione dell’Amplifon Chair in Customer Science, una cattedra nata dalla collaborazione tra il leader globale del mercato retail dell’hearing care e la Bocconi allo scopo di approfondire la comprensione del cliente e del suo percorso di acquisto e fidelizzazione attraverso i più avanzati strumenti di computer science e intelligenza artificiale. 
 
La cattedra, che sarà inaugurata con l’anno accademico 2021-2022, è stata affidata a Gaia Rubera, una studiosa che ha lavorato presso la Michigan State University e la University of Southern California prima di rientrare in Italia e alla Bocconi, dove è direttrice del Dipartimento di Marketing e titolare dei corsi di Innovation and Marketing Analytics, Deep Learning for Computer Vision e Social Media Marketing.
 
The chair's activities include an intensive research program and initiatives that will involve students in educational challenges that will put them in direct contact with business reality.
 
The research program of the Amplifon Chair in Customer Science aims to develop a deeper understanding of the customer through the use of artificial intelligence techniques. "Developments in computer science," explains Gaia Rubera, "allow us to transform into data the conversations that the customer has with the company through the most diverse channels: a post on Twitter, a picture on Instagram or a call to a call center. Artificial intelligence techniques allow us to understand how the consumer will respond to different company actions and then define marketing activities that give us to create more value for the company, but also for the consumer himself."
 
If the most developed tools for this purpose were, at the beginning of last decade, textual analysis, to interpret texts posted on social networks, and in recent years computer vision, to analyze images, the new frontier Rubera intends to explore are audio analytics. The latter make it possible, for example, to identify and correlate with customer response, nonverbal characteristics of a call center operator's behavior, such as speed of exposure, tone or use of sighs and pauses.
 
"We are grateful to Amplifon," says Bocconi Rector Gianmario Verona, "which allows us to intensify our activities in advanced fields such as the impact on marketing of computer science and artificial intelligence, on which Bocconi has invested heavily in recent years, first by hiring young academic talent such as Gaia Rubera, then by developing new and advanced training courses, such as the three-year course in Economics, Management and Computer Science and the course in Mathematical and Computing Sciences for Artificial Intelligence or the Master's degree in Data Science and Business Analytics”.
 "We are very proud to start this journey with Università Bocconi," commented Enrico Vita, CEO of Amplifon. " The in-depth knowledge of our customers, their needs and their buying experience are critically important values for our development strategies. For this purpose, we believe it is fundamental to leverage on the talents of the future and we are very excited to be able to do so together with a global Italian excellence, in a logic of long-term collaboration, demonstrating the Group's commitment and attention to the younger generations and their education," concluded Enrico Vita.