iTnews Benchmark Awards 2019: Consumer finalists revealed

We’re getting closer to a complete reveal of the finalists in the 2019 iTnews Benchmark Awards.

So far we’ve announced the final three in contention for the award in the Finance, Industrial, emerging technologies, State Government, Local Government, Education and Health categories.

Today, we reveal three Consumer Technology innovators our judges feel most worthy of consideration for a win in that category, plus of course our top prize as Australian Technology Leader of The Year!

That title will be announced at the awards dinner on March 7^th.

But to whet your appetite before that announcement, here are the finalists in the Consumer Technology Category.

Boost Juice realtime feedback app

Mystery shopping sees paid shoppers visit retailers and then manually report on their experience. And that’s the way Boost Juice gathered feedback on its stores’ performance – one visit per store, per month across its 270 stores.

The chain’s in-house developers thought there had to be a better way, by leveraging its already-popular app to gather data.

And so it came to pass: the app was enhanced with a questionnaire that feeds into the chain’s Zendesk implementation.

Now the chain receives between 2,000 and 3,000 pieces of feedback every day, most collected in real time during customer visits to stores.

That’s more than 50,000 pieces of feedback a month, up from 270!

The resulting flow of information helps the brand to hone its offering, which in turn helps it to maintain its premium position.

And as a nice side-effect, encouraging customers to use the chain’s mobile app has also seen an increase in traffic to its mobile website.

Mychemist.com.au hybrid cloud

Online retailer mychemist.com.au has taken a very modern journey to ensure its data centre utilisation rates are as high as possible, to avoid new spending, while also making its applications portable so they can run anywhere, anytime, without degrading performance or interrupting business.

Along the way it’s had to learn DevOps skills, to enable rapid iteration of applications and take up its key suppliers newest technologies.

The results are impressive: quantifiable savings of $5million over five years. And the adoption of more agile IT practices will likely drive more benefits in future.

CUA AI chatbot

Credit Union Australia (CUA) wanted to improve the experience of acquiring health insurance.

Enter “Sam”, a chatbot powered by Australian company Flamingo AI, that can not only interact with prospects and customers in real time but learn from each experience to improve its future performance.

CUA hoped to combine the experience of a call centre with the experience of digital self-service and thinks it’s close to nailing it: a pilot saw Sam close sales at almost triple the rate of unassisted online sales, and the bot has therefore been allowed to come to work more hours each day!

All finalists will be contacted in coming days to explain how to attend the awards.

Keep an eye on iTnews next week, for news of our final finalists.