Predictive analytics and Microsoft Dynamics AX: How JJ Food Service delivers real customer engagement results

Founded in 1989, JJ Food Service Ltd is one of the largest independent food distributors in the United Kingdom, and it has run its operations on Microsoft Dynamics AX since 2005. Over the past few years, the company has invested in adding intelligence and analytics tools on top of typical operational workloads to boost performance, says Chief Operating Officer Mushtaque Ahmed.

"We use Dynamics AX pretty much for everything, and the main focus has been how can we take advantage of modern technology, especially machine learning and predictive analytics, to expand our call center function," he says. "How can we expand the Dynamics AX functionality into our mobile apps for the customers, our employees' tools, and our e-commerce portal?"

Dynamic profiling enhances call center experience

Over the last few years, Ahmed and his team have steadily enhanced their ability to predict their customers' needs. They have enhanced core AX capabilities with added data mining, machine learning, and rules-based algorithms. As the company's ability to understand and predict the needs and behaviors of customers has grown, the technology has made its way into various user experience, some customer-facing and others seen by employees.

The company has been working with a bespoke call center module for many years. For incoming calls, agents can identify the customer immediately thanks to an integration between the call center module, Dynamics AX, and Skype for Business. This streamlined experience spares the customer from providing details and gives agents ready access to customer details, all of which significantly reduce processing time.

Within the call center module, JJ Food Service is now using predictive analytics capabilities to ...