Call Center and Soccer: Two of a kind
One of the eternal problems in a call center is getting an enquiry routed to the right agent. This is doubly true in a mobile world that demands conversational support in near real time. Add to this the fact that most customers seeking support already failed to find an answer to their inquiry using an FAQ, a community, or other self-services. In this situation customers expect an answer within few minutes, if not seconds. On top of this, the ability to make engagements with the company easy, efficient, and ideally joyful, is becoming more and more a distinguishing factor for companies. Customer experience is the result of engagements, and for humans the experience gained from the most recent engagement tends to have a higher influence than older ones. Consequently, a positive customer experience matters, not only during marketing- and sales, but even more so in situations that require active help of the company that sold the product or service. So, getting a solution to an issue must be as easy and as human as possible. The challenge is that every support organization needs to live and work with limited resources – human as well as technical ones. It is Like a Good Game of Soccer 11 players and a ball. There is a goal keeper, are defenders, midfielders and attackers who play as a team against their opposition, trained by their coach and guided by the captain. There is a core team, and some players may be assigned to different roles, even within one game. Depending on the opposition team, the coach and the captain change player assignments, tactics...
Helpshift to Salesforce Integration – Where Peanut Butter meets the Jelly
The leading in-app support company Helpshift just released a seamless integration with the Salesforce Service Cloud. This integration is now available on AppExchange. Here a copy of the press release for your convenience, followed by my analysis: Helpshift Announces New Integration Capabilities for Its Customers on the Salesforce AppExchange, the World’s Leading Enterprise Apps Marketplace SAN FRANCISCO – (BUSINESS WIRE) – MAY 25, 2017 – Helpshift today announced an integration with new capabilities available on the Salesforce AppExchange. This integration is meant to improve the mobile user experience by enabling service agents to deliver support to app users directly from within their Salesforce Service Cloud Dashboard – In-app! When a customer contacts support from inside the Helpshift-enabled app, a Salesforce case is created that the agent responds to, creating an in-app conversation. Customers get notified via banners, notifications and badges, enabling them to continue at their pace. “Organizations are seeing an explosion in demand for mobile solutions from their customers,” said Esteban Kolsky, president of thinkJar, a customer strategies advisory firm, “and they quickly realize they can’t offer outdated and incomplete solutions without real time data. Direct integration with systems of record are at the core of their strategies to support this trend.” Built on the Salesforce Platform, the Helpshift integration is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange. Enterprises can benefit in the following ways: In-app Messaging: Helpshift’s new integration capabilities allow existing Salesforce customers to provide support to mobile customers, which extends their ability to reach mobile customers where it matters: Directly in the app, and supported by the smartphones’ powerful notification mechanisms. Enhanced Knowledge Capabilities:...
AI and IoT at SAP – Yin and Yang
During the 2017 SAPPHIRE NOW conference SAP told the stunned audience about how they connected some dots to create better value and more intelligent business applications for their customers. In essence SAP lifted the veil on how the company will go ahead with two technologies that will dominate the next years and that are ordinarily treated as different topics. But which, in essence, are like yin and yang. I talk about AI and machine learning on one hand, and IoT on the other. SAP has been fairly quiet on the former and fairly vocal on the latter, although the first announcement was about machine learning powered intelligent business applications, back in November 2016. At that time SAP announced the availability of the machine learning platform for SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. After this, SAP announced SAP Leonardo, the bundling of their IoT portfolio back in January 2017. On day 1 of SAPPHIRE NOW SAP delivered on the November promise by announcing “it’s time for machine learning to take the work out of your work flow. It’s time for billions of devices to go from thinking, to doing. It’s time for SAP Leonardo, the SAP system for digital innovation.’ With this approach they even go beyond only connecting two technologies but they also add Blockchain, Big Data, Data Intelligence and Analytics into one single platform. Whereas one could argue that Big Data, Data Intelligence and Analytics are essentially the same. With this powerful combination, as Holger Mueller, Principal Analyst of Constellation Research, aptly observed, ‘technology for the first time can do more than business best practices want’. To accommodate for this, SAP...