Monthly Archives: November 2021

The Best Customer Experience (CX) Automation Use Cases You Must Know

Customer experience (CX) automation is ruling the roost and is clearly winning a thumbs up from CX professionals globally. People have realized the advantages of automating CX and now they want to reap the business benefits.

Automating Customer experience programs are done to enhance the overall productivity of the enterprise process. Automation reduces the repetition of tasks and aids in reallocation of the resources to crucial tasks. Automation has proven to be economical for small and mid-size companies.

Let us look at Customer Experience automation use case examples to know how effective this technology is.

• Customer Service & Self-Service

Customers today prefer being communicated via texts rather than calls. They go for quick response time and online accessibility. Automating customer service is the best way companies can reach customers and resolve their queries.

Today live chat support, AI automation software like chatbots is well equipped to resolve user queries. These solutions offer instant solutions to relatively simple user problems. However, complex problems are addressed by human agents.

Self-service is another excellent option where companies provide information in the form of FAQs or a series of steps where users can seek answers for their queries and proceed. This is an excellent form of a DIY model.

This not only provides a good customer experience for the users but also saves time of resources of the businesses. These methods make sure that your business has loyal customers and growth in sales.

• Usefulness and Accessibility

Customers today look at how useful your service or product is to them and what kind of service you provide makes it or breaks it for them.

Companies are looking at technological solutions like IDP – Intelligent Document Processing, AI – Artificial Intelligence, ML – Machine Learning and NLP – Natural Language Processing to integrate the processing of data from documents. It will help to extract needed information, organize and read the information.

It is extremely useful for companies receiving high-volume sales orders. Electronic forms bring competence in the process and reduce the rate of human error. With direct and instant access to customers’ order history can lead to quicker problem resolution.

• Personalized Support

Automation helps in delivery customized support. Automated email platforms and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems aid in sending targeted offers or deals to customers based on their interaction with the brand. These tools play a crucial role in sending reminders to customers about items for checkout, follow up after a purchase, and sending updates. This will not increase your brand value but is also a sure short way to gain loyalty.

    

• Competent Sales & Marketing

Marketing campaigns can be customized with marketing tools based on RPA (Robotic Process Automation). They can gather information based on demographic factors such as location, age, gender etc. This will help in targeting the campaigns to particular locations and people.

AI in customer service can shift your user experience to a great deal. It offers consistency and monitor user’s emotional state throughout the sales cycle and thereby help brands to enhance their performance in providing better user experience.

Brands also get ample opportunity to understand their user preferences and initiate self-help options accordingly.

     

• Equilibrium

The key to digital transformation is in incorporating AI and RPA technology into your businesses sooner than later. Automation saves time of businesses by generating analytics quickly and providing insights accurately.

Easy and prior availability of information on sales forecasting and supply and demand predictions, will help brands to provide relevant services to right people at the right time.

Not only will this improve your organization’s productivity, but it will show your customers that you’re ready and able to meet their evolving needs.

Conclusion

Your customers are smarter than you, always remember that! You need to meet their requirements whenever and wherever they are available. With a plethora of options in the market today, it does not take longer to lose a customer loyalty. Brands should be able to adapt themselves to new technology and deliver services efficiently.

To deliver such impeccable services you need a trusted and expert team who can assist you throughout the process. Reach out to our team at Embitel, a certified Freshworks partner and assist you with all Freshworks related implementation and integration support services.

4 Essential Tips for Customer Empowerment and Retention

Until few years ago, enterprises would make decisions for customers. It was more like a one-way communication. The businesses had the hold on customer’s needs. But now, there has been a power shift. Today, customers are well informed and can take decision for themselves. They have that kind of independence and information available today which makes it easier for customers. This is what is called as customer empowerment.

Businesses who have aligned themselves with customer empowerment have gained customer loyalty and retention rates have increased for their businesses as well. Research shows that when businesses help customers in making choices, they develop a stronger affinity with their users. This kind of empowerment is what customers of today are rooting for.

Let us look into the factors that determine customer service empowerment.

• Customer Self-Service

Queries related to product/services and technical issues are the most common factors for the customers to reach out the support team. Every user would want their issue to be resolved quickly and smoothly. A faster and seamless query resolution might not always be possible. Today customers are comfortable with self-service to solve their problems.

Self-service tools are the new age resources/implements where customers can resolve queries on their own without any external help.

AI-enabled chatbots, community forums and knowledge base are few examples of self-service tools. Knowledge base is one of the most commonly used self-service tools today.

Knowledge bases are support articles which has all the description about troubleshooting common or simple problems. The objective is here is to solve customer queries before transferring it to the support team. This model saves the time of both customers and your support team.

• Social Media/ Customer reviews

Social media has become a powerful tool for companies and customers. It is one of the major factors contributing to customer empowerment. Customers can now comment, share, exchange information, and voice out their opinion freely.

Companies should listen to their customers and engage in social listening to know their pulse. Companies should take on social media customer service.

Did you know that over a billion messages are exchanged between users and companies every month. About 60% of customers prefer messaging over a customer service call. It is a must now for companies to use social media service tools to improve customer relationships and loyalty.

Apart from social media, customers can share their thoughts and review the service and product of any company through customer review sites. Google, Yelp and Bing etc. are third-party websites that are used by customers extensively. Good or bad reviews have direct effect on your brand.

Irrespective of the nature of the feedback, always try to reach out to customers, reply and engage with them. This can change their perspective about your brand.

• Customer Feedback Collection

Feedback collection is one of the effective ways to empower customers by enterprises. This should be done proactively by asking customers to take part in surveys and inviting them to share their experiences with their peers. Tools like NPS and Customer Effort Score are used these days to see the customer satisfaction rate associated with your company.

Follow up with users and if it is a positive feedback, check with them if they can share it as a testimonial. In case of negative feedback, look at it as an opportunity to rectify the errors and failures and fix it better and sooner.

• Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding is a service which happens post-purchase where customers are educated on using your products. If users find your product to be complex or take time get a hold on it then it is better to go with an onboarding process on how to use it. This saves time for customers and goes a long way w.r.t customer journey.

It is better when there a resource associated with customer account. They will be empowered with information and can make informed decisions for themselves. A substandard onboarding process can end up in cancellations and refunds. Companies should go with a good subscription-based service provider.

Conclusion

There should always be a direct relationship between customers and brands. Businesses should be open to adapt to new trends in customer service and implement them quickly in their workflows to thrive in the market today. Customer empowerment is a subset of customer service. Loyalty is what we aim to achieve with customer empowerment.

To make the best use of customer empowerment in your businesses, you need to associate with a provider who has been delivering best results consistently. Freshdesk is one such feature of Freshworks who is an expert in all forms in customer service department. We at Embitel, as a registered Freshworks partner are here to help you in accomplishing your objectives and deliver best results.

Serverless is the New PaaS

The growing demand for quicker and flexible software development is pushing companies to explore new platforms and technologies to meet the requirements of users. They are looking at serverless as a go-to solution to enhance and speed up their cloud-native journey.

Software solutions such as PaaS (Platform as a Service) have picked up steam by offering complete software deployment and development platforms in the cloud. Serverless architecture is one of the many technologies that is quickly gaining widespread acceptance from users today.

Let us look into PaaS and Serverless in detail on how different these technologies are, how they can be utilized in modern development processes, can they co-exist and many more such questions.

An Overview of Platform as a Service (PaaS)

PaaS/ Platform as a Service is a cloud platform that offers services related to computing and software resources with or without architecture management requirements. PaaS is the next evolved step of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

In IaaS, users can have any number of servers, storage and network infrastructure. They are also in charge of managing the operating system, software configurations, etc.

In PaaS, cloud service provider manages the OS, underlying servers, network architecture and software configurations. This allows users to develop and deploy applications quickly and efficiently.

Benefits of PaaS

• Resource management is streamlined and economical
• Can create highly scalable and ready-to-use environments quickly
• Saves time with lesser infrastructure management and monitoring requirements
• Support for automation reduces workloads in the software development lifecycle
• Enhanced security and compliance
• Flexible development and deployment pipeline

Popular PaaS Offerings

• Azure Cognitive Search
• BitNami by VMWare
• Google App Engine
• IBM Cloud Pak for Applications
• Azure App Service
• RedHat OpenShift
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk

An Overview of Serverless

Serverless is a cloud execution model where computing resources that are required to run application code on demand (or as a response to any specific event) are automatically facilitated. With serverless, resources can be spontaneously scaled up or down depending on the demand. It switches to zero scalability when the application stops running which means you pay only for what you use.

Serverless disburdens all maintenance responsibility for backend infrastructure and operational tasks of cloud such as supplying, scheduling, scaling, patching, and more to the provider.

Does serverless mean no servers?

Of course, there will be servers in serverless computing. Here “serverless” means servers are invisible to customers and they do not need to manage or interact with them. Serverless, microservices and containers form the core of any cloud-native app development.

Benefits of Serverless:

• Developers get ample time to optimize front-end application code and business logic and hence increases productivity.
• Serverless is cost-effective as you pay only for the resources used while running the application.
• Serverless is essentially a polyglot environment meaning developers can code in any language or framework that they are comfortable with.
• Serverless simplifies DevOps cycles and enables for smooth workflows and integration within the framework.
• Parallel processing is efficient, quick and effortless with serverless.
• Users get required visibility into system and time utilized and this information can be collected systematically in serverless.

Popular serverless offerings

• AWS Lambda
• AWS Fargate
• Azure Functions
• IBM cloud functions
• Google Cloud Functions
• Apache OpenWhisk

Serverless vs. FaaS (Function as a Service)

Serverless and FaaS (Function as a Service) is often confused. The fact is that FaaS is a subdivision of serverless. Serverless includes FaaS and other associated resources and cloud related services which are not visible to the user.

What is serverless stack?

Serverless is a set of attributes and makes it easier for user to understand and manifest in other core areas of the stack.

• Functions as a Service (FaaS): FaaS forms the core of the serverless architecture. It is responsible for processing workflows across the framework.
• Serverless databases and storage: SQL and NoSQL databases and storage (especially object storage) form the base of the data layer. Here going “serverless” means transitioning from giving instances under defined capacity, query limits and then scaling accordingly with the infrastructure. This is an intricate process but done seamlessly.
• Event streaming and messaging: The architecture of Serverless works best for event-driven and stream-processing workloads.
• API gateways: They act as proxies to web actions. They offer HTTP method routing, client ID and secrets, rate limits, CORS, viewing API usage, viewing response logs, and API sharing policies.

Use Cases for Serverless

The most popular use case of serverless is assisting microservices framework. The focus of microservices is to create small services that perform a particular task and communicate with other smaller tasks through APIs.

Microservices can be built and operated using PaaS or containers but serverless is widely used for its features that facilitate small code bits, flexibility, and quick provisioning. As mentioned earlier, there will be no charges when the infrastructure is idle.

Any function or action in a serverless platform can be developed into a HTTP endpoint which will be ready to be used by web users. When functions are enabled for web, they are called web actions. Post the development of web actions, they are assembled into a full-featured API with an API gateway which aids additional security, OAuth, rate limiting and custom domain.

Serverless works perfectly well with structured text, audio, image, and video data. It enriches tasks like data enrichment, transformation, validation, cleansing along with PDF processing, audio normalization, image processing, optical character recognition (OCR), and video transcoding.

Serverless runtime supports any kind of parallel task where each parallelizable task results in one action command. Sample tasks involve everything from data search and processing (specifically Cloud Object Storage), Map(-Reduce) operations and web scraping to business process automation and hyperparameter tuning.

Serverless architecture is best suited for operating with all kinds of data stream ingestions (for validation, cleansing, enrichment, transformation), along with IoT sensor data, application log data, financial market data and business data streams (from other data sources).

Difference Between PaaS and Serverless

1. Scalability

With serverless applications, scaling up and down is effortless and depends on the demand without any requirement of configuration or interference from the developer.

A PaaS solution offers scalability as well, but the users must configure the scaling parameters. Here scaling does not happen automatically depending on the demand.

2. Pricing structure

Users pay only for what they have used and pay for the number of requests or execution time with serverless.

In PaaS, Users must follow the pay-as-you-go model I.e., a flat fee is charged for the service irrespective of how you use the services. However, users do have an option to customize the resource requirements and manage costs.

3. Control

With PaaS you have control over the underlying application and framework configurations. It becomes easier to test and debug the apps and know more about application logic. However, more control means increased complexity in the development and deployment process. This can be fixed through serverless solutions.

Serverless provides no control over apps or infrastructure.

4. Application architecture

Serverless applications are faster, but they cannot really support long-running processes and applications. It is well suited for event-driven architectures or microservices-based applications.

5. Vendor lock-in

It is not easy for most companies with PaaS services to migrate to a different service provider.

It is much easier to migrate a serverless function between different service providers. Here, the function is loaded with dependencies that are required and does not rely on any vendor-specific technologies.

Is serverless the new PaaS?

We now have a clear understanding of serverless and PaaS. It is obvious to know whether serverless is the new PaaS? There is an evident overlap between the functionality and use cases of each technology. And the fact that people are appreciating and accepting serverless as a platform proves that this is the future. So, it is safe to say that serverless is the future and serverless is the new PaaS.

Conclusion

IT teams want to make the best of the options they have. They want a multi-platform approach that facilitates scalability and meets their requirements at the same time. It doesn’t matter whether it is PaaS, containers, or serverless, companies want a mix of technologies that offer newer cloud-native applications, refactoring existing apps, and getting rid of apps that no longer serve the purpose.

Which technology or solution to go with is dependent on customer requirements, application infrastructure, and developer preferences. With all the leading cloud providers offering both options, it’s advisable for organizations and users to go with an option that best suits their needs. We at Embitel have a track record of successful associations with many enterprises and businesses with cloud-based requirements. Our expert team will provide end-to-end assistance on all cloud-native and cloud-based applications and deployment.