Introduction To Support Driven Development

Are you Practising Support Driven Development?

If you are reading this then the answer is probably no. Or, you may think you are, but certain decisions that have been made (or not made) in the development of your product have made it much more difficult for you and your staff to support. These problems may be small and unnoticeable at the start but as your product scales and your user base grows, they will begin to create a black hole of lost hours and days for your developers who are supporting problems that should have been solved long before they reach their desks.

Key-Factors to Consider in a CRM Implementation for Customer Service Success

Currently, most organizations are implementing a cloud-based CRM system for better scalability, high availability, and improved performance. There are several market leaders in cloud-based CRM solutions, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, Pegasystems, etc.  However, when selecting a platform or implementing a solution, it is important to focus on the below factors, if the organization is aiming to provide best-in-class customer service.

Robust Ticket Management

Effective ticket management is the heart of any Customer Service. Therefore, the below features must be considered while implementing a CRM.

4 Business Applications for Natural Language Processing

4 business applications for NLP.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that deals with the interaction between humans using natural language and computers. Simply speaking, it’s technology that helps computers understand people’s natural language. It’s not just about picking out a few specific words and spouting out a generalized answer either. Rather, NLP can comprehend meaning and context and provide automated support with a personal touch.

Natural language processing and artificial intelligence were once technologies only available to mega-corporations. But now, small businesses can use NLP and AI to their advantage too. So, are you wondering how you can use NLP to improve the customer experience, streamline processes, and even generate sales?

New PagerDuty Solution Unifies Customer Service, Engineering, and IT

PagerDuty

Today, Jennifer Tejada, CEO, PagerDuty announced PagerDuty for Customer Service to empower front-line customer service agents to solve issues faster and deliver better experiences to their customers. The solution consists of new partnerships and two-way integrations with Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud and lets teams proactively share information between the applications they work in, understand and resolve technical issues, and work together on a united front supporting customers. 

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In today’s always-on world, 80% of people will stop doing business with a company because of a poor experience. Consumers expect digital services, such as apps and websites, to work perfectly every time. Customer service teams are on the frontline of this reality: 51% of companies only become aware of an issue — such as a failed shopping cart or cable service outage — when customers complain. Once the company becomes aware, it takes an average of 80 minutes to mobilize a response team, in part due to siloes separating teams that work in different applications and have no way to share essential information. 

How AI-Powered Chatbots Are Unlocking Business Value Today

Since the term “AI” was first coined by cognitive scientist Richard McCarthy and his team in preparation for the 1956 Dartmouth AI Conference, machines that can demonstrate human-like intelligence have been the holy grail of the artificial intelligence field.

AI has certainly endured some rough times; falling well short of the hype popularized by media in addition to the unrealistic expectations that were created and not met by the reality of AI’s narrow capabilities. Along with the underestimation of AI project costs, this of all contributed to busts and disappointments in the field. Despite these past disappointments, the recent convergence of technology improvements in the fields of computing power, automation, hardware capabilities, cloud, big data, and advanced analytics have brought AI starkly back to the forefront of research and business today.

Why You Need to Automate Your Customer Support With Chatbots

Up until 2015, social media dominated the digital world, creating a new way of sharing content, managing customer support, or communicating around the world. We all got used to it and were expecting instant gratification and simplicity out of everything digital. In 2015, messaging apps such as Messenger, Whatsapp, Kik, and Telegram took over social media in terms of users.

This created a new shift in the way we get information online: conversation became the new way of sharing — the new interface. That, of course, had a strong impact on the service industry, which consequently faced a drastic increase in online interactions. Thus, companies today are having to find ways to efficiently manage the increased requests while still providing outstanding customer support.

Getting a Bot That Really Works: The Best Corporate Architectures for Conversational Interfaces

People today expect instantaneity. That's why messaging has become the most popular interface in the world; billions of messages are sent every hour! But while the public has shifted to this conversational era, companies and governments are still living in the past. So, when brands record a drastic increase in customer support requests, they are failing to provide a good experience for their customers and losing them. Let's not forget that poor customer service amounts to $1.6 trillion annual losses in the US only.

"There are many reasons for a brand to build a bot! The two most important are innovation and customer relations. Innovation generates convictions about what you want to do with chatbots, giving you the opportunity to rethink your customer or employee relationship. All in the goal of offering a more powerful service."
Christophe Tricot, AI expert and manager at Kynapse  ( @ctricot )

In a past article, we've talked about why chatbots are the only viable solution to scale the customer service of major corporations. Remember how brands today are struggling to handle the booming number of customer requests and because of bad customer care, are losing money and gaining a bad reputation? Well bots, by excelling at managing simple customer conversations, are definitely the best solution: they automate support while increasing productivity and customer experience quality.