Tag Archives: optimize
GE Digital Launching Solution to Optimize Airline Function via Teradata Vantage
Flight Data Link integrates flight analytics with operational business data
Integrating with Teradata Vantage helps airlines eliminate silos and cost-effectively query all their data to get a complete view of the business
GE Digital and Teradata today announced the release of a new GE Digital software solution that integrates with Teradata Vantage, the cloud data analytics platform, to provide blended enterprise and operations data in an aviation-specific data model. The solution, Flight Data Link, helps accelerate airlines’ digital transformation – driving reduced expenses and greater insights into operations by integrating customer, maintenance, and supply chain data.
Flight Data Link allows flight data from GE Digital’s Event Measurement System (EMS), a comprehensive flight data processing system delivering fast, accurate, and actionable insights, to be made available through Teradata Vantage. Vantage powers an enterprises’ data analytic ecosystem – integrating all relevant data into a single platform to make analytics available across the enterprise. By merging flight data with operational data in Vantage, airlines are able to perform complex analysis of multiple flights across their fleets. Combining EMS and Vantage helps airlines connect the dots from operational data to flight data, giving them the ability to gain new insight across their airline.
“We’re proud that GE Digital’s innovative new product will utilize our Vantage platform, leveraging Teradata’s world class platform for aviation analytics so that leading airlines across the globe will be able to use data as their greatest asset,” said Scott Collins, VP Global Partnership Organization at Teradata. “Vantage provides GE Digital with the flexibility of a multi-cloud platform that makes it easy to deliver their new offerings and the two companies are also working together on integrated software that makes it easier for our joint customers to consume more data and insights.”
Connecting full flight data with Teradata Vantage provides the ability to do complex analytical functions across multiple flights, routes, and assets. Business users can apply a BI tool or programming language (i.e. Python, R, Java) to perform analysis, and then airlines can leverage the integrated data across their ecosystem to recommend specific actions based on flight behaviour and data understanding. Further, airlines can maximize equipment and operational data (outside of and in addition to the safety team) by using full flight data for predictive maintenance and – with the integration of supply chain data – help improve operations.
“The combination of GE’s aviation experience and GE Digital’s software expertise, integrated with the world’s most robust platform for scalable analytics, allows airlines to prioritize passenger experience as well as revenue growth,” said Andrew Coleman, General Manager for GE Digital’s Aviation Software group. “Our deep partnership with Teradata allows us to build exciting solutions that integrate multiple data types, both from the enterprise as well as operations to drive powerful outcomes.
Flight Data Link allows flight safety teams to easily provide flight data to other teams across an airline for their analytical purposes. The solution automates this flow of valuable flight data while still providing governance. By utilizing near real-time flight data for predictive maintenance and integrating supply chain data into maintenance planning and events, Flight Data Link drives efficiency in operations and reduces costs by managing flights and assets better.
Teradata Vantage is the leading multi-cloud data analytics software platform that enables ecosystem simplification by unifying analytics, data lakes and data warehouses. With the enterprise scale of Vantage, companies can eliminate silos and cost-effectively query all their data to get a complete view of their business.
More information about GE Digital’s Aviation Software solutions can be found here.
About GE Digital
GE Digital is transforming how industry solves its toughest challenges. GE Digital’s mission is to bring simplicity, speed, and scale to its customers’ digital transformation activities, with software that helps them to better operate, analyze and optimize their business processes. GE Digital’s product portfolio – including grid optimization and analytics, asset and operations performance management, and manufacturing operations and automation – helps industrial companies in the utility, power generation, oil & gas, aviation, and manufacturing sectors put their industrial data to work. For more information, visit www.ge.com/digital.
Technology as a Disruptor to Optimize Operations and Explore New Revenue Streams
Reading Time: 4 minutes
This blog was written by TIBCO Director of Digital Strategy Alessandro Chimera and originally published on Connected Technology Solutions.
Unless they re-think their business operations, they will fail. The average professional is also facing a challenge, one where a change in their habits is top of the list. Suddenly, we are required to travel less, attend fewer meetings, not eat at restaurants. Still, at the same time, we are streaming more content, making use of food delivery services, attending virtual meetings, and using eLearning platforms.
One industry heavily impacted is the travel industry, which now needs to re-arrange its offerings to optimize its business. In short, what is now required is a form of “recasting your business” – the new business imperative.
If the current situation and history have taught us anything, it is that when a crisis happens, traditional operational models are no longer valid. Companies need to react quickly and create, validate, and adopt a completely new strategy to keep their business running, as well as generate enough margin to weather the crisis. But it isn’t just the travel industry that is impacted; financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, transportation, retail, healthcare, government, hospitality, and the energy sector are all facing the same difficulty.
How to Adapt
If we take a moment to analyze the actions financial services organizations need to take, the quickest action at their disposal is to speedily rebalance all of their investment lines and make smarter, event-driven decisions. On the other hand, a telecommunications business needs to gear itself to handle an increase in connections, additional load on their networks, and focus on providing reliable services to a burgeoning number of people whose only means of connecting with their communities is through communication services.
Another heavily impacted sector is manufacturing, as they see orders dropping or canceled because customers are focusing their primary needs elsewhere. There are delays in the supply chain, raw materials sourced internationally are delayed, and new procedures as a result of the pandemic are being implemented to ensure the safety of workers. Some of these businesses may well have to consider a temporary reduction in their workforce.
Transportation was the first industry to feel the direct impact as flights were canceled, borders closed, passengers assigned to new flights, and flight schedules have had to change and adjust at a moment’s notice. The IATA predicts that there is approximately a $ 63billion worldwide passenger revenue loss as a result of the current social distancing requirement.
The travel bans we are seeing from the US, Europe, Africa, and Asia have grounded thousands of flights. If 550 flights are canceled a day, that is a total of 125,000 daily passengers. Then there is also air cargo to consider. It was estimated that in January, which wasn’t even the peak of the crisis, air cargo decreased by 3.3%. We don’t have new figures, but that must have more than tripled by now.
Who is Ready
Very few players in these industries were prepared; for the most part, the majority were utterly unprepared. Let’s look at the lockdown in Italy, my home country, when it was first implemented it generated an increase in eCommerce of 56,8%, mobile traffic doubled, and systems had to scale to support the additional loads they were experiencing.
Manufacturers started to optimize their processes and operations by analyzing their data to create an understanding of how to best face the new climate they find themselves in. This was particularly true for food processing and manufacturing plants, which were experiencing a massive surge in demand as Italians were urged to stay home. Conversely, retailers and distributors evidenced a 12.2% increase in sales as a result of new demand.
On-demand media and streaming entertainment services also started facing pressure, a sudden surge in customers with more extended usage patterns had them reeling as the load placed on their networks had them at breaking point.
But not all have seen an increase in demand, and the entire hospitality industry had to come to a hard stop: major events were canceled or postponed, corporate travel restrictions have led to empty hotels, and major hotel chains are waiving cancelation fees for existing and new bookings, to at least ensure future business by not alienating customers.
Complete About-Turn
We often speak about business evolution and business transformation and how it needs to happen at speed. However, no one could have anticipated the rate at which it has been forced upon us. Some countries are already under lockdown, which means their window of opportunity has passed. Others need to hasten in their efforts to reinvent their go-to-market strategy completely.
Unfortunately, for many, they never invested in the tools to better analyze and make sense of their data. This left them entirely on the backfoot as they can’t tell if the new business processes/models they want to put in play will work.
The spotlight is on all businesses to act quickly and to connect and unify their data sources to recast the value potential of this data and intelligence so that they can take advantage of new channels and customers and leverage new revenue streams.
It is a lesson in understanding and a call to better adapt to what customers are looking for, monitoring their current behavior, and knowing how quickly you can adjust your business. If ever the term reinvention was relevant, it is now, in the current business climate we find ourselves. The key to this lies in knowing that decision-making relies on data-driven insights that provide you with the know-how of how to optimize your execution model to make the alternative business models you are exploring work.
We often speak about business evolution and business transformation and how it needs to happen at speed. However, no one could have anticipated the rate at which it has been forced upon us. Click To Tweet
Failure is not an option. Strategies need to be tested quickly and digitally, to predict an outcome. Lastly, but most importantly, you need to get closer to your customers. Understand that their buying power has moved online, they are more selective, more frugal, and discerning, and that customer intimacy is now a digital concept. If you get this mix right, they will return, and when the world rights itself, their loyalty will see them return as a customer.
Visit tibco.com to see how we can help you begin your digital transformation today.
Optimize Your Enterprise-scale Processes Easily, and in the Cloud
Reading Time: 2 minutes
As businesses around the world continue to digitally innovate, are you asking yourself what you’re doing to ensure the continued success of your company as new challenges and opportunities arise?
The Digital Process Automation Opportunity
One of the smartest ways you can improve business operations is with digital process automation, which allows you to manage and optimize your enterprise resources through automated tasks and processes. A good process management platform enables end-to-end execution of long-running processes while providing real-time visibility and traceability.
TIBCO’s flagship deep digital process automation solution has been transformed with both an improved user experience and cloud-native deployment.
Cloud-Native Advancements
Advancing the previously named TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM, TIBCO BPM Enterprise (BPME) with the new 5.0 version release is now fully cloud-native and can be managed on any CNCF-certified Kubernetes platform. This means scalable, seamless deployments with faster startup and runtime.
Experience Enhancements for Process Automation Experts and Developers
To improve its user experience, the new BPME platform features an out-of-the-box user interface that allows you to manage all applications, as well as perform process management, work management, and case management operations from one easy-to-use UI. Designed and built with TIBCO Responsive Application Mesh in mind, BPME provides users with a blueprint for building modern application architecture for digital process automation. Users can more conveniently build applications using their choice of framework leveraging the RESTful APIs designed with Open API Specification (OAS).
Streamlining Processes Is Easier Than Ever
Providing a cloud-native foundation built on a modern stack, independent of the ActiveMatrix platform, makes it easier to streamline business operations across your enterprise. Existing TIBCO BPM users will also benefit from the latest version, taking advantage of the new capabilities while continuing to run existing workloads on their current platform.
One of the smartest ways you can improve business operations is with digital process automation, which allows you to manage and optimize your enterprise resources through automated tasks and processes. Click To Tweet
If you’re ready to optimize your business operations, contact us to learn more about TIBCO BPME 5.0 at TIBCO.com. If you’re already a BPME user, reach out to your account representative to discuss migration options.
Optimize your everyday actions on your Geo-analyzed data with a Single Click within Dynamic 365 CRM!
Organizations are swimming in an ocean of data! Companies rely on the state of the art software like Dynamics 356 CRM / Power Apps to organize, manage, and streamline their large amounts of data to be able to stay on a float the constant new waves of data coming in.
Maplytics is the next choice for many such organizations that realize the power of locational intelligence and adapt to the latest technologies built natively for Dynamics 365 / Power Apps. Maplytics give users the ability to geographically layout their Big Data on the map to implement and simplify geo-analysis of their CRM data. Maplytics empowers its users to perform that offer them the unique ability to select and perform a bulk action on all of the plotted data at once.
The great response to this feature has been validating to its effectiveness and resulted in our Preferred Solutions badge on . To understand how it works and how you can benefit from it, let’s unpack some of the key features of Mass Actions.
Creating multiple activities with one click
When the plotted data is related to leads, opportunities, etc. it is ready for action. Managers need to schedule create appointments, schedule phone calls, assign tasks, and much more. Doing this individually for all the records becomes tedious and a waste of time. Here, Mass Actions help by allowing users to create activities in bulk! Users can create activities like Appointments, Tasks, Phone Calls, etc. using the Mass Actions Create Activities.
To do this, first, the user has to plot the records for which they want to create activities, select the activity they would like to create, and define the fields like the Activity, Subject, dates, Owner (User/Team), etc. After filling the required fields, all the activities can be created at once for the multiple plotted records.
Reaching customers in bulk by sending mass emails
Emails are communication mediums that are essential to any organization. Every company has a load of emails getting sent to their leads, customers, vendors, etc. on a daily basis. However, many organizations fall into the trap of expending unnecessary effort in sending the same emails to a group one member at a time. For example, Mass Actions slashes the email sending time to all of a company’s selected leads by sending all the emails at once using its Send Email Mass Action. This makes .
Whether it’s sending a reminder email to all the clients that have an appointment scheduled, sending a follow-up email to all interested clients, sending a service-due email, or either an invitation to an event, the possibilities for usage are endless with Mass Action email!
Users can select any one of the available email templates or a new email to write their own content when sending a mass email. The recipient can also be kept as To/Cc/Bcc in the email. and this means a spike in productivity and ultimately business growth.
Data format flexibility for multiple records
Users have a powerful feature to export data from the map directly into an excel sheet. This data can be saved directly on the user’s machine to be used offline. This means that when users want to create a using Maplytics, they can easily do so. This opens the door for a seamless transition between geo-analysis to strategic decisions being compiled, presented, and executed.
Easily save bulk data using a single click action
Users can also save bulk records as a list for future actions. They can into an existing Marketing List or create a new marketing list for the plotted records. If needed, users can even save the records as a Personal View in Dynamics CRM for quick access the next time. This allows users to select the same view or marketing list in Detail map and have the required data plotted directly on the map in a few clicks.
Adjust routes by adding bulk waypoints in seconds to your routes
Managers and field reps can use the Mass Action to add waypoints to their routes in bulk. For example, consider some data points in a 1-mile radius from a field repslocation; they can simply make a single click on the Add To Route and add all the records plotted within that 1-mile to their routers waypoints. A maximum of 25 data points can be added to a route.
Creating single or multiple automated schedules
Creations of on-field operations have been redefined with this one. Once the required appointments or any other data which need to be met by the field reps are plotted on the map, managers can easily use the Mass Actions and for their field reps which they can follow over a span of days. Moreover, managers also have the ability to create an at once.
This was just a preview into the capabilities of Mass Actions. The full feature set has . Mass Actions has proven to be the true definition of optimization in terms of its abilities to go from analysis to bulk action! Utilizing the convenience and smart grouping of records in Mass Actions, you stand to curb manual efforts by letting our software do the heavy lifting for you while you focus on the activities requiring human involvement.
If these features intrigue you about their possibilities within your organization, you can try it out with our out of the box, ready to perform, 15 days free trial from or our . Alternatively, you can even opt for a free demo from our team to get a walkthrough demo by shooting a quick mail to us at crm@inogic.com.
Until the next time –Keep reading and supporting Maplytics in Masses!
How Power Apps and Power Automate Can Optimize Dynamics 365 Sales for Professional Services Firms
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales offers a wide range of functionalities to help the sales team manage their day-to-day activities, but every organization has their “secret sauce” or slightly different process that gives them their competitive edge and unique selling proposition. Microsoft understands this, which is why the Microsoft Power Platform lets professional services firms add their personalized processes to the application.
Microsoft Power Apps is an application that sits within the Dynamics 365 environment and allows you to build, conceptualize and group business processes and information together. By streamlining processes, employees can better focus on their priorities and complete their tasks more efficiently.
In the case of professional services firms, the sales cycle typically includes a team that builds and validates mandates. As a result, additional steps, information or approvals may be required on top of the standard sales process. This is where Power Apps can be useful: users may only need to view or complete a small portion of the information and can now enter it into the system without having to access the complete list of opportunities or details regarding the prospective client.
Microsoft Power Automate allows you to automate certain actions, such as approvals or email alerts, ensuring that members of the organization can take proper action when needed to ensure the process moves to the next stage without interruption. For example, other team members will be notified when the opportunity reaches a certain stage in the process or when a specific activity is triggered. This is especially useful for users who are outside the direct sales process to ensure that proposals are sent to the client and that deals are closed as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Personalizing your operations according to your needs can help with user adoption as it improves the usability of the system and increases the efficiency of the team. This reduces the learning curve and the number of back-and-forth communications between teams, ensuring the process can follow its course without obstacles. The Power Platform also provides better visibility on the overall process to the person overseeing the deal and helps notify other team members without having to return to that particular account. By benefitting from these improvements, users are more likely to keep using the system.
For more information, read our article to learn How to Customize Your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales (CRM) Solution with the Microsoft Power Platform.
JOVACO Solutions is a leading ERP and CRM solution provider operating in Quebec for over 35 years. As a specialist of Microsoft Dynamics business management solutions, we offer a wide range of products and services to meet all the needs of professional services firms and project-based organizations. We also offer specialized project management tools and timesheet add-ons fully integrated to Microsoft Dynamics solutions. Visit or for more information.
How Dynamics 365 Sales Can Optimize the Sales of Professional Services Firms
While a customer relationship management solution is an important tool for any industry, it may be easier for companies that sell products to make a case for the use of a CRM than it is for professional services firms. As the latter sell time and expertise, they may not need to track which products clients use, but it’s just as important to properly manage client connections and business relationships, and to catalogue communications and proposals sent to clients.
Manage longer sales cycles and proposals
Typically, the higher the dollar value, the longer the sales cycle. Depending on the type of service you offer, your sales cycles are probably longer than most, and the necessity to track what has been done in the past becomes even more important. Dynamics 365 Sales lets professional services firms tailor the sales cycle to their specific reality, as it probably involves quite a few more steps than just a quote and a follow-up.
A CRM solution lets all the various stakeholders involved through the sales cycle have access to the information they need to facilitate the hours required for a particular mandate. It also provides an easy place to store all your mandates, as the integration between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 (previously known as Office 365) lets you store your proposals in SharePoint, facilitating collaboration when putting proposals together in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint.
Strengthen your business relationships
After the initial sale, other critical elements for professional services firms is better visibility on future cross-sell possibilities, as well as retaining all contact information and the different influencers and connections within your firm. Having all this information centralized ensures you never miss an opportunity. Your professionals can manage and foster each client to build strong business relationships and ensure appropriate follow-up on all tasks, activities and opportunities.
Streamline and automate your business processes
An automated approval process within your sales cycle is another functionality that offers major gains to professional services firms, as it allows you to personalize your business approval process depending on size, industry or service. Automations can also be used to send reminders for follow-ups, meetings and other client tasks. Dynamics 365 also lets you incorporate other business processes into your solution, such as your employees’ various competencies and specialties to find the ideal staff members for a particular project.
All these features make Dynamics 365 much more than a traditional CRM system. One of the major benefits of a CRM solution for professional services firms is having a platform that will help structure your organization. At a certain point, you will need to systemize and automate certain processes to maintain the growth of your organization. To learn more about how a management information system can help you in your growth journey, check out our eBook
By JOVACO Solutions,
4 Ways to Optimize Your Brand’s Amazon Advertising
Way back in 1995, Amazon made its first-ever customer sale. Within two short months, Amazon was selling US$ 20,000 per week in the U.S. and countries around the world.
Today, Amazon has become the go-to marketplace for more than 310 million customers, and more than 54 percent of all product searches occur on Amazon.
In other words, Amazon has replaced Google as the No. 1 search engine for products.
So, how can your brand leverage this fast-growing, ultra-competitive marketplace while still remaining profitable? Let’s take a look at four Amazon advertising strategies you can start using today to improve your effectiveness and sell more products.
1. Optimized Product Listings
Before even considering advertising on Amazon, you need to start with effective product listings that are optimized properly for both your audience and Amazon’s algorithm. Many brands advertising on Amazon still neglect this fundamental step, which leads to lower engagement, lower audience intent, and fewer sales.
You need to err on the side of excellence, especially the more complicated or technical your product is. There are five common shortcomings that brands make in regards to product listings:
- Poor brand representation or low quality images: Make sure that all of the text supporting your product — from title and description to details and bulleted copy — are optimized with the keywords that resonate with your audience. Look to Amazon’s own product listings to get a sense of how it positions information.
- Misleading product claims: Be accurate and truthful in the claims you are making about your products. The fastest way to destroy consumer trust is to exaggerate or inaccurately portray your products. Don’t be a snake oil salesman!
- Unanswered questions: If someone asks you a question about your product, answer it! A huge part of building consumer trust is being highly responsive in your customer service. Unanswered questions are warning signs of a brand that doesn’t care.
- Negative reviews: Although you can’t entirely control negative reviews, you can leverage them to your advantage. Use them as an opportunity to get valuable feedback on your products, provide customer service if something went wrong, or even determine if your customers are receiving counterfeit products from a third-party seller.
- Duplicate listings: If the same product has multiple listings, you not only are diluting your traffic, but also might be sending shoppers to an unoptimized product page. Make sure that your products don’t have multiple listings. If they do, work with Amazon Seller Support to get them removed.
2. The Right Goals
This might sound like common sense, but you’d be amazed at the number of brands that don’t have clearly defined goals, or have goals focused far too granularly to see the bigger picture. Success means different things to different companies, so understanding the specific needs of your brand is the first step to setting the right goals.
There are three common objectives for Amazon advertisers:
- Brand awareness
- Rapid growth
- Sales at a target ROI
Before even considering building out or expanding your Amazon advertising, you need to set clear expectations for the channel.
For instance, if brand awareness is your main goal, you’ll probably want to invest more heavily in your Amazon Store and Amazon Sponsored Brand ads, which are a great way to showcase your products and get more people viewing what you offer.
If sales at a target ROI is the goal, you’ll need a much more comprehensive advertising strategy and campaign optimizations in place to reach your goal.
3. Competitive Research and Analysis
Understanding your competitors and your position in the marketplace is another essential step toward optimizing your Amazon advertising.
One of the best ways to make this determination is to perform a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) of your brand. This will help you better define your competition, and it also can help you flesh out the specific strengths of your brand.
The big takeaway here is that you can make more profit quickly and easily by focusing on your strengths and capitalizing on the strengths of your products. You can spend a lifetime trying to eliminate your weaknesses and never achieve the same impact as optimizing for your strengths.
Here are six questions to ask yourself as you look to understand your unique strengths:
- How competitive is your category on Amazon?
- What is your fulfillment strategy, and what is the strategy of your competitors?
- What do your product reviews look like?
- What is the quality of your product listings?
- How are you priced compared to your competitors?
- Are your products bundled similarly to your competitors’ or do you have a unique selling angle?
4. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
Last but not least, understanding the keywords that are resonating with your audience is essential to optimizing your Amazon advertising campaigns.
There are three main keyword match types on Amazon:
- Exact match captures traffic that matches the keyword exactly or is a plural. If the search is “sock,” either “sock” or “socks” would be an exact match, but “red sock” would not.
- Phrase match captures traffic with any variation of a keyword or keyword phrase, assuming the words appear in the correct order. If the search phrase is “red socks,” phrases like “long red socks” and “red socks for sports” would track, but “red long socks” would not.
- Broad match captures traffic when an individual word within the keyword or keyword phrase is used. The order does not matter as long as one of the words for the search is present. A search for “red long socks” would track for any combination of terms using “red,” “long,” “socks,” or any combination of these words.
There are a number of free tools available to help you in your keyword research.
Also, the Amazon search bar itself is an incredible resource for keyword research. When you start typing a query into the search field, Amazon attempts to auto fill the keyword or phrase based on the tremendous audience data acquired from its 310 million customers.
This offers a great opportunity to see the common keywords that are associated with your products, and the terms that real consumers are using.
Tying It All Together
Once you have gathered a solid collection of keywords, completed your competitive research and SWOT analysis, set smart goals, and fine-tuned your listings, you’re well on your way to mounting an efficient, optimized Amazon advertising campaign.
Obviously, the setup is only half the battle. Fine-tuning the ads themselves and continuously analyzing, testing and optimizing are key to long-term success.
Timothy P. Seward is the author of
Ultimate Guide to Amazon Advertising and the founder of
ROI Revolution, which drives growth for brands, retailers and e-commerce merchants through digital marketing technology and services. Seward is a thought leader who has spoken at 70-plus industry e-commerce and Amazon events. He is a frequent guest lecturer at North Carolina State University’s College of Management, and he has contributed to key industry publications including Internet Retailer.
Tips to Help You Optimize Your Sales Funnel
All businesses want to be profitable and see their numbers grow from year to year. To experience sustainable growth, however, businesses have to fine tune and streamline their sales processes to attract, engage, and convert leads into customers faster than before.
Doing so can be difficult because of everything involved in getting prospects to the finish line. For businesses dealing with disconnected systems and inefficient processes, it can be hard to gauge where things went wrong, how to reel leads back in, and also ensure a seamless handoff when prospects are ready to talk to Sales or make a purchase. Many times, these organizations find themselves constantly putting out fires instead of focusing on driving growth.
Thankfully, with the right strategy, businesses can attract the right leads, provide them with personalized experiences that improve engagement, and ensure they have everything they need to make an informed decision when they near the end of the sales funnel.
So, if driving conversions and improving ROI are two of your business goals for 2020, you’ve come to the right place.
The following tips will help you engage your leads, keep them moving through the sale funnel, and win them over when the time to make a purchase comes around.
Use Segmentation to Personalize Your Marketing Efforts
Thanks to Google and social media, today’s customers are accustomed to accessing the information they need in just a few clicks. This puts the pressure on you and your team to deliver targeted information and experiences.
To meet this demand, companies are replacing their one-size-fits all marketing with more tailored and targeted messaging and experiences.
Unfortunately, this has proven to be a very difficult, expensive, and time-consuming feat for many organizations. Not only are they trying to expand the number of campaigns they produce, but they’re also determining the most effective method to distribute their efforts to the right audience at the best time.
5 Ways to Optimize B2B Customer Experiences
You just started your Software as a Service company. With hard work and dedication, you’ve created a solid product that solves the challenges your business-to-business customers face on a daily basis. With any new product, questions arise on how to get the most from it. Your customers want the best experience possible, and they turn to you to deliver that experience.
It’s easy enough for your first few customers. They all have your phone number — you’re a call or text message away to handle any and all problems. Then you get a few more customers — and more after that. Suddenly, you’re spending most of your day solving customer issues and less time building your company’s next great feature or product.
By now, it’s probably clear to you that you need some customer service experts. You’ll be building a SaaS customer service team and hiring agents to solve customer issues. As your team grows, with multiple support agents covering the same customer accounts, you’ll need a tool to streamline communications and keep agents updated on all customer data.
With the right technology and training, you can enable your support agents to tackle the biggest product challenges and provide consistent and excellent service to your customers.
Following are five ways you can empower your B2B customer service teams to deliver exceptional customer support experiences.
1. Solve Problems With Screen Sharing
To offer great customer support, you need to go where the customer lives. Both you and your B2B customers live in software, so it makes sense to use software to solve problems. Customer support teams equipped with the right software can make quick work of a long support queue.
The customer support software your teams use should back up your agents and offer ways to better resolve your customers’ issues. For B2B customers, visual support is especially useful. Pictures and video let your customer support agents show exactly where the problem lies and makes it easy to follow steps to resolve it.
Imagine your customer is having trouble using a back-end feature of your product. If your team had to explain it over the phone, think of how many steps that would takes: Click here, scroll there, look in the upper left corner. Wouldn’t it be much easier — and less time-consuming — to show your customer where to go and what to do?
B2B customer support software with screen sharing as a native feature solves plenty of pain points in real time for your customers. It simplifies their journeys from problem to solution. Your support teams complete tickets faster and with less frustration. Relying on the clarity that video and screen sharing can provide is a win-win.
2. Keep It Simple
Founders love to try to help every part of the business. They’re passionate about the products they’re building, and they want to explain as much as possible about how it works. That goes over well in new customer meetings and conference talks. It’s less helpful when customers are frustrated and need support.
Customer support presents an excellent opportunity for a founder to step back and let the team go to work. While a founder is well-versed in the tech speak relevant to the company’s product, that high-detail form of communication doesn’t translate well into closing customer tickets. Tech can get complicated, and your customers are looking for simple answers.
Empower your customer support teams to keep it simple. You’ve trained your agents well — now let them use their intellect to deliver great service for your product. The best hires on support teams can take the complex and boil it down to terms and steps that customers easily can follow.
Let’s say you have a customer who’s asking about how to activate the most recently debuted product feature. A founder excitedly might share the valuable technology operating in the back end to enable the feature and highlight its use cases.
A trained customer service agent would break down the issue itself and walk the customer through the activation process. By enabling support agents to keep it simple, founders can focus their time on building the next product feature. Customers get the specific answers they want while having a positive experience with the company.
3. Support Takes a Team
When you’re first building your product, it can feel like you’re a team of one. While sometimes that is the case, you can achieve greater results through collaborative team efforts. This is as true in customer support as it is in any other business function.
B2B customer support thrives on collaboration. Even if the answers your customers get are simple, arriving at those answers could take several complex steps. Having access to the right minds at the right times can create effective and memorable support experiences.
Perhaps a customer has a question about a highly technical part of your product. While your support agents are well-trained, they’re not equipped to answer a question with that level of detail. A great customer support software product can connect the agent to one of your engineers without needing to switch between technologies. Together, they can work out a solution and send it back to the customer in a matter of minutes.
To be successful, you need to create an environment of trust with your customer service agents. They should feel comfortable when they seek advice from specialists who can provide better answers to customer questions. A team-of-one mentality would have the agent trying to field every single answer. A collaborative environment instead encourages the agent to connect with fellow agents and other teams to lean on their expertise to solve problems.
Your support software should encourage collaboration. That kind of software includes resources that allow agents to share information quickly. If you can create channels for easy collaboration, then agents can jump right into them and solve even the most difficult customer challenges through teamwork.
4. Take an Omnichannel Approach
Your customers live everywhere online, and they expect you to be the same way. When they have questions for your support team, they’ll use all sorts of channels to make contact. It’s easy for agents to feel bombarded in short order without a system to maintain order.
Customers will come from everywhere with their questions: email, phone,live chat and more. Even in the digital age, phone calls are one of the most popular ways customers contact teams for help. Software built to manage omnichannel customer support approaches will enable your agents to answer customers quickly and decisively, no matter where they started.
An omnichannel approach lets your agents easily switch between channels and reply to customers where they are, not missing a beat or needing to ask them to repeat information. Solutions will need to be presented in different ways depending on the channel. Agents who can share solutions over the phone and through email with equal clarity will propel your success.
Customers won’t be waiting as long if they get the answers through their preferred channels. In addition, your agents will resolve issues faster and maximize their agility. When there’s slow traffic in the chat program but plenty of phone calls pouring in, agents can focus on the most active source and resolve issues effectively.
If you want to lessen the burden on your channels even more, then help the customer help themselves with self-service solutions. Oftentimes, customers can solve the problem on their own, given the right resources.
Developing an online database of guides to common problems can remove a lot of stress from service agents who must answer the same questions repeatedly. Video content is especially helpful, as customers can walk themselves through the solution before they ever reach out to customer support.
5. Always Follow Up
The job isn’t finished even after the customer service agent solves a customer’s issue. One benefit of working at a SaaS company is that with the right technology in place, customer service agents can see when and how customers interact with your software. Your teams are given insights into how your customers use your product, which creates opportunities to provide additional value through education and continued support.
For example, let’s say a customer service agent resolves a customer’s issue with a simple solution. The agent checks in after a while to find that the customer hasn’t logged back into the software to try out the solution. What can an agent do about that?
This is a great time for agents to follow up with the customer. If the customer still isn’t sure how to use the solution, the agent can share additional guidance or educational pieces, like a webinar about the topic. These additional touches can improve the customer relationship by showing your customers that you care about their success in using your product.
Use your customer support software to track and manage procedures to follow up. Ensure that your agents feel they can make that outreach to customers. Build and update a healthy database of support content that agents can plug into messages. Following up is a powerful method of demonstrating the value each customer brings to your company.
Reap the Rewards
When you’re starting out, SaaS customer support can seem difficult. It’s certainly a lot of information and traffic to manage. However, it doesn’t need to be a tough process.
Give your support agents the best software and keep solutions simple. Let them collaborate with other teams on solutions and talk to customers across all channels. Always check in after the support ticket is closed.
The right technology and training let your company’s customer service agents offer your customers easy and practical solutions to even the most complex issues. You can save customers valuable time and build meaningful relationships, winning loyal B2B customers in the long run.
Technological Innovations Optimize Ground Transportation For Business Customers
It’s an exciting time in the transportation industry. As an industry where efficiency is everything, it’s no newcomer to disruptive innovations. Although it’s already come a long way, emerging technologies like autonomous driving capabilities, e-hailing, enhanced fleet tracking, AI, faster networks, and the Internet of Things is set to disrupt it even further.
For proactive businesses, there are promising developments on the horizon. Optimizing your ground transportation now can have a direct positive impact on your bottom line.
Autonomous e-hailing services
Conventional e-hailing services like Uber has already proven its value as a convenient method of transportation. However, self-driving or autonomous e-hailing, also called “robo-taxis,” may even be more valuable for business customers.
Unlike conventional e-hailing, there isn’t the same element of human fallibility. We all know the frustration of an Uber driver not finding the right route, not picking you up right away, talking when you want peace and quiet, or driving erratically.
Self-driving vehicles won’t have any of those issues. The moment you book a cab, it will head straight for your location and deliver you to the specified address. Furthermore, with built-in GPS and in communication with a central server, these cars can instantaneously adapt to local conditions.
If roads are closed or traffic conditions change, the vehicle can immediately reroute—no need to stop and find an alternate route manually.
It will also mean a lower overhead for companies as they won’t have to hire dedicated drivers. For this reason, companies might soon have their own fleet of private autonomous “robo-taxis.”
These vehicles aren’t only useful for transporting people. Packages can be picked up from automated warehouses and delivered with zero human intervention; in fact, Apple is already fulfilling some orders using autonomous drone cars. Eliminating human error will drastically optimize business operations.
For now, electric car maker Tesla has an undisputed head start when it comes to self-driving technology. Some Tesla cars will soon feature full autonomous capabilities. However, Google and Apple are also investing in this technology, and traditional manufacturers like GM, Ford, Honda are also exploring self-driving features.
The evolution of fleet tracking
In the early to mid-1950s, locomotive companies had a massive problem: Because of limited communication, no one actually knew where their trains were unless they were at a station.
This had a massive impact on how efficiently these companies could run. Not only did it take too long to figure out if a train was incapacitated, but there was virtually no situational adaptability.
Fleet-tracking technology changed the game for transportation and courier companies. Now, these businesses know exactly where each one of their vehicles is at any given time. Live updates of any incidents that affect their delivery or schedule are also possible.
Rental companies also benefit from advancements in fleet-tracking technology. It allows them to more accurately determine when specific vehicles will be available in various locations.
While fleet tracking isn’t exactly new, the next step is integration with 5G, AI, and machine-learning systems. Combining with AI will further streamline operations by automatically rerouting, alerting drivers, and giving operators greater situational awareness. Machine learning will help carriers more accurately predict future variables like traffic, weather, rate of incidence, and ETA estimations.
5G technology will help this all happen much faster, with up to 100 times increased bandwidth speeds and 5 times lower latency than 4G.
Frictionless transport experiences
We can thank traditional e-hailing services like Uber for massively improving the convenience of this everyday task. With e-hailing apps on our phones, there’s no need to flag down or call a taxi or go to the nearest concierge office.
However, this experience can be taken even further. Some transportation companies are already providing dedicated tablets from which customers can make orders. These tablets directly tap into the fleet-tracking infrastructure, giving the end customer all the available data to make an informed business decision.
This almost completely cuts out the middleman. Clients can initiate time-sensitive and business-critical orders almost immediately, with no need to contact a customer service rep who then needs to check availability before getting back to the client. Once the order is completed, the vehicle (either with a driver or driverless) will simply update its status and return to the available fleet.
Orders can then be paid either online or via MPOS (mobile point-of-sale) technology built into the fleet’s vehicles.
If a nearby business initiates another order, the whole process can be kicked off again without delay. It’s a win-win for both the transportation and client company in terms of saving time, effort and money.
Save money and streamline your business by optimizing ground transportation now
Much potential remains for improving ground transportation operations. With 5G and AI technologies just on the horizon, we have only scratched the surface of what’s possible. These technologies are set to disrupt the transportation industry and catapult it into the future. Although the cost of implementing such technologies now might seem high, they will more than make up for it in future savings.
Be an early adopter and set the stage for your business to soar in the new decade.
For more on how emerging technologies are disrupting the transportation industry, read The End Of The Beginning For Ride Hailing.