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4 Marketing Automation Tools for SMB Success in 2020

January 15, 2020 CRM News and Info

Marketing automation isn’t a thing of the future — it’s very much a part of the here and now for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) across the world. However, many are unaware of a variety of marketing automation tools that can help SMBs reach customers in a timely and effective way.

In order for SMBs to compete with larger firms when it comes to customer reach, they need to approach their marketing plan with a strategic mindset.

Marketing automation not only provides important opportunities for interaction with the customer, but also saves time. That’s especially important when running a small business. Time saved on marketing means being able to capture new business and have more time to commit to other vital tasks.

Following are just a few of the many benefits marketing automation provides:

Drives sales productivity;
Helps guide sales and marketing teams work together for a common goal;
Increases conversions;
Boosts ROI by doing the work of a large marketing staff; and
Compiles a complete view of customer behavior.

If you’re interested in taking advantage of marketing automation but don’t know where to start, consider these four marketing automation solutions geared toward SMBs.

1. One-Stop Social Media Shop

A social media management tool can be indispensable to small businesses trying to make the most out of their online presence. Having effective and timely social content is imperative in 2020, as many customers are more likely to buy from brands they follow on social media and to increase their spending with those brands.

Securing a tool that will help manage this important customer connection is essential. This type of tool prevents you from having to post at an exact time across multiple platforms, and instead lets you schedule content in advance.

That means businesses can plan their social media a week or month out, and not worry about interrupting their weekends, holidays and busy workdays to post on social sites. These programs also can provide SMBs the opportunity to create an organized posting strategy, analyze performance and respond to customers across multiple platforms from one easy-to-use interface.

2. CRM With Email Marketing

Capturing important customer information in one localized place can help SMBs deliver an excellent customer experience and boost sales revenue. The right customer relationship management software can track all customer interactions and purchases. Some even offer predictive analytics technology that can help determine potential next steps and drive transactions.

You’ll also want a CRM that integrates email marketing automation, which will enhance the customer experience and increase the success rate of your email and follow-up campaigns. Email is a fantastic way to reach customers because it requires the reader to opt-in and allows for several layers of personalization.

Marketers potentially can see a return of US$ 32 for every $ 1 spent on email marketing, research indicates, so having a CRM that facilitates this type of communication is imperative.

3. Would You Like to Take a Survey?

Customer feedback is a vital way for companies to improve. Small businesses often can achieve significant growth simply by soliciting — and heeding — the feedback of their customers. The challenge is that in-depth market research can be costly.

Enter the online survey! This tool allows SMBs to gain valuable insights from customers without having to invest in lengthy market research programs. An online survey is convenient for the consumer and allows the data to be tracked and analyzed for insights.

Do your customers like your most recent product upgrade? Is the packaging holding up during shipping? Do they feel the product was represented accurately online? How was their experience with your customer service associate?

All of these questions and more can be answered through a short online survey. Small businesses can create different surveys for different customer interactions, allowing for customized feedback to propel growth.

4. Let’s Chat

Chat is another marketing automation tool that can strengthen the customer journey. Through the power of artificial intelligence, a chatbot gives a personalized experience and can field a variety of frequently asked customer questions directly from your website.

Chatbots also can gather customer data for future marketing efforts, as well as help businesses reach their sales goals. A chatbot gives customers an instant response to their requests and can send links to make a purchase, or transfer customers to a live associate if needed.

The Year of Automation

2020 is here and it’s time to embrace the new decade with the tools that will set up your business for sustained success in the new decade. Small businesses that invest in, and take advantage of, these four marketing automation solutions will be more likely to see the sales results and ROI they want this year.

Marketing automation offers a variety of benefits, including time savings, the ability to drive more meaningful customer interactions that lead to transactions, and the opportunity to gain customer feedback and track behavior. These four automated tools can help pave an SMB’s path to success in 2020 and beyond.

Chad Ruff is chief technology officer at
Swiftpage, which provides the cloud-enabled CRM and marketing automation platform
Act!.

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Chatbot or Human? Combine Both to Achieve Customer Service Success

January 8, 2020 CRM News and Info

Companies across industries are shifting toward an automated approach to customer relations. With the help of chatbots, businesses
can reduce their customer service costs by up to 30 percent and save both employees’ and customers’ valuable time.

In fact, many customers welcome chatbots in the customer service process.

So, if chatbots offer all of these advantages, why not scrap your customer service team altogether and automate everything?

Not so fast. While chatbots certainly have their benefits for customer service, they are still a long way from being sophisticated enough to deal with all client interactions — and many customers still prefer speaking to an actual human.

In fact, an increasing number of consumers
prefer a combination of automation and human-led interactions. Both of these approaches can help companies reach the top of their customer service game.

First, what actually are chatbots, and how is AI advancing them?

Chatbots Have a Lot to Offer

Chatbots are applications that interact with humans via text through various platforms and for various purposes. These days, businesses primarily use chatbots to facilitate online ordering, make product suggestions, offer personal finance assistance, maintain schedules, and of course — provide customer support.

The chatbot industry is booming, with market value estimated
to reach $ 10.08 billion by 2026. From startups to enterprises, businesses across the spectrum are realizing the value of chatbots for driving efficiency and their bottom lines.

In fact, 80 percent of business decision-makers planned to start using a chatbot in some way or another by 2020, an Oracle survey found.

So, how are chatbots proving to be so beneficial?

When used correctly, customer service chatbots can save companies serious amounts of time and money. A well-developed chatbot can improve response time and customer satisfaction, and help retain vital customers.

Being a technology, and not a human representative, chatbots have infinitely more scaling potential. Think of it like this: A human-based customer service interaction is one to one, between live agent and customer. A chatbot has the ability to interact with hundreds or thousands of people at the same time, who never will experience a drop in quality or response time.

Just to give an indication of how much time can be saved by chatbots: In an average 6-minute customer service call, 75 percent of the time is spent
doing manual research, while only 25 percent is devoted to customer interaction. Not to mention, the wait time customers have to spend to get through to an agent in the first place is non-existent with chatbots.

This not only saves companies the resources they’d otherwise channel into employing human agents, but also makes their business contactable 24/7. Chatbots for customer service
will help businesses save an astounding total of US$ 8 billion per year by 2022, research from IBM indicates.

However, it’s important to note that chatbots can vary wildly in their capabilities, and companies looking for top-of-the-range tech should be prioritizing the inclusion of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP). Let’s take a look at what chatbots need to include to please customers rather than push them away.

All Chatbots Are Not Created Equal

When looking to leverage chatbots to drive efficiency in customer service, businesses often deploy rudimentary, path-based bots that are unable to engage in natural-sounding conversation and deliver accurate responses.

Using such chatbots can be risky. Seventy-three percent of users recently surveyed
would not return to a chatbot they deemed unhelpful the first time they used it. Bad chatbots could end up driving your customers away.

So, what makes good chatbots good?

Advanced AI and NLP technologies ensure that customer-chatbot interactions are more informative and fluid. Chatbots embedded with these functionalities can understand the context around requests, engage in free-flowing conversation, and learn from the data they collect over time. This means that in many cases, customers can get meaningful and relevant answers in a matter of milliseconds.

When should businesses apply chatbot technology, and when they should opt for human-led interactions?

When to Use Chatbots

As they currently stand, the majority of chatbots are great for answering simple requests and minor troubleshooting. In fact, many customers prefer to troubleshoot on their own before talking to a live agent, which is when chatbots can be incredibly useful.

For example, basic chatbots can answer high-frequency questions on things like opening hours and location, which don’t require human intervention to explain. Businesses that experience many of these types of low-value queries would benefit greatly from chatbots.

A top-of-the-line chatbot that includes AI and NLP can respond to customer requests using conversational language or handle more complex queries involving specific products.

Chatbots are a great option for when customer service representatives are offline or overloaded with work. Chatbots can deal with multiple requests at a time, and never need time off. You can utilize them as a tool that allows your customers to contact your business at any time.

When Human-Led Customer Service Is Best

Despite the time and money-saving potential of chatbots for businesses, the reality is that many people still want to speak to an actual person, especially when the issue is complicated. Customers found that live chats with humans consistently outperformed chatbots for a range of reasons, including great customer experience and ease of communication, according to this 2019
report.

Evidently, people are still wary that a chatbot won’t be able to resolve their query from start to finish. It pays to make sure your customers have access to a live agent when a complex or technical request requires human judgment and intuition.

Most chatbots are unable to detect when someone is becoming irate. They cannot manage delicate situations, or determine when to offer a discount or upgrade to dissatisfied customers in the same way a human can.

Customers often spend time attempting to resolve an issue with a chatbot, only to be transferred to a live agent after having failed to get an answer from the bot, at which point they already are frustrated. In cases like these, it’s best to have an agent on the case from the beginning.

People generally had good experiences with chatbots — up to a point, based on one
recent poll. Of the people surveyed, 51 percent said they were open to using a chatbot when the issue was a simple one, whereas with more complex problems, 57 percent said they would prefer to wait 10 minutes to get help from a human.

Human customer service representatives are better at identifying upselling opportunities and giving a conversation a personal touch that could make customers more receptive to additional purchases. While AI chatbot technology is developing fast, it’s still a long way from being able to match the nuances of human-led conversations.

Generational Preferences

While it’s clear that consumers have distinct preferences when it comes to chatbot or human-led interactions, there is some variation across demographics on these choices. Businesses should take this into account and look at their customer segments. Are their customers likely to feel more comfortable with a human on the line, or are they open to chatbots?

Unsurprisingly, millennials and generation Z are leading the way in chatbot usage, with the number of consumers that prefer a live agent declining with each older generation. Younger generations, however, are more demanding when it comes to a seamless digital experience switching between channels. This means that if you’re offering a combined chatbot and human agent customer service experience, the transition between the two should be easy and straightforward.

Better Together

Ultimately, you shouldn’t feel that you have to choose between chatbots and humans in your customer service strategy. If you are considering using a chatbot, make sure you first have identified the problem area it will help to address. Will it be dealing with the simple queries your agents often receive? Or does it need to have specialized knowledge on a certain product?

Once you have the goals and purposes of your chatbot clear, you can ensure that your live agents spend their time efficiently and use the technology to complement their own tasks. With the time and money-saving promise of chatbots, along with live agents’ guarantee of a great customer experience, you’ll be well on your way to customer service success.

Jay%20Reeder Chatbot or Human? Combine Both to Achieve Customer Service Success
Jay Reeder is CEO of
VoiceNation.

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5 Tips to Help Make Your Next Customer Event a Success

January 3, 2020 CRM News and Info

2. Take Advantage of Having Your Customers in the Room and Emphasize the Power of Networking

Customer events provide a rare opportunity for your current customers to connect with peers who are using similar solutions. For people who are part of a small team (or, many times, the only user of your solution), it can be very exciting to network with other customers and share best practices.

But how does encouraging your customers to network help you at the end of the day? While it might not seem obvious at first, creating opportunities for your customers to connect with their peers to share tips and ideas opens the door for them to be more active users of your product or service. That’s because as your customers talk to each other, they’ll discover new and exciting ways to leverage what you provide.

For example, you might have a customer who is experiencing a pain point that they might not know your solution can solve. However, a new friend they just met at the event has the perfect use case for your product or service that will help them resolve their problem. While this customer might have otherwise been inclined to search for a new vendor, this new discovery will remind them how great it is to be your customer.

3. Leverage Your Social Channels to Create Buzz Before, During, and After the Event

Customer events are a great opportunity to create community, but you don’t have to wait to get all your people in a room to get them talking and raving about your brand. Leveraging social media is a great way to get your attendees excited before the event, invite them to share special moments once they’re there, and keep the momentum going long after the big day is over.

To encourage customers to look forward to your event, you should develop a social media campaign sharing the event location, date, and any highlights you think will motivate your target audience to sign up. In these posts, include a link to a dedicated landing page where your customers can go to discover more details and register for the event.

Although it’s easy to create one or two posts to promote your event, seeing the same message over and over again can tire out your audience. To avoid getting unfollowed or blocked by your social media followers, diversify the content of your posts promoting the event and spread them out over time.

Creating a dedicated hashtag for your event is an excellent way to motivate attendees to share moments from throughout the day. You can further incentivize them to share content on their social media profiles by hosting a photo contest or automatically entering them into a raffle every time they post.

Finally, it’s just as important to follow up through social media as it is through email. After your event, make sure to write a post thanking customers who attended your event and tag them and/or their companies if possible. Not only will this allow you to increase engagement on your post, but it’s also a great way to keep the conversation going. You’ll also find that many customers will want to share what they enjoyed about your event. Having their feedback front and center is a great way to motivate those who didn’t attend to register for one of your events in the future.

You might be thinking that managing all the activities I just mentioned is more than you can handle. However, the right social media management tool, such as Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module, can help you automate most of these activities so you can stay on top of your social media game without having to spend all day in front of your computer.

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The Secret to Fantasy Football Success? APIs

November 29, 2019 TIBCO Spotfire

Is (fantasy) football season your favorite time of year? These days, it isn’t just the team playing in the stadium you’re invested in, it’s the team on your screen, the one you so carefully crafted and drafted, as well. Perhaps the most exciting way to get into the football spirit today is through fantasy football. But, have you ever considered just how all of those statistics appear on your phone immediately after your starting QB throws that game-tying touchdown?

For starters, why is fantasy football so popular?

E-sports connect the real world with the digital world, allowing regular Janes and Joes to feel like they are part of something bigger. That connection is made possible by modern technology, and real-time stats and the need to make snap decisions in your fantasy lineup requires just as much strategy as the game itself.

You can access current player and team rankings, pulling in not only team wins and losses, but individual player stats, including injury updates. Adding, dropping, and trading players can all be done at the touch of a button (and maybe a bit of haggling with a teammate, if you’re going for the trade). Winning your fantasy league is almost as exciting as having your favorite team take home the Super Bowl Championship, right?

APIs Make E-Sports Possible

Your fantasy football league is made possible by APIs, which provide secure access to the massive amounts of data provided by the leading sports leagues. It all starts with the fantasy football app on your phone. You have access to the endless amount of data on players, teams, and trends in the palm of your hand, in real time.

Your fantasy team isn’t the only way professional sports are taking advantage of APIs; they enable many of the technologies underpinning modern sports today. Without them, the way we consume sports—in a hands-on manner with additional stakes at play—wouldn’t exist. For example, official league partners, like Sportradar, use API management platforms to create products that distribute data, making the data more consumable to a broad audience. Check out this webinar to see how Sportradar, the official stat provider of several professional leagues including the NFL, uses APIs.

Just like Fantasy Football, without APIs, your digital business would not be possible today. Download your free trial of TIBCO Cloud™ Mashery^® to see what API management can do for you.

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Sydney Water: Customer Success In 5 Easy Steps

November 24, 2019 TIBCO Spotfire

For any modern business, the level of customer experience it provides is crucial for success. Battling a negative net promoter score (NPS), Sydney Water was looking for an opportunity to improve its customer experience with a seamless, efficient, and reliable technology solution. As Australia’s largest water and wastewater service provider, Sydney Water supplies water, wastewater, recycled water, and some stormwater services to more than five million people in Sydney, the Illawarra, and the Blue Mountains.

Through implementing TIBCO ActiveMatrix® BPM software, the company was able to streamline its complex business processes and sort through a large volume of case data. Not only was Sydney Water able to improve customer service outcomes, but it also increased its net promoter score by a remarkable 127 points. What’s more, it took only nine weeks for the company to develop new customer-focused processes, where it now takes fewer than five steps for users to complete a case.

In addition to these positive business outcomes, the company saw additional significant benefits, including:

Improved customer experience by creating a single view of operations and case management solutions.
Increased transparency by giving its customers more visibility into their water usage.
Development efficiencies through showing forms and components to the business quickly, incorporating feedback and easy reuse of components in other parts of the workflow.

Sydney Water was also awarded a 2019 TIBCO Trailblazer Award at TIBCO NOW Singapore. According to Sydney Water digital project manager Simon Dewey, “winning a TIBCO Trailblazer Award is a very humbling experience. It reaffirmed what we already felt about how far we’ve come and the experience we delivered.”

Like Sydney Water, you too can create a single view of operations and case management solutions so your customers have more transparency and visibility into product usage.

To learn more about how Sydney Water was able to increase its net promoter score and provide customers with a better experience, see the full case study.

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Atlanta Business Circulators Finds Sweet Success Migrating Off of QuickBooks

November 20, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Barney Beal, Content Director

When marketing consultant Robert Lee bought an established mail fulfillment house last year, he was really buying the company’s customer base. What he definitely was not buying was their antiquated financial system.

Not long after his ultra-small Lexis Direct Marketing purchased not-quite-as-small Atlanta Business Circulators of Marietta, Ga., Lee (no relation to the famous Civil War general) realized that the desktop QuickBooks deployment ABC was relying on was no longer going to cut it.

He envisioned creating a one-stop shop for customers’ direct mail campaign needs, from concept and design through delivery and fulfillment, but ABC’s existing financial system just wasn’t going to deliver the flexibility and visibility Lee needed to make his vision a reality.

He immediately moved the newly combined company onto QuickBooks online in order to modernize just a bit, and to put data in his hands when on the go. While this solved some issues, the lack of customizability still held the company back.

“We were kind of stuck in QuickBooks Online’s way of doing things, which was fine on the accounting side, but for production management, it was just absolutely ineffective,” Lee said.

NetSuite was already on Lee’s radar, and he ended up comparing it to a direct mail fulfillment-specific ERP system that offered a lot of needed functionality, but wasn’t as customizable as NetSuite, and was built for a larger company. Ultimately, Lee went with NetSuite, tapping the SuiteSuccess methodology to help ensure a smooth deployment.

Technology That Works How the Customer Needs

Not only was NetSuite up within a few months; NetSuite Professional Services consultants also worked closely with Lee and his small team, ensuring that any questions got answered. One specific piece of help they provided was in customizing ABC’s item fulfillment process. Since the company didn’t need functionality that supported picking and packing of items, they were able to tweak the pick and pack buttons to mark work orders as being completed by the data and production departments.

“This makes it very simple for me to be able to go in and say, ‘Where are these jobs?’ if a customer calls and what’s to know what’s going on,” Lee said.

Lee described the implementation as simple and smooth, although it was made simpler by the fact that ABC had no integration needs during deployment. But Lee did have one regret: He wishes he’d invested more in training from NetSuite consultants, in large part because of the ease with which small business workers fall into their old habits.

One integration Lee would like to pursue down the line is to add a payment processing tool that plays nice with NetSuite. As of now, the company is continuing to work with a payment processor that’s priced right, but integration isn’t an option.

In the meantime, Lee is focused on a five-year plan that NetSuite makes possible, namely building a small outside sales team that will help to build the company’s brand across a larger portion of the state of Georgia. NetSuite will allow that sales team to build better customer data, and will also enable better collaboration on estimates, and improved visibility into the pipeline.

That future capability, Lee, said, is more important than what NetSuite has already delivered to the business.

“I didn’t necessarily need something that made us better today,” he said. “I needed something that we could grow into.”

A System For the Future That’s Paying Off Now

Not that he isn’t enjoying today. Not only does he have that improved visibility and flexibility, but Lee is also benefitting from the ability to customize any transaction he needs to support and to capture the information needed for any particular job or estimate.

Once ABC delivers on its five-year plan by establishing the sales force, Lee said the second five years will focus on more advanced functionality for managing growth, such as the ability to better track costs and inventory. Eventually, he foresees NetSuite supporting a growth-by-acquisition strategy that could enable ABC to gain a foothold in other states.

And then there’s what Lee said is perhaps the greatest peace of mind NetSuite provides: its ability to insulate ABC from the impact of any future economic recession. He believes having NetSuite in place better positions ABC to survive a 12- to 18-month dip in the business.

“I’m confident that we have everything we need right in front of us so that we can actually forecast enough to be able right-size ourselves through any kind of economic downturn,” said Lee. “It will at least allow us to understand the impact of what we’re facing just by virtue of the fact that we can see those trends.”

Posted on Wed, November 20, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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Oracle NetSuite helps ANZ partners maximize customer success

November 12, 2019 NetSuite

Oracle NetSuite today announced that new and existing partners in ANZ are rapidly adopting SuiteLife, a new partner initiative, to maximize customer success. With SuiteLife, new NetSuite partners in ANZ are able to start selling and delivering NetSuite to customers in only 90 days, while existing partners have benefited from innovative new offerings to expand their NetSuite practice and amplify their growth. To further enhance collaboration with partners in ANZ, NetSuite has also launched a partner council to give solution providers in the region a platform for greater voice and influence with NetSuite’s regional leadership team.

“Our partners play a critical role in helping put the power of cloud ERP into the hands of more organizations across the world,” said Vijay Raghvani, JAPAC Senior Director – Channels, Oracle NetSuite. “Since launching SuiteLife in ANZ, we’ve had great feedback from new and existing partners as they take advantage of the new program to quickly and easily gain the knowledge and expertise required to help customers succeed, differentiate their practices and expand their business.”

SuiteLife delivers a comprehensive set of resources, certified training and tools that enable NetSuite partners to develop expertise around specific business functions, product areas and industries. With SuiteLife, NetSuite partners in ANZ can quickly and easily gain the knowledge and expertise required to help customers succeed, differentiate their practices and expand their business. Since introducing SuiteLife for ANZ partners in April 2019, over 80 per cent of existing partners have signed up for the program.

“SuiteLife has helped us expand our NetSuite practice and amplify growth, for both our business and that of our customers,” says Matthew Owens, Sales and Marketing director, Annexa. “The demand for cloud is growing at an exponential rate and having all the resources in the right place means we can better serve our customers and help them maximize their success.”

“NetSuite has always been a supportive partner and we see SuiteLife as a perfect extension of our work together as we pursue the same end goal – ensuring we deliver the best outcomes to our customers.” says Grant Robertson, executive director, Fusion5.

SuiteLife is the next stage in our long association with NetSuite. “We’ve been working with NetSuite for over 15 years and programs like SuiteLife are taking us to the next stage through increased education offerings,” says Stuart Mallet, managing director, Applejack. “Access to SuiteAnswers gives our team the additional knowledge needed to help customers achieve success.”

SuiteLife represents the largest investment NetSuite has ever made in its partner ecosystem and encompasses a number of the NetSuite Partner Programs, which include more than 550 partners in 85 countries. SuiteLife includes:

SuiteSuccess Alignment: Enables partners to leverage SuiteSuccess, a pre-configured industry cloud solution that helps organizations achieve the benefits of the cloud in as little as 45 days. SuiteSuccess is built on industry-leading practices, which combine deep domain knowledge with pre-built workflows, KPIs and dashboards.
Accelerated New Product Introduction: A structured program that helps partners expedite the roll out and delivery of new products.
Partner Support Programs: New services that help partners save time and lower risk on customer engagements by providing anytime access to NetSuite’s library of training and network of industry experts.
Simplified and Holistic Program Structure: One subscription for all the enablement, tools, assets and support a partner will need to grow without having to compromize.

“We always take a best practice approach to helping our customers. With SuiteLife, we now have more resources available to do this which is invaluable in delivering exceptional customer service,” says Guarav Srivastava, CEO at Absolute Vision Technologies.

In addition to SuiteLife, NetSuite partners in ANZ can also take advantage the newly established JAPAC Provider Council. The council consists of channel partner representatives that serves as the voice of the channel by providing a path for relevant feedback to improve and strengthen the partner ecosystem through ongoing enablement programs. Committee members will leverage their deep local insights to become a central, local body representing channel partners in ANZ.

About Oracle NetSuite
For more than 20 years, Oracle NetSuite has helped organizations grow, scale and adapt to change. NetSuite provides a suite of cloud-based applications, which includes financials / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR, professional services automation and omnichannel commerce, used by more than 18,000 customers in 203 countries and dependent territories.

For more information, please visit https://www.netsuite.com.

Follow NetSuite’s Cloud blog, Facebook page and @NetSuite Twitter handle for real-time updates.

About Oracle
The Oracle Cloud offers complete SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM and CX, plus best-in-class database Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com.

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Microsoft is banking Cortana’s success on the idea of a multi-assistant world

November 5, 2019 Big Data

In the competitive landscape of virtual assistants, Cortana has struggled to find its place. It lags behind competitors like Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri in the delivery of satisfactory responses to questions, and with no smart speaker or mobile operating system, it lacks native access to two of the most common devices people use to speak with AI assistants. It may still have the power to act as a general purpose assistant, but Microsoft wants Cortana to become your assistant at work.

The focus is on making Cortana a larger part of Microsoft 365 productivity software for the workplace, which sees applications like Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint currently being used by more than 180 million monthly active users. “We are really focusing on this experience, embedding [Cortana] across M365. That’s really the message,” said Microsoft corporate VP Andrew Shuman.

That strategy played out across multiple upgrades and announcements that Microsoft made Monday at its Ignite 2019 conference.

Cortana can now read your email summaries and send quick-reply responses in Outlook. The AI assistant is also getting into the dicey business of scheduling meetings, as well as delivering daily schedules and task rundowns. Excel now supports natural language queries, so you can ask questions about your Excel data, and you can use Cortana as a kind of coach.

Email briefings from Cortana in Outlook can suggest focus time, and last month Microsoft launched Presenter Coach, a PowerPoint service that listens to your presentations and then provides feedback on pace, use of inclusive language, and repetitive use of mannerisms like “umm” and “basically.”

As other assistants focus on consumer use cases, Cortana is now able to transcribe your meetings, perform voice email playback, find and automatically remind you about tasks in your emails, and schedule your meetings. Cortana has also entered Microsoft Teams and Skype in recent years.

But absent any first-party hardware or a mobile operating system of its own, that means outside of Windows 10, Cortana is going to have live or die in a multi-assistant capacity, alongside the virtual assistants that are its direct competitors.

The future of Cortana hardware?

The double-down on integration with Microsoft software doesn’t address the fact that the company missed its chance on hardware. There’s no first-party Microsoft smart speaker with Cortana, like Google Nest or Amazon Echo, for example. The Harman Kardon Invoke, one of the only speakers with Cortana inside, saw little commercial success. Smart home integrations and Cortana skills don’t seem to see much adoption either.

That leaves Microsoft’s intentions for future hardware difficult to follow. In a conversation with VentureBeat last year, former Cortana product lead Javier Soltero stressed that Cortana adoption rates may be partially based upon Cortana’s ability to grow a presence in the home. On the other hand, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott told VentureBeat that Cortana doesn’t need a smart speaker to succeed as an AI assistant and can instead rely on legacy strongholds like Windows 10.

Microsoft’s Surface headphones released a year ago and the recently released Surface earbuds are devices marketed to busy professionals, not particularly the home.

In an interview ahead of news Monday, Shuman talked to VentureBeat about Cortana’s focus on enterprise applications, Cortana’s future in hardware, and the new Voice Interoperability Initiative to make a multi-assistant world. “I echo Kevin’s point about ambient devices,” he said. “I think we’re going to continue to work on our Amazon partnership and thinking a lot about how M365 users who have an Amazon speaker can get a great experience, as we have that in beta already today and we’ll do more there,” Shuman said.

When asked about the less-than-clear hardware message Cortana can present, Shuman said Microsoft will look for opportunities with mobile devices. “We feel ever more convicted that getting ourselves into a great position on the [mobile] device you already have, you already trust with a lot of your data, but really being able to enhance that experience, because it is hard to do some stuff on the phone. That will be the way forward for us,” Shuman said.

In news that may run counter to the idea of a mobile strategy for Cortana, word emerged today that the AI assistant may be removed from the Microsoft Launcher for Android smartphones. VentureBeat reached out to Microsoft for comment. This story will be updated if we hear back.

Exactly how to define success for an AI assistant can depend heavily on existing market advantages. Cortana’s current focus is on leveraging mobile and PC software use cases. Meanwhile, Samsung’s Bixby might be losing a dedicated buttons on smartphones, and its Galaxy Home may never be a hit, but it could still succeed as a second-class assistant with third-party offerings and integrations with popular home appliances.

Microsoft would benefit from a multi-assistant world — and indeed it has to, because it lacks the competitive advantage of a popular mobile operating system or smart devices, like speakers or displays, that reside in people’s homes.

How to define AI assistant success in a multi-assistant world

In September, ahead of Amazon’s Alexa major annual hardware event, the Voice Interoperability Initiative launched with 30 partners, including Amazon and Microsoft, as well as Baidu, Tencent, Intel, Qualcomm, and Salesforce.

Notably missing from the group are Apple and Google, makers of mobile operating systems that are most likely to be used for interaction with an AI assistant.

“I think that’s why I’m most excited about that consortium, is to recognize that speech and natural language breaks down barriers between these experiences […] much more than any app platform ever has, because you’re not going to just think, ‘Oh, I’m only doing calendaring right now; I’m only going to talk about calendaring.’ No, you’re going to say … ‘Is there a cafe near that appointment I’m having?’,” Shuman said. “Those things are just going to become more and more part and parcel of this with much fuzzier lines, and that’s where I think that that should go.”

Microsoft has been pushing the notion of a multi-assistant world since it shared plans with Amazon to make Cortana available through Echo speakers and make Alexa available through Windows 10 PCs. Amazon’s Echo is the most popular line of smart speakers in the United States.

“I think we’re going to continue to work on our Amazon partnership and thinking a lot about how M365 users who have an Amazon speaker […] can get a great experience,” Shuman said, adding that the project is already in beta, with plans to “do more there.”

Shuman added, “In my life, I have maybe a doctor or a coach or a therapist, I have multiple assistants who are helping me all the time. You’re going to have multiple digital assistants, and they’re going to do different things for the right places. I mean, we’re never going to be an ecommerce company, so it’s really great that we can think about how Amazon can extend our experiences in the right ways.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella expressed a desire to connect Cortana with Google Assistant earlier this year, too.

There’s still much to learn about people’s habits with a voice ecosystem. Canalys predicted the sale of more than 200 million smart speakers worldwide by the end of 2019, up from 114 million in 2018. Voice assistant usage is up, but it’s unclear whether people are actually open to the idea of using more than one assistant in their lives. A multi-assistant plan might work, but Microsoft needs it to for Cortana to be successful going forward.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Professional Services Firms Learn To “Listen” To Clients And Employees To Drive Success

October 10, 2019 BI News and Info

Competing in a high-growth market is both an exciting opportunity and a source of surprises for midsize professional services firms. After spending years developing a deep bench of the best talent, firms acquire a reputation for delivering “superb” services at a competitive price. But as comparisons against competitors loom more extensively, clients are constantly evolving their criteria for a successful engagement.

How can professional services firms differentiate themselves in a way that resonates with existing and potential clients? The answer is acquiring, analyzing, and sharing the right data about clients to deliver a high-value, personalized experience. According to the IDC InfoBrief “Becoming a Best-Run Professional Services Company: How Growing Midsize Firms Use Technology and Innovation to Succeed,” high-performing (or best-run) midsize firms are leading the way in this area of experience management.

midsize companies know their customers Professional Services Firms Learn To “Listen” To Clients And Employees To Drive Success

Source: “Becoming a Best-Run Professional Services Company: How Growing Midsize Firms Use Technology and Innovation to Succeed,” IDC, sponsored by SAP, 2019.

The X’s and O’s of experience management

In the professional services industry, one faulty offering or unsuccessful engagement means much more than unhappy clients and loss of future revenue. It also negatively impacts workforce morale and degrades the firm’s relationships with its business partners.

Such a chain reaction of negativity and loss can be avoided when firms connect two distinctly separate types of data in their vast collection of information:

Operational data (O-data): Hard numbers – for example, costs, accounting, and sales – inform all lines of business across a wide variety of roles, as well as what is happening in business operations, the industry, and the global marketplace.

Experience data (X-data): The emotions, thoughts, and sentiments of clients, employees, and partners are captured to better understand why specific outcomes happen and predict how changing preferences may impact future business success.

All too often, professional services firms only rely on their operational data when evaluating their status with a client. However, this practice tells just part of the story.

By blending X-data and O-data, firms can create, monitor, and manage every experience. Doing so allows them to foster deep relationships between clients, employees, and partners to drive value to their bottom-line goals as well as the firm’s.

Relentless focus on experience is achievable – no matter your size

The logic behind the data philosophy of experience management is simple, clear, and proven. Every aspect of a professional services business is a powerful experiential force that influences how people engage, communicate, and remain loyal.

For example, an engagement may be tracking fine from a budget and revenue perspective. However, if the customer is not happy and feels that things are amiss, there is a strong chance this client will move on once the project is done, leaving any promise of future revenue at risk.

All firms, regardless of size, possess the ability to capture O-data – in fact, they do it every day when determining if engagements are on time, on budget, and profitable. However, to understand how experience impacts clients, employees, and partners, firms need to embed “listening posts” into their processes to acquire and analyze X-data to deepen insights and their call to action.

From clients to employees and partners, every area of the business is a source of operational and experiential insight that ensures firms act in ways that can lead to the right action every time. And before you know it, your clients are your fans, your employees are your evangelists, and your partners are your advocates.

Learn more

Read these resources to find out how best-run midsize professional services firms are focusing relentlessly on clients by evolving their financial models, addressing evolving risks, using nontraditional talent engagement models, and supporting digital sales and marketing strategies.

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Digitalist Magazine

Improve Webinar Success With These 5 Tips

September 28, 2019 CRM News and Info

by Kyle McCarthy

Last updated September 24, 2019

You probably know that marketing webinars are one of the best ways to educate your audience and promote your organization, but do you know how to get more registrants? What about creating the best possible user experience for all your attendees? Follow-up and lead nurturing after the webinar? These are all essential steps to producing the best possible webinar for your organization and your attendees, but many marketers aren’t aware of their value or don’t know how to address these critical webinar components.

If you’re dedicated to producing more online events but want to improve your webinar success moving forward, please keep reading to learn five great tips for proven webinar results.

Improve Webinar Success With These 5 Tips

1) Create Demand Gen Campaigns to Secure Webinar Registrants

This probably goes without saying, but there’s no point in hosting a webinar if nobody bothers to show. So you need to create effective and efficient demand generation campaigns to get more people to reserve their seats.

Before launching these campaigns, however, you need to create a dedicated landing page for your online event with an easy-to-complete form and clear and concise copy listing the following:

The primary topic and your main talking points
The date and time of your marketing webinar
Who will be participating and their expertise

Your form on the page should include less than five fields (and ideally no more than three) and a prominent “Submit” or “RSVP” button.

Once your landing page is complete, you can begin leveraging it to secure webinar registrants. Here are a few different ways to get your target audience to commit to your webinar.

Link to your invite landing page in your marketing newsletter.
Create Google Ads and paid social campaigns using highly targeted keywords aimed at specific demographics.
Enlist all team members to promote the webinar in their email signatures and via the appropriate social media channels.
Depending on your audience, write a blog on the same topic as your webinar and create a call-to-action that links to your invite landing page.
Link to the webinar on your form submission “Thank You” pages.
Create an organic social media campaign.

Encourage your target audience to join your webinar any way you can, as long as your efforts align with your brand guidelines and don’t break the bank.

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2) Increase Webinar Attendance With Lead Nurturing

Before you launch your demand generation efforts, you should create a lead nurturing campaign to ensure that your registrants actually attend the webinar. This should consist of a series of 3-4 emails reminding registrants of the upcoming event and also include a link to different content assets that are related to the webinar topic.

Copy should be brief and reiterate the topic, presenters, and date and time of the webinar and say something to the effect of:

“We’re excited for you to join us at our webinar next month on {date and time}. If you’d like to learn more about {Topic X} before the webinar, please click this link to read an eBook we recently wrote on the subject!”

Short, informative, and to the point.

Different content assets you can use include:

Blogs
eBooks
Infographics
Success stories
Videos
Podcasts
And even previous related webinars

At this point, you already have your registrants’ contact information, so the links to these content assets should be ungated whenever possible. You want to balance your lead generation efforts with the user experience, and the best way to do that is to collect information slowly over time and provide valuable content that keeps your users engaged. And don’t send too many nurturing emails; you don’t want to alienate your audience and motivate them to unsubscribe before they even have the chance to attend your webinar!

Creating a Content Strategy Banner CTA Improve Webinar Success With These 5 Tips

3) Use Webinar Polls During Your Event to Improve Engagement

Most marketers are used to sending follow-up surveys after a webinar, but you should also be posing questions throughout your event to keep attendees engaged and collect valuable information along the way. Additionally, many of your attendees might be reluctant to participate during the Q&A portion of your webinar, so polling them throughout the event is a great way to field questions and learn more about your audience in real-time.

Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when creating your webinar polls:

Only ask one question at a time to avoid confusion.
Use plain language and simple questions to get the most accurate answers.
Write questions that benefit your attendees as much as they do you.
Don’t ask too many questions on top of one another (one question every 7 minutes seems to be the sweet spot).
Introduce your questions before asking them, and show your attendees where and how to respond.
Keep your audience invested by showing them the results.

The right webinar polling questions will increase user interactions and provide valuable data that you can use to improve your products and services, develop new content, and even perfect the way that you speak to your target audiences.

4) Create and Distribute an On-Demand Webinar

Just because you already filmed your webinar live doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continue to reap the benefits of your hard work. By creating an on-demand version of your webinar and then distributing that content to multiple channels, you can get more out of these online events over the long haul. Maybe your attendance for your webinar was in the 30% range, which is isn’t bad, but could definitely be improved. By posting a recorded version of the event, you can actually exceed your registrant totals and market to an entirely new audience!

Some innovative ways you can use on-demand webinars include:

Create a “Webinars” section of your website and host your recordings there within days of recording.
Add your on-demand webinars to existing automated nurture programs with similar topics.
Develop organic social media campaigns to highlight your on-demand webinar series.
Write blogs on related topics and then embed your webinar as a prominent call-to-action on the page.
Send it to all registrants as part of your “Thanks for Attending” email, along with social links to encourage advocacy sharing.
When it’s time to present your next webinar, you can include a link to this on-demand webinar as an extra incentive to join and as proof of the value of your webinars.

On-demand webinars should be gated, as these are premium content assets and are likely being viewed by users who did not sign up for the original event recording. The best practice here is to allow your audience to watch about 5% of the webinar and then present a brief form they must complete before they can continue watching.

5) Create Automated Programs to Follow-Up With Attendees

Now that you have established a real relationship with everyone who viewed the live and recorded versions of your webinar, you should create automated email campaigns that allow you to email your webinar leads.

Similar to the lead nurturing campaigns you launched prior to the webinar, your post-webinar automated programs should consist of about 4-5 emails that continue to showcase your organization as a thought leader in your space. This time, however, you should include messaging and content that begins to explain how your products and services can help solve your email recipients’ primary pain points.

For instance, our automated programs usually follow a format that begins with content usually found very early on in the customer funnel and then slowly narrows to more middle-of-the-funnel content before delivering a hand-raiser CTA:

Blog closely related to the webinar topic — perhaps with the on-demand version of the webinar embedded on the page to jog the reader’s memory and give them another chance to share to their social media channels.
Infographic that presents detailed statistics in a visually engaging way. You don’t want to overwhelm your audience, but you do want to make them aware of the issues you’re discussing as well as how their peers are discovering solutions to their main problems.
eBook that delves deeper into the same topic you’ve begun to address with your blog and infographic. The eBook should be focused on how to tackle the issue it’s addressing, but there should also be an entire section near the end that is solely focused on how your organization helps your customers to overcome the challenge.
Success story that illustrates how your customers are getting the most out of your offerings to solve their issues and generate better ROI. This offers real proof of your company’s worth to your new prospects.
The final email should be a tidy summary of everything you’ve sent so far (with links to each content asset) and a friendly invitation to book a product demo, take a virtual tour, or contact a sales rep — whichever hand-raiser CTA is most applicable to your business model.

If these leads aren’t yet ready to speak to a salesperson once they have completed the entire automated program, you can place them in related programs based on their interests, demographics, company size, etc. This way, you always remain top of mind without having to hassle them with too many promotional emails or sales calls.

Act-On Can Help You Deliver Better Webinars

Now that you know the proper strategy to host, execute, and leverage your marketing webinars, you should look into Act-On’s webinar management functionality. Act-On simply and seamlessly integrates with both Cisco WebEx Event Center and Citrix Online GoToWebinar so you can spend less time organizing your webinar and more time building great registration and attendance lists.

With Act-On, you can:

Easily manage the process from start to finish using the Act-On Dashboard
Create a timeline of activities prior to and after your webinar
Develop all emails, landing pages, and registration forms related to your webinar
Track, analyze, and report your webinar data and results

For more information on how to deliver the best possible webinar, please download our eBook, “How to Use Online Events to Build Lasting Relationships.” Or, if you’d like to learn how Act-On can help you improve your online event management, please book a demo with one of our marketing automation experts today!

Webinar and Chill CTA Improve Webinar Success With These 5 Tips

Tag Archives: success

1. One-Stop Social Media Shop

2. CRM With Email Marketing

3. Would You Like to Take a Survey?

4. Let’s Chat

The Year of Automation

Chatbots Have a Lot to Offer

All Chatbots Are Not Created Equal

When to Use Chatbots

When Human-Led Customer Service Is Best

Generational Preferences

Better Together

2. Take Advantage of Having Your Customers in the Room and Emphasize the Power of Networking

3. Leverage Your Social Channels to Create Buzz Before, During, and After the Event

For starters, why is fantasy football so popular?

APIs Make E-Sports Possible

The future of Cortana hardware?

How to define AI assistant success in a multi-assistant world

The X’s and O’s of experience management

Relentless focus on experience is achievable – no matter your size

Learn more

1) Create Demand Gen Campaigns to Secure Webinar Registrants

2) Increase Webinar Attendance With Lead Nurturing

3) Use Webinar Polls During Your Event to Improve Engagement

4) Create and Distribute an On-Demand Webinar

5) Create Automated Programs to Follow-Up With Attendees

Act-On Can Help You Deliver Better Webinars

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