aheadCRM

The News Freshworks on 29/08/2017 announced that it acquired Zarget , a conversion rate optimization software startup. With this being the ninth acquisition in about two years Freshworks is continuing to augment its development by adding missing functionality from outside while adding talent to the teams. Zarget’s software is helping marketers measuring and understanding how users interact with their websites, which is important information when it comes to assessing reasons for users not becoming customers. For Freshworks this acquisition also marks a first step to close the functional gap that marketing still is for them. With Freshworks founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham having been an angel investor into Zarget this is also a natural choice. An interesting piece of information comes as a quote by Girish: “ At Freshworks, our ambition is to emerge as the de facto cloud-based business software platform for businesses of all sizes”. The Bigger Picture There are a couple...

Photo by Don Ross III on Unsplash A short while ago Craig Rentzke from Helpshift pointed me to a particular episode of CXOTalk , featuring Kevin Henrikson of Microsoft and professor Anindya Ghose from NYU. Henrikson is responsible for Microsoft’s Outlook for Mobile, a personal information manager (PIM) app, whereas prof. Ghose comes more from a B2C angle, with B2C being more concerned with convenience. This interesting episode deals with the future of mobile computing and given that, apparently about how mobile apps will (have to) look like and what it is that vendors should do and what they should not do with the apps. The Now Naturally, the discussion immediately zeroed in on two topics ·       the purpose of the app ·       and data The purpose of the app mainly determines two things, which are first the way that users are presented with information and are engaging with the app and second the data that gets collected...

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about customer service in a world of ambient computing . This article looked at customer service from a customer’s point of view. In it I described how I see customer service getting humanised again by leveraging the advances in AI technologies like Natural Language Processing, speech-to-text- and text-to-speech generation along with intent determination. Leveraging these technologies customer service will turn into a conversation and it won’t matter anymore whether service is delivered by a bot or by a human. For the customer it will all appear to be the same. Instead of FAQs or web searches, bots will be the first line of support and escalate a problem to humans if they cannot solve it on their own. The obvious question is whether there will be an impact on the customer service center? And it probably does. Call centers, and with it the service agents as well as their managers, already now are under intense pressure to deliver, and to d...