devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: customer service

Forget Automation: Why IT Should Take UX Cues From Fine Dining

As a college student, I worked at a five-star Italian restaurant where I learned the discipline and practice of customer service. The general manager knew exactly which corner to stand in to get a view of every single table during service. They would gauge diners’ experience according to how they were interacting, their microsignals, how much food was left on their plate and the way they glanced around the restaurant. What does this intense attention to detail and individual customer experience have to do with running a service-oriented technology business? Everything.

The tech industry is notorious for automating processes at the expense of personalization, and that aversion can extend to building the relationships necessary to produce a successful end product. Understandably, some companies and their developers prefer to keep relationships with their clients strictly functional because these connections are messy, people are unpredictable and nothing ever goes completely according to plan. It’s a dance we have to do over and again with every new client and project.

For those of us who wish to function as service-oriented tech companies, keeping on top of client and customer experiences requires us to stay attentive and listen with active care. Just like the veteran restaurant manager, we have to constantly scan our environment for cues of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

Service is More Than an End Product

Before opening every night, the general manager would make staff hold long pieces of string to measure the angles and distance between tables to ensure they were straight and the edges perfectly aligned. Then, after telling staff the evening specials, he would randomly quiz them about the menu. What color is a fava bean?

Seeing the value of such old-school standards left a deep impression and helped me embed attention to detail as a foundational practice across the board, from designing good UX to cultivating relationships. Creating a desirable environment is about successfully orchestrating a million tiny details and always looking for tweaks to make the customer experience better.

That seemingly omniscient Italian from my earliest experience in the restaurant industry also taught me that being empathic goes hand-in-hand with the hard-nosed realities of running a service-oriented business. They showed me how to take care of people, how to make them feel good and how to read body language.

It might be easy to stereotype tech companies as impersonal dispensers of products (and their developers as cogs in the machinery), but we don’t want to just take orders. Our job is to become strategic partners from the ground up for long-term success, and that requires constant care and continual adaptation.

Mapping the Client Experience

We must be willing to redesign how we work with customers and end users over and over again—it’s always changing because expectations are always changing, and market norms are always changing. The moment that we stop trying to get better through small incremental improvements is the moment we stop being service-oriented.

In the same way that a restaurant has a sequence of service that maps a diner’s journey from the moment they enter the door, we can architect a customer experience from every touchpoint.

In the sales process, it’s valuable to layer in different people to create more relationship touchpoints throughout an organization, so, in our case, a new client meets a member of our operations team and then somebody from our engineering team in order to ensure that they feel fully supported. Then, we set expectations in terms of communication as part of a scripted onboarding experience. In our review meetings, we seek feedback to determine whether we have under-delivered and course correct if necessary.

The other thing I learned from that Italian restaurant is that no mistake is irredeemable. It doesn’t really matter if you get it right or wrong the first time, it is how you respond when the unexpected happens that matters. Turning a situation around after making a horrible mistake—even sending out a cold steak—can breed even more loyal customers because it demonstrates that you really care.

The Creative Heart of Service

Despite the image of tech as cold and distant, it’s important to recognize that coding and development itself is creative and we should seek to nurture a healthy environment so that people can perform at their best. To that end, it makes sense to think of your responsibility as running the entire length of the chain, from employees to clients and, finally, to end users. Finding humanity in the work along each link is key to building successful partnerships.

In the context of building products, we must be creative to design seamless, curated experiences for end users. There are plenty of apps that sit on someone’s phone unused before ultimately being deleted. The only way to grab the attention of people that share the same interests and problems is by understanding their needs.

To that end, we must always be asking our clients: What is the easiest point of entry for the user? Creating a low barrier is a quick win that in and of itself is an onboarding experience and an opportunity to build trust.

Equally, what may make one customer happy may not actually have any resonance in the wider market. If customers were only hiring us to write code, we would only be interested in meeting their expectations. The goal is not just to build products, but successful products that establish or reinforce a client’s reputable presence in the marketplace.

Adding Value Through Relationships

When we stand in our metaphorical corner of the room to observe the customer experience, we are consolidating data from products that have millions of users and harvesting insight. We are not interested in quick fixes. Customer service and a focus on the end-user experience means being oriented to what the market wants, not designing in a vacuum. We can then continue to build value over time.

In the restaurant business, the little surprise at the end of dinner adds value because it is unexpected. A complimentary after-dinner liqueur with a pithy origin story is a point of detail at its finest. Creating a richer, fuller customer experience can set a tech business apart in an exploding marketplace. For my old mentors, paying attention to every nuance from the beginning to the end is what defines five-star service.

October 10, 2022
Next-Level Tech: DevOps Meets CSOps

Operations are some of the most important aspects of an organization. In tech, DevOps has dominated the conversation due to its necessity in keeping up with the rate of building products, applications and infrastructure with code. DevOps encompasses much more than a team of developers; it is a culture, a set of practices and tools that allow organizations to deliver applications with speed and scale and then effectively operate. This philosophy has been incredibly useful over the last decade but has lacked a connection with other parts of the organization. Developer teams are connected, but within their silo, their work is lacking integration with the end user, diluting the opportunity to deliver the best solutions for their customers. More immediately, developers, DevOps and ITops cannot see the breadth of impact when working in an autonomous environment, leading to poor prioritization and remediation.

Enter customer service. Another pillar of organizational strength, customer service is not only a necessity but has risen to become a strategic function for the business. They are the first responders of a business when digital services don’t work as expected or their customer expectations are not met. Customer service agents are highly trained, well-funded and armed with the latest technology so they can be the most effective first point of contact for customers. Customer service teams can learn something from developers in their organization and work within the same kind of ‘operations’ model that dictates philosophies and practices: in other words, CSOps or customer service operations.

Why CSOps?

Customer service is an incredibly powerful element of business operations, as it is tied to user experience. Consumers are not shy about announcing when they have experienced poor customer service, and the opposite is also true. End users also loudly trumpet the moments that they have received strong customer service; that goes a long way in creating loyalty, repeat business and retention. In a study from Bain & Company, it was noted that customers were four times more likely to buy from a competitor if they experienced a service-related problem rather than an issue based on price or product. Leading with customer service, like many e-commerce platforms have done, is a new standard of operating and is critical to meeting the expectations of customers. In a B2B setting, customer service is no different. Customers or users are drawn to organizations that can quickly remediate their concerns in a frictionless and efficient manner.

Customer service is now at the forefront of corporate initiatives and isn’t going anywhere. In a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, analysts and executives weighed in on CIO budgets and forecasted priorities amidst growing recession concerns. With cuts coming to some areas, customer service was not one of them. The overall sentiment is that “businesses see more value than ever in tech that will enhance the customer experience and give them an edge in an increasingly tight market.”

In today’s organizations, you cannot compete with DevOps if you do not have CSOps. They are symbiotic in their relationship to the bottom line—if products or applications do not meet the customer’s desired outcome, communication from customer service teams must connect with developers and convey what’s wrong or missing. Then, developers can work to provide the proper solutions. Customer service operations feed the DevOps pipeline to create products and services that address customer needs. In other words, you cannot succeed with DevOps if you don’t have CSOps.

Creating the DevOps and CSOps Relationship

The truth is that most CSOps and back office teams like SREs or ITOps don’t have a good relationship, nor do they have effective processes to communicate with each other. This disconnect not only creates problems with customers, but the lack of internal communication creates fault lines across teams and an inability to produce results efficiently. With the trajectory of technology organizations over the last decade ignited by the SaaS model, flexible work and the rise of applications, it is important to look at best practices within an organization and understand how teams can work better together.

While developer teams continue to iterate and produce code, customer service teams are constantly fielding customer feedback, concerns and complaints. Customer service agents are often the first to learn if something is broken and where—if organizations are not using their front-line workers as a tool in remediation and incident response, they are missing out on valuable information that can help them find a solution.

Beyond just fielding complaints and reports about product and service issues, customer service teams are able to aggregate and correlate reports, as well as gather additional information from reporting users. When something goes wrong, mobilizing the required rapid response can often be difficult. If there is a lack of communication between the customer service teams and the developer or engineering teams, a customer complaint about a product or service could take too long to make it through remediation. Creating a rapid connection from the customer service team to the developer team allows customer service agents to have visibility into the problem and the solution, offering feedback to the customer in real-time as the solution is being implemented. It is this ‘Ops’ culture on both the customer service and development teams that supports the organization from end to end.

The symbiotic relationship of DevOps and CSOps can benefit any organization, but adoption requires visibility and bi-directional communication. Development teams that are in close contact with their customer service teams benefit from having better, real-world user information that can then be incorporated into new features and improvements. When customer service teams have a clear path to escalate customer-reported issues—with the right context to the appropriate teams—time to resolution decreases by eliminating silos and breaking down the walls between CSOps and DevOps.

It is time that every organization integrates customer service teams as part of delivering on customer satisfaction instead of just reporting on it. The integration with engineering and back office teams creates a culture of service-first operations.

August 12, 2022
How Retailers Can Prosper in the Age of eBay and Prime

It feels like a long time since the beginning of the pandemic, where once malls and city centers were alive with the footfall of customers and any service could be found across a counter. The landscape of consumer services has now changed irreparably. Online marketplaces, which have increasingly dominated much of consumer purchasing habits since the 2000s, became increasingly monopolistic. Amazon, eBay and other e-commerce platforms are now a one-stop shop for pretty much everything—made possible by the creation of complex global supply chains and unmatched economies of scale, in combination with nationwide distribution centers and an army of delivery drivers.

But these tech-enabled big retailers cannot offer everything to a customer. In many cases, they lack the expertise that smaller, independent vendors can offer—and this is where an advantage can be found.

A USP for Specialists on Par With UPS

Amazon, as large as they are, cannot offer someone to, say, fix your car or mow your lawn and eBay cannot offer a service to unblock your sink or walk your dog. These tasks require skills and services that are still vital in the post-internet age. On my last getaway, I experienced this when renting sports equipment from a waterfront shopkeeper at a remote beach resort. His experience and know-how was first-class. So, the challenge these specialists face is how to offer bespoke services to customers in a convenient, substantial and scalable way.

Technology Takes Services to Customers Like Never Before

And now, prompted by the effects of the pandemic lockdown, an increasing number of retailers are realizing the benefits of augmenting their physical estate with services that bring the shop to the customer’s front door. This is where the rise of mobile retail services has taken hold, providing pre-booked services with minimal contact and disruption to the customer. There are multiple benefits to the customer: Professional services delivered at their convenience, backed up by digital communications to keep them looped in on slot times, stock levels and arrival expectations.

But Mobile Services Need to be Able to Service!

From a retailer’s perspective, a move to mobile services can be as simple as procuring a fleet of vehicles and putting their experts on the road. But on the back end, they must ensure their software infrastructure is up to the challenge. When slots are promised and services are often vital for the customer, missing an appointment is not an option.

This means making sure they have a software system to match the end-to-end mobile customer journey and expectations. That means taking data and putting this journey together, from offering available slots online through to order processing, stocking vans, route optimization and last-mile delivery.

With a robust software system in place, scale and efficiencies can be quickly realized.

Stores Need a Digital Makeover to Ensure Service Delivery

Back in the physical store, manual spreadsheets and creaking retail platforms for ePOS, stock management and appointment bookings cannot provide the level of consistent service and support required by both employees and customers in today’s ultra-competitive retail environment.

Retailers must augment colleagues’ personal expertise with digital means to ensure a more consistent and customer-centric shopping experience. Tablets and mobile devices should be on the shop floor to allow employees to quickly answer customer queries, check stock levels and even execute a purchase.

Even when employees are carrying out services on a customer’s equipment, they can use tablets to photograph or film work done and deliver this straight to the customer to ensure the highest possible standards of quality and safety.

This assisted selling model makes sure employees across the retail business, regardless of their location or skill level, have access to the information they need to ensure a customer-centric interaction.

Adopting Online Innovation to Satisfy Customer Needs

A recent PwC report underlines the vital role technology will play in driving a more customer-centric retail future as consumer expectations continue to rise. The report found that speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service are prioritized by consumers. These qualities were highlighted by nearly 80% of all survey respondents as being the most important elements to ensure a positive customer experience.

The report states: “Those who get it right prioritize technologies that foster or provide these benefits over adopting technology for the sake of being cutting edge.” It continues: “[C]ustomers expect technology to always work (and are unlikely to take note of new technology unless it malfunctions or interrupts the seamless, friendly experience). They want the design of websites and mobile apps to be elegant and user-friendly; they want automation to ease experience. But these advances are not meaningful if speed, convenience and the right information at the right time are lacking.”

Retailers Can Keep Their Digital Hands on the Customer

In a volatile post-pandemic world where more transactions will become digitized, specialist retailers still have an exciting opportunity to interact with a customer base that no longer frequents their stores on a daily basis. They can tap into ever-expanding technology to not only retain customers but truly grow and prosper in ways that were previously not feasible. To do this, they need to shed traditional practices and embrace the new dawn of the customer-focused digital age—in a way that Amazon and eBay can’t!

November 8, 2021
Top 4 Challenges for Developer Teams in 2021

As remote work continues into 2021, developer teams are still navigating the new landscape for working across distributed teams and how this new way of working affects product delivery. In particular, there are several key challenges that every developer must face this year, including adapting to new tools and workflows internally, balancing the prioritization of keep-the-lights-on initiatives with product initiatives, and understanding how to address emerging customer challenges.

As developer teams are responsible for keeping both internal systems healthy and maintaining service uptime for customers, addressing these issues and implementing the strategies below will help ensure better delivery, easier deployment of application and software solutions and improved internal communication processes.

#1 Get Better at Digital Experience Monitoring

For businesses to survive in this current environment, neglecting to monitor a user’s digital experience across their life cycle can mean losing business to a competitor. At a bare minimum, developer teams must ensure that their application’s basic infrastructure is sound. This means monitoring key metrics like CPU load, memory load, memory used, disk space, queue lengths, API uptime or error codes returned.

For a fuller user experience, developer teams should also monitor things like page or app load times, drop-off points in an app and crash logs. The third level of digital experience monitoring is keeping tabs on what your users are doing, such as skipping the onboarding flow, inviting friends to your app, posting content or how much total time they’re spending within the app. Robust digital experience monitoring will ensure that you are constantly measuring the quality of your users’ experience and making improvements along the way.

#2 Expand Where and How You Gather User Feedback

Beyond initial user monitoring, teams should continuously collect feedback to improve features and fix issues that might not have been discovered during testing. One natural way to do this is to aggregate user reviews and support questions to find common themes that may help product teams prioritize future releases. It is also critical to think outside of the box in terms of where and how feedback is collected. Teams can also collect feedback in other ways, such as conducting data analysis and user research sessions or having direct conversations with customers. Giving key beta users early access to a new release can also help developer teams understand whether their application is meeting users’ needs, and whether it is intuitive to use.

Ultimately, by engaging with customers in extensive and real conversations, teams may learn where there are disconnects between users and the products, and what they can do to bridge this gap. Once the information is collected, teams should then prioritize what needs to be done first by ranking requests by frequency received, financial value of fixing the issue, strategic importance to the overall organization and engineering effort.

#3 Prioritize Low-Code and Customer Self-Service Models

Removing barriers to entry for customers is especially critical right now, as developers consider changing user needs, tighter budgets and fewer personnel to implement new code. Customers just don’t have time for entire enterprise sales and onboarding cycles to implement new solutions, so requiring less code is a great way to introduce a more self-service model. This model is also great for non-developers to implement and ensures that customers (whether fellow developers or even someone on a marketing operations or web team) can easily integrate new tools and software into their existing solutions. This is not only critical for those without a more technical background, but also valuable for time-strapped product teams who want to buy, versus build, a new feature.

#4 Codify Hiring to Help Developer Teams Succeed

During the pandemic, both large companies and small startups have pivoted significantly in the way they recruit and onboard engineering, DevOps and technical roles. Leaders of developer teams need to codify their hiring plans and put in place remote work strategies, especially with the hybrid working model that combines remote personnel with in-office staff.

When hiring for remote teams, consider where individuals are located for both development and customer support purposes. Once you determine these core hubs, there should be guidelines in place to reduce the need for team members to work across major time zone differences. This can mean having a core software team in a centralized region that also overlaps with a major customer base, or having an engineering team located in a similar time zone to the design team for easier communication.

Overall, the needs of each developer team will differ depending on the size of the company and the industry it serves. That’s why it’s critically important to adapt your systems and infrastructure accordingly. Furthermore, listening to and processing user feedback, building products that meet ever-changing customer demands and continuing to focus on team communications will help ensure long-term success in a post-pandemic world.

February 23, 2021
Build Better CX Across the Entire User Journey with AIOps
Ready or not, digital experiences are now the gateway to customers and the standard-bearer of a company’s brand. Yet, as apps become more distributed, more intelligent and more real-time, they continue to run on infrastructure that resides within on-prem data centers as well as multiple public clouds. This complexity is underscored by gaps across IT teams, leaving businesses, developers and operations teams working in silos without a single source of truth, exposing risks that can inflict not only severe damage to an application’s performance and reliability, but also eventually exposing the entire business.

For IT teams, understanding their applications is key. Not only are they the backbone of any organization, but they also hold invaluable data on customers and their decision-making habits. Having complete visibility is critical in today’s multi-cloud and hybrid cloud world.

When IT teams are able to work quickly and intelligently, they consistently deliver a strong customer experience–avoiding the risk of creating opportunities for customer disengagement and abandonment. Recent research shows that nearly 84% of respondents said they have experienced problems with digital services. As a result, 40% reported switching suppliers due to a poor digital experience and 63% have actively tried to discourage others from using a service or brand if they have a bad digital experience.

What’s the way forward and how can these existing silos be eradicated?

How to Build Better CX

IT teams are faced with a conundrum–they’ve been asked to manage app complexity while simultaneously navigating operational silos that make collaboration, data exchange and problem resolution incredibly challenging. The way forward lies in a collaborative approach across traditionally siloed teams that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to uncover hidden bottlenecks and resolve issues before they can impact the end-user.

Transformational CIOs need their teams–across app and infrastructure owners–to speak a common language rooted in what’s important to the application performance, user experience and the business impact. They need infrastructure decisions in service of the application, which will ultimately drive business performance. They also need application teams to be able to go deeper and quickly identify underlying infrastructure that may be contributing to poor application performance.

In order for true collaboration to take place, the first step is to increase visibility across the IT organization by providing a common view of correlated data across domains that provides contextualized insights to better collaborate and create a superior digital experience.

For application teams, this means gaining insight into the users’ most transited application journeys, helping to clearly identify application bottlenecks and abandonment and to triage efficiently. For the infrastructure teams, improved visibility means having insight into infrastructure constraints impacting app performance so that teams can correlate the user experience to any underlying infrastructure in real-time. Through this increased visibility and context, application and infrastructure teams can clearly identify respective action items and move swiftly to resolve the right issues, at exactly the right time.

This notion of fill stack visibility and correlated insights that drive action is a mindset commonly referred to as AIOps.

Enter AIOps

While it may be true that the emergence of today’s modern application and infrastructure environments has provided the speed and flexibility professionals demand, the numerous services have unleashed a deluge of data on the enterprise IT environment. Automating tasks has helped teams to free up some bandwidth for operations and planning, yet automation alone is no match for today’s increasingly complex environments. What’s needed is a strategy focused on reducing the burden of mounting IT operations responsibilities, and surfacing the insights that matter most so that businesses can take the right action.

So, what are forward-thinking IT professionals doing to stay ahead of the curve?

Many are applying an AIOps approach to the challenge of environment complexities. AIOps leverages advances in machine learning and AI to proactively resolve problems that arise in the application and infrastructure environment. This is so powerful because using AI to identify potential challenges doesn’t just help IT professionals get ahead of problems, it helps companies avoid revenue-impacting outages that jeopardize the customer experience, the business and the brand. What’s more, an AIOps strategy can provide:
- Intelligent alerting that can be trusted to indicate an emerging issue. By ingesting data, AIOps platforms and technology can play a pivotal role in not just automating existing IT tasks, but identifying and managing new ones based on potential problems detected.
- Automated root cause analysis and business impact assessment. With the help of AIOps technology, this can be achieved, providing increased agility in the face of potential service disruptions or threats, and without additional drain on resources.
- Automated remediation for common issues. With an AIOps platform, it’s easy to not only automate remediation for known issues, but unknown issues, too. That’s because it can ingest data and also provide more intelligent insights as a result of it.
The path forward is clear. Digital businesses are not only the future but they are today’s norm. Any IT leader looking to succeed needs to rethink their overall approach and embrace a future that includes complete visibility of their technology and application stack, and also a strategic approach that keeps their teams operating one step ahead of the curve.

— Whitney Satin
April 16, 2020
Intelligent Virtual Assistants and Their Role in Helping Brands Transform Customer Experiences

The relationship between computers and humans has undergone a significant paradigm shift over several decades. From the emergence of the web in 1995 to applications or apps in 2005, technology has grown by leaps and bounds as the years progressed. This growth has brought technology to the modern era, where artificial intelligence (AI) has ultimately begun to come of age.

Engineers and scientists have invested a great deal of effort, in terms of both energy and time, over the past few decades, which has allowed AI to be adapted into nearly every technological innovation in recent years. One such innovation is the intelligent virtual assistant (IVA).

An IVA is a conversational AI system that has the capability to emulate human interaction in order to carry out and optimize tasks—customer service, for example. Digital assistants are gaining widespread attention across the industrial landscape, owing to a plethora of technological advancements, including machine learning and deep neural networks, among others. What makes these virtual assistants intelligent is their ability to emulate three key elements that enable customer service agents to solve problems—learning, reasoning and understanding.

How did these conversational AI technologies achieve these capabilities? To answer this question, it is essential to delve into the evolution of the IVA market.

Evolution of IVAs

Although the terms “chatbots” and “intelligent virtual assistant” are often used interchangeably, and despite the fact that these technologies share a core commonality—i.e., their ability to facilitate consumer-enterprise interaction—these conversational AI technologies have some distinct differences. These differences lie mainly in complexity, scope and abilities, which IVAs’ possess more of than chatbots.

In simple words, IVAs are the result of a decade-long chatbot evolution.

Chatbots were first introduced in the late 60s and early 70s. These technologies were programmed with rudimentary capabilities, including scripted responses based on user inputs in the form of specific phrases and keywords.

However, with conversational flows becoming increasingly more complex over time, these chatbots began facing limitations in their scope, mainly owing to their lack of learning process and pre-programmed responses. With no memory or context retention capabilities, the bots were unable to comprehend relevant user information between sessions or even during the conversation.

However, conversational AI evolution reached a turning point with the emergence of two novel technologies, machine learning (ML) and natural language understanding (NLU).

NLU gives the digital assistant the ability to comprehend and interpret inputs from users in natural language, which can enable the bot to converse with a customer naturally, as a customer service agent would.

Meanwhile, ML allows the bots to self-train based on data such as previous customer service interaction transcripts or by observing live customer-agent interactions. This helps the IVAs to cater to customer needs in a more efficient and seamless manner.

The technological advantages provided by these technologies, therefore, facilitated the gradual evolution of simple chatbots into IVAs, which possess in-depth domain knowledge that they can leverage to understand customer preferences and intents, fulfill their needs and enhance performance over time by gaining new insights from each interaction.

As a result of these advanced capabilities, automation and customer satisfaction are assured outcomes of IVA adoption. Thus, brands that make use of this technology can make sure that they refocus on their primary objective: ROI.

The Gradual Shift of IVA Technology from a Personal to a Commercial Landscape

Starting out as an ideal solution for virtual personal assistants, such as Apple’s Siri which allows users to use voice-technology to perform myriad tasks like texting, scheduling meetings or making phone calls, IVAs are now gaining prominence as crucial tools for brands to implement effective customer engagement.

AI assistants are rapidly making their way out of personal applications and entering a more business-oriented landscape, for instance, Oracle’s Digital Assistant which is designed to be an ideal platform for sales, marketing and other industry verticals by interfacing with a vast software app portfolio.

IVA technology is used across a range of industrial applications, for example, taking up the role of sales agents or customer service executives, which makes it a scalable and appealing option for enterprises. Businesses predominantly adopt digital assistants to drive efficiency, enhance ROI, optimize processes and help reduce workloads.

As the industrial space grows increasingly more competitive, customer engagement has emerged as one of the most significant assets for a successful brand. In fact, studies have shown that almost 96% of customers across the globe believe that customer service is a significant factor contributing to their loyalty to a brand.

IVAs help brands deliver positive customer experiences by covering a number of different aspects. For instance, AI assistants can quickly solve customer problems through customers’ preferred channels, ensuring speed and convenience. They can also integrate with various systems and databases of brands, thus offering a robust knowledge base to provide tailored solutions to customers. Additionally, they are able to adapt their tone and language to context, which helps them emulate human conversations. All these factors help digital assistants play the role of an efficient and helpful customer service representative.

How Brands Are Leveraging Conversational AI Assistants to Drive Customer Engagement

Given the strong capacity of conversational AI technology to engage actively with customers and optimize customer service, more and more companies are adopting the technology as an integral part of their customer experience activities.

To illustrate, Volvo has plans to develop conversational assistance to guide drivers in the use of various in-car apps to deliver a more effortless connected car experience.

Likewise, Spotify has also earned positive reviews for its AI-based technology to track user patterns and make accurate recommendations and predictions based on preferences of individual customers, in turn elevating the overall user experience.

The IVA industry has witnessed several prolific advancements over the years. The future outlook for the technology seems positive, with even more exciting avenues as the years progress, and AI researchers investigating the prospect of enhancing the emotional intelligence of assistants. The ability to comprehend not just the user’s preferences but also their emotions would revolutionize the way customer service is delivered, thus positioning AI assistants as a pivotal component of the future customer experience landscape.

— Saloni Walimbe

April 15, 2020
FRESHeTECH FRESHeBUDS Pro, Even DevOps Can’t Help A Bad Product & Company

At devopsy.kinsta.cloud we spend a lot of time talking about the many companies who are making tremendous progress building better apps and products, being more profitable and serving their customers better. But every once in a while we need to remind ourselves that not every company, not every product or app works like it should. FRESHeTECH, makers of FRESHeBUDS is a great example. A product that is of shoddy quality as evidenced by many reviews of real customers and even worse customer service. These two qualities combine to a fast track to failure.

Let me give you a little background. We were looking for some simple bluetooth earbuds to use around the office for conference calls and webinars. We were emailed an offer for the FRESHeBUDS at only $29.99 a pair. Yes, you get what you pay for and we should have done our homework. But they looked good enough. They were a local Florida company and we gave them a chance.

The first thing that should have sent a flag was that there was no way to track order status from the website. When was the last time you saw an e-commerce site where you can’t track order status? The next thing was we received an automated email that our order shipped and gave a USPS tracking number and estimated delivery. OK that sounded a little better. Alas, when the site wasn’t updated and the buds didn’t arrive again red flags. Frankly we blamed it on the USPS, not FRESHeTECH.

Finally, a week later the product arrives. Nice packaging, kind of shoddy instructions. But the buds themselves looked as they did online. We tested them out as again the instructions were pretty sparse.

We were able to get the buds to pair with two different phones. However, anytime you move the sound would cut out. Also they would only work if you held the paired cell phone up near your ear. If you lowered it below your shoulders again the sound would cut out. Our testing revealed that these earbuds had a bluetooth connectivity range of 10 to 12 inches!

Really? No one picked this up in testing? Would this not be a critical design element? Thinking maybe this was just a defective set, we opened the 2nd set of earbuds and put them through the same test. Ugh, same result. So this wasn’t a random accident, this was poor quality by design!

At this point we tried other phones and then used those phone to pair with other bluetooth headphones. No doubt about it, it is the FRESHeTECH FRESHeBUDS pro that are culprit. It appears this local Florida company probably had them manufactured in China or somewhere and choose some really poor quality design.

Now no company wants to be know as the seller of this kind of shoddy product right? Well that is when we looked on Amazon. They have a rating of 2.5 stars. The complaints from customers are pretty evenly split between terrible design and even worse customer service. That does not make for a winning combination.

So what does it take for a company like FRESHeTECH to realize that they are on a fast track to nowhere? Feedback loops, customer satisfaction – are these just crazy words to them? FRESHeTECH is reminder that even at a time when we have DevOps and other ways of improving our customer experiences, failures still happen.

The good news is the market takes care these failures by forcing them out business once word gets out about the way they do business. Hopefully FRESHeTECH will learn and improve or fail quickly.

So next time you think that your organization is not releasing fast enough, not making enough progress. Not like Facebook or Google enough, remember you could be like FRESHeTECH and really have problems.

— Alan Shimel

November 27, 2016
DevOps Is About Serving The Customer: Q&A with Shridhar Mittal

As a longtime proponent of continuous delivery and fast deployment schedules, Shridhar Mittal has advocated for DevOps operational patterns since before the DevOps moniker was even coined. It was a philosophy that stemmed from what he and his colleagues at what was then Interactive TKO saw happening in response to the service-oriented architecture movement: many organizations were slowing down their releases as opposed speeding them up, which was the whole “promise” of SOA, he says.

“So we started a whole company around how do you change your development processes to get speed with quality in this new world of distributed architectures,” he explains.

Since iTKO’s acquisition by CA Technologies in 2011, Mittal has used his current role as general manager of application delivery at the company to focus his efforts on evangelizing DevOps cultural shifts within the enterprise. He believes that DevOps is on the brink of revolutionizing the way IT departments function and in addition to his anecdotal evidence from frequent talks with IT leaders, he points to a recent survey CA conducted together with IDG for evidence. According to technology decision-makers, while only 7 percent of organizations have already adopted DevOps practices with enterprise-wide scope, it is gaining traction. Another 39 percent report that they’ve either implemented DevOps principles with limited scope or are in the process of adopting DevOps. And another 28 percent are either planning on implementing or are evaluating DevOps.

devopsy.kinsta.cloud recently spoke with Mittal to discuss the mainstream uptake of DevOps, the biggest transition challenges and the attitudes about IT job performance in a new era of cooperation.

devopsy.kinsta.cloud: Why do you believe that DevOps is gaining so much traction today?

Mittal: I think the whole promise of DevOps is around better customer experience. Better quality for the customer, but in a much, much faster way than you could do it before. To me, that is ultimate goal.

Ever since the whole consumerization of IT, everyone uses the web and everyone uses mobile devices, and there is no buffer in between the application and the end consumer now. Previously to that you used to have, in the call center, you had people who are using applications and the consumer never actually interacted with the application.

So if it sucked, its internal people that had to deal with that–it wasn’t the consumer. Now, you cannot afford to have your customers have a bad experience because then you are going to lose business. One of our case studies is the .com part of a very large company–one of the Fortune 100. They had done a study that showed that for every one second delay in the response in the website dropped the conversion rate of sending someone to the next step of purchasing. It dropped significantly for every second.

Think about it. If you’re doing a big marketing event, you’re sending hundreds of thousands of people to your website, and just because your website doesn’t respond properly, you lose that many more potential customers.

That’s the kind of value that we’re talking about right now. Take a simple example, say there’s the launch of a phone and the telecomm company wants to release it at the same time the manufacturer is releasing it and the systems are not connected in time. They would end up losing hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of business because they didn’t release it at the same time, and one of the competitors actually released on time.

These are the kinds of the hundreds of millions worth of value we’re talking about. In the past, people thought about it as, maybe if I can get three percent or four percent more efficiency I can save x numbers of millions. But what I think they’ll really be looking for now is the ability to grow their business much faster.

devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How can organizations start meeting the challenge of transitioning to DevOps?

Mittal: Start small and then build up to the big There are at least three different on-ramps we talk about to get to DevOps. One is, just start with the development side of the word and decouple the development teams from each other so that they can do their things faster and still be able to deliver things on a higher quality. That’s using things like server virtualization and API testing. The second on-ramp is just improving your environment management, the release management capability. People today are spending tens or hundreds of man-hours creating and maintaining these environments then tearing them down and then bringing them up again.

So figure out how automate that process where you can take so many man-days of work and bring it down to something that can be handled by one person and can be done as a self-service in a matter of minutes as opposed to taking days weeks or months to happen.

And then the third on-ramp is to put more automated testing processes in place, for instances doing performance testing. Trying to do it in-house today is becoming more and more difficult because there’s never enough infrastructure internally to be able to handle simulating these tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people coming to your web site. It’s just not possible. So figure out ways to leverage cloud-based automated testing capabilities to support that.

There are many different on-ramps and people can start from one or another and then start building to much bigger things. Start small and eventually expand to put it across the enterprise.

It is also important to get the trust built between developers and operations through better visibility. The classic scenario is, the developers just want to write code, release it, then they want to go back to writing code again. Operations want to slow things down because all they care about is a stable environment. If I could get devs to have visibility and ownership and be measured on how the products are actually behaving in production and, same thing with ops, if I could give them visibility to what’s in the pipeline, what’s coming out, why is this coming out, what is the business case and how this impacts your business, they’ll all start feeling an ownership for the whole process.

devopsy.kinsta.cloud: That brings up an important question: how critical is it to change job performance metrics in both development and operations in order to make DevOps work?

Mittal: I think it’s very important. I think it’s not something that has to be done from the get-go but I think somewhere after you have done the first couple of projects and some of the people have started buying into DevOps, that’s when you have to fundamentally change the culture of the company. In my mind, that’s contracted behavior—and it’s not because people are coin-operated.

I’m not saying this in a bad way. To me, people look at the way they’re comped as a way of understanding what their direction is. What are they being asked to do?

So if they are not getting measured on quality, to them, that means “Just make sure that you just get things out as fast as possible and then if you have to roll back, then you have to roll back.” And if you’re not getting measured on constant speed, then that’s like being told by the executives that, “All I want you to do is have a stable environment; I don’t care as much about getting new stuff out there.”

So there has to be changes in the comp structure, how people are rewarded, to really change the culture of a company.

devopsy.kinsta.cloud: What other things need to be done on the line-of-business executive leadership side of the house to make DevOps work?

Mittal: I think that the business side needs to be the driver to a large extent, because the business needs to say why something is important. If supply of IT capabilities is much less than demand, that means there has to be some kind of prioritization of work. And who’s making that determination? Who is doing the prioritization? To me, without a business context, you can’t be doing direct prioritization.

I think the business has to be very involved in helping IT understand a prioritized list of what needs to get done. They don’t say how it needs to get done, they just need to say, “This is more important than this, and this is the impact to our business of that.”

April 7, 2014