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Tag: UX

  • 3 Performance Challenges as Chatbot Adoption Grows

    3 Performance Challenges as Chatbot Adoption Grows

    Today, many organizations are starting to use voice or text-enabled chatbots for the first time or already have chatbot systems in place. In fact, Gartner said 25% of organizations are predicted to make chatbots their primary customer communication channel by 2027. This is because consumer behavior has shifted to primarily digital interactions and away from traditional customer support channels.

    As a result of today’s digital landscape, consumers are now accustomed to immediate gratification and expect instant responses and resolution from customer support, which makes chatbots an ideal solution for brands to rapidly serve customers. Due to this rising demand for instant customer service, chatbot systems have become more sophisticated and consumers’ reliance on them is increasing. This increase in adoption has led to higher performance expectations for bots and if those expectations are not met, customer satisfaction and brand loyalty will suffer.

    Below, we’ll look at three major challenges tied to the growing popularity of chatbots as they handle larger and more diverse groups of customers, and how business leaders developers and DevOps and customer experience (CX) teams can tackle these common challenges with a continuous testing approach.

    The Pain Points of Adoption: 3 Key Challenges as Chatbot Usage Grows

    As the popularity of chatbots explodes for customers around the world, the underlying systems that handle natural language processing (NLP), latency, data security and other functions need to be stronger. This is due to a growing and increasingly diverse demographic of users, many of whom are sharing more of their personal information to address a wider range of customer needs. Common chatbot pain points can be summarized by three overarching challenges.

    Challenge #1: Chatbots must contend with a larger and more diverse base of customers

    Chatbots that are voice or text-enabled must be smart enough to operate securely while navigating countless variations in spelling, a wide range of spoken accents and vernacular, background noise, static from bad connections and more. Even in a single language, there may typically be only four or five “intents” from most customers in engaging a chatbot, but those intents may be phrased in hundreds of different ways. Now, the global growth in adoption raises the chance of poor connections and exponentially increases the number of languages and variations in phrasing that a chatbot must understand and interpret.

    Challenge #2: Customers are trusting chatbots with more personal and sensitive data

    As chatbots become smarter and more trusted by customers to meet their needs, people are getting more comfortable giving their personal data to chatbots. That increases the number of situations where chatbots are working with personally identifiable information (PII) or other highly sensitive data. Especially given GDPR and other data privacy regulations being enacted worldwide, there’s added pressure to ensure a chatbot system’s handling of this data remains secure and compliant across all use cases and geographic regions.

    Challenge #3: Modern chatbots require 24/7 availability and reliability

    In an era of flexible work and millennial and Gen Z audiences interacting with bots after business hours and on weekends, chatbots can’t afford to work in shifts. Users may be spread across many time zones or around the world, meaning there’s always a sizable portion of customers awake, online and looking for fast and efficient service. Because of this, chatbots must be able to handle spikes and heavy traffic 24/7.

    The executive takeaway from these challenges is that modern chatbot investments must be built around dynamic systems capable of adjusting to shifting customer usage and performance requirements.

    A Continuous Testing Mindset is Required for Top Chatbot Performance

    Fortunately, by honoring a few best practices and making the right strategic technology investments in automated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-driven systems, C-suite leaders responsible for CX and the teams they manage can deploy chatbots capable of keeping up with the above challenges. Perhaps the most central element for success is to embrace a continuous testing approach.

    For example, when a company is undergoing digital transformation and shifting its contact centers and supporting systems to the cloud, they are moving a significant amount of data, reimagining complex integrations and rearchitecting processes. In order to maintain application stability and existing integrations in the contact center, continuous testing is critical to ensure that an organization’s systems still operate effectively throughout the cloud migration process. With continuous testing, development and testing aren’t separate processes. The testing is automated and quality assurance is involved as developers submit code.

    The most effective approach to continuous testing includes end-to-end analysis across all channels. Testing chatbot behaviors should mimic real-time customer interactions. This should include challenging scenarios such as unexpected user inputs and usage spikes at random times of the day and night. Automation is critical, especially in peak demand scenarios such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, open enrollment, etc. Load testing up to 1,000-100,000 bot requests per second, or more, can help ensure companies will be able to handle the increased traffic. Ideally, the testing approach should be comprehensive to include automated NLP score testing, conversational flow testing and security testing and performance testing and monitoring.

    By promoting the continuous testing approach across contact center operations, executives can empower their teams to build and maintain chatbots that remain optimized on an ongoing basis and that form an essential part of providing exceptional CX. This will make a huge difference in performance and reliability as systems scale and adapt to the evolving demands of a growing customer base.

    Continuous Testing Elevates Chatbot Reliability and Value

    High-performing chatbots and the continuous testing that keeps them optimized at those performance levels can benefit any company by lowering risks and enhancing revenue. Organizations that become adept at applying continuous testing avoid 90% of the downtime from high-severity (SEV 1) errors, which can result in saving $2.2 million in costs over a three-year period. When continuous testing touches every stage of the development process, it identifies issues earlier and helps strengthen an organization’s ability to innovate faster and service its customers effectively and profitably.

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

    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.

  • 8 Web Development Trends to Follow

    8 Web Development Trends to Follow

    Since the inception of the internet in 1983, many web development tools have been introduced to simplify complex processes that would otherwise take months to finish and cost companies a great deal of money.

    According to internet live statistics, over 1.5 billion websites and more than five billion active daily internet users visit multiple sites around the clock. That number is expected to grow as businesses (and website owners) offer personalized experiences to users, make their websites more user-friendly and introduce navigation that visitors prefer.

    Website development has changed and is still evolving quickly. As a website owner, it’s imperative to watch out for new trends that are being introduced in the industry. Neglecting to adopt current trends might affect your website’s functionality, user experience and network. You risk falling behind your rivals and losing visitors to websites with superior user experiences and network scalability.

    The best way to maintain competitiveness is to make sure your website is consistently updated, fresh and that it follows current trends. Here are eight to watch out for.

    Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

    PWAs speed up website loading times and enable offline functionality in multiple applications. PWAs have already been used by businesses like Starbucks, Uber, Pinterest and Twitter to improve user experience.

    It is crucial to transform web apps into PWAs, given the increased shift toward smartphones and tablets for various online functions. PWAs offer a superior user experience, increased engagement and conversion rates and lower development costs.

    Motion UI

    Motion UI is used to create fully responsive site designs. Motion UI enables developers to produce motion in a native app environment, and with a built-in motion, it can be used for any design project. A website needs to be appealing and offer the information a user seeks. Your target audience is more likely to notice websites that look good.

    Motion UI is easy to implement as the developer doesn’t need to be an expert in JavaScript. It also assists people in finding the precise information they need and improves the effectiveness of site design.

    Privacy Center

    Privacy is a core component of ensuring your customers have a safe user experience when navigating your website. Privacy Center is an intuitive way of cataloging your privacy policy and notices, terms of service, cookie policy, refund policy, data subject requests and more on a single page.

    Privacy Center enables users to obtain information regarding a company’s data activities from a single source without having to navigate multiple pages and scroll through endless paragraphs to identify the information they need.

    Privacy Center is a growing trend for web developers as data privacy laws impose strict obligations on companies, necessitating the need to implement intuitive privacy centers that address all concerns of users.

    Dark Mode

    Although dark mode was first introduced in 2016, it wasn’t until 2020 and 2021 that it gained popularity as a standard practice in web building. Essentially, dark mode refers to a site’s color scheme. In other words, the website has a darker background with light-colored text and other UI elements.

    Dark mode typically lessens eye strain, especially in dim lighting. When dark mode is used instead of light mode on a mobile device, it uses less battery. People with light sensitivity or vision impairments have also found it to be beneficial.

    Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

    Accelerated mobile pages, better known as AMP, is an initiative that resulted from Google and Twitter working together to provide quicker mobile pages. Pages that are AMP-optimized load quicker, thus ranking better than pages that take more time to load. Compared to non-AMP pages, which may take up to 22 seconds to load, AMP pages do so in roughly two seconds.

    In web development, AMP is a simple search engine optimization method that reduces bounce rates, adapts to any browser and doesn’t need sitemaps to be discovered by search engines.

    AI Chatbots

    AI chatbots are intuitive, enabling businesses to operate more quickly over voice or text chats while enhancing the consumer experience. The technology provides a more human-like experience to visitors with the help of machine learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) that understand the user’s intent and responds accordingly. Many well-known enterprises already use AI chatbots to communicate with their clients.

    Industry experts predict that AI chatbots or self-learning bots are the way of the future, and organizations can save money by using them instead of human customer support representatives, especially for simple queries and FAQs. AI chatbots are a long-term investment as they process orders, respond to users’ questions, connect them with the relevant department and quickly resolve any complaints, resulting in an improved user experience.

    Voice Search Optimization

    The practice of optimizing web pages to show up in voice searches is known as voice search optimization. Voice assistants and the internet of things (IoT) have helped voice recognition devices become increasingly widespread.

    Google launched voice search in 2012. Since then, the market for voice search tools—such as virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri—has seen exceptional growth. The trend is only expected to grow since virtual assistants are not currently being integrated into many internet-enabled devices.

    By 2023, eight billion digital voice assistants are predicted to be in use worldwide. Due to this enormous expansion, voice search optimization will become indispensable among the newest web development technologies.

    Push Notifications

    When users browse, push notifications—clickable pop-ups—appear before them. Companies employ this technology as a speedy route for communicating information, such as promotions and announcements. Push notifications can be integrated on any device, including laptops, cellphones and tablets.

    Push notifications are an effective tool that significantly improves users’ experience, drives visitors to your website, improves click rates, aids in grabbing users’ attention and improves conversion rates. Web applications from internet behemoths like Facebook and Google already use the technology.

    Conclusion

    Though it has been around for decades, web development continues to innovate and improve as organizations strive to influence the future delivery of web experiences. To give your users the best experience, raise the search rating of your website and reach new heights, it is crucial to keep up with these trends.

  • Next-Level Tech: DevOps Meets CSOps

    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. 

  • Dynatrace Adds Synthetic Tests to Validate App Experiences

    Dynatrace Adds Synthetic Tests to Validate App Experiences

    Dynatrace today extended the application release management capabilities it provides to include synthetic tests for validating and assuring user experiences.

    Saif Gunja, director of product marketing for Dynatrace, said the user experience validation and user experience assurance (UXA) capability spans everything from application availability and performance to actual engagement with specific features based on the service level objectives (SLOs) defined by a DevOps team.

    Dynatrace views application release management as an extension of its observability platform, said Gunja. While application release management has historically been viewed as an extension of a continuous delivery (CD) platform, Gunja said that observability platforms—such as the Dynatrace platform, which is infused with a Davis artificial intelligence (AI) engine—provide the visibility required to better automate the process.

    In fact, as DevOps continues to evolve, it’s apparent that CD and continuous integration (CI) are becoming more loosely coupled as DevOps processes mature, said Gunja. Most organizations have yet to implement CD simply because it’s been too difficult to achieve. Each platform that applications have been deployed is unique. Dynatrace provides the foundation for automating application release management via the agent software it makes available to instrument applications, said Gunja.

    It’s not clear whether DevOps teams are reevaluating their approach to application delivery, but Gunja noted that much of the interest in the Dynatrace approach is coming from organizations that have already installed the Jenkins CI/CD platform. The number of extensions that have been built and that need to be supported has created a level of technical debt that is unsustainable for many DevOps teams, he noted.

    Many IT leaders concluded they would rather allocate more resources to building applications than maintaining DevOps platforms, added Gunja.

    Most DevOps teams are committed to ruthlessly automating as many IT processes as possible. Observability has always been a core DevOps tenet in pursuit of that goal. Applications that are not instrumented can be programmatically managed. The issue is that providing observability isn’t enough—DevOps teams need to be able to take actions across the entire software development life cycle based on the data collected by the observability platform, said Gunja.

    Obviously, it’s still early days as far as observability is concerned. While application performance management (APM) platforms have been employed for decades, it’s only recently that observability platforms capable of correlating application and IT infrastructure data have emerged. Thanks to the rise of open source agent software, it’s also becoming less costly to instrument IT environments. The challenge, of course, is, as always, deploying and maintaining all that agent software.

    Regardless of the approach to observability and DevOps, it’s clear that IT teams will soon have a lot more visibility into their IT environments. The days when IT teams determined the root cause of an IT issue by process of elimination are finally coming to an end. Observability, however, is not an end in itself, but instead is the end of the beginning of a previous DevOps era.