Archive for November, 2019

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Customer data platform – Hospitality

November 4th, 2019

The hospitality industry, is built on the premise of welcoming and delightful experiences for guests and patrons.

Advancements in technology have led to more automated and self-service functions across hospitality organizations like online booking and reservation. However, it is important not to lose the personal touch and service that makes a travel, entertainment, or dining experience so memorable.

With the vast amount of data already available to organizations today, the hospitality industry can refine its approach to customer engagement, and leverage customer data and insights to empower every employee to deliver exceptional experiences to guests.

Customers have more options available than ever and are increasingly more selective. They expect brands to use their data to personalize recommendations and experiences and are even willing to pay more for a personalized experience. Engagement should not only be personalized, but also convenient, guided and consistent across every channel, to provide guests with the same, seamless and intelligent experience at every touch point – whether online, mobile app, phone, or in person.

Harness customer data generated at every interaction: website activity, search histories, previous visits, social engagement, transactions, and more – hospitality organizations can better understand their customers in order to anticipate and serve their needs.

What might a data-driven engagement strategy achieve in the hospitality industry?:

Restaurants
• Unified customer profiles enable hosts and servers to provide highly personalized service – they already know a guest’s drink or table preference or food allergies
• Analyze customer data to predict churn and to trigger personalized dining offers to guests who haven’t been back in a while
• Make informed changes to menus, events, or specials based on guests’ preferences and response

Hotels
• Empower every employee, from reservation agents to onsite hotel staff, with holistic customer profiles that enable personal engagement at every touch point, like knowing a guest’s preferred room location, or special requests before they need to ask
• Seamlessly connect online and offline experiences like hotel staffhaving a customer’s name and reservation details surfaced as soon as they call in about a booking made online
• Use search data and previous stay history or preferences to deliver personalized follow-up. Offer previous guest a loyalty offer for a discounted rate at another location they searched;
• Make better, timely, informed business decisions and adjustments to offerings based on rich customer insights and feedback.

Airlines
• Providing personalized ticket pricing based on customers’ past spending behaviors, or search criteria,
• Create a consistent and intuitive experience across all channels, enabling customers to engage how and where they want to, from website to call center to mobile app to in-flight experiences
• Deliver highly personalized service at every interaction when a reservation agent already knows a customer’s preferred seating choice and meal selection when booking a flight
• Proactively identify and engage at-risk customers who had a bad travel experience by sending a tailored loyalty offer or discount

Deliver an exceptional, personalized guest experience from the first interaction to post-visit helps secure guest loyalty and keeps them coming back, increasing brand advocacy and customer lifetime value.

According to a recent report by McKinsey, guests report being 61 percent more willing to recommend a hotel that gets the entire customer experience right, versus those that merely focus on individual touch points.

How a customer data platform will help

Hospitality organizations can collect customer data across many systems and channels that guests interact with. Yet without the ability to effectively unify and interpret all of this data at scale, it can be difficult or impossible to derive the holistic customer profiles and actionable insights necessary to deliver a hyper-connected, personalized guest experience.

With a customer data platform (CDP) like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, organizations can bring together customer data from all sources to gain a truly 360-degree view of customers, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to unlock rich insights that increase customer loyalty and lifetime value with personalized experiences across all channels

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Posted in Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Customer data platform

November 4th, 2019

The CDP Institute’s latest research indicates that 34 percent of B2B companies plan to start deploying a customer data platform (CDP) in the next year, compared with just 19 percent of B2C companies.

B2Bs have significantly longer and more complex sales cycles that create huge volumes of data, and the relationship-driven nature of B2B business requires a persistent and holistic view of the customer across the entire customer journey.

B2B buyers are changing the rules of the game. Accustomed to fast, frictionless, and personalized buying experiences in their everyday life as a consumer, they bring those high expectations to their roles as B2B buyers. They are technically savvy and comfortable engaging via digital channels, which means their data is scattered across different systems.

Without unified customer data, it’s impossible for companies to personalize experiences with B2B decision-makers.

A CDP provides B2B organizations with the means to unify customer data and gain a complete view of customers. This unified data is the foundation for gaining insights, from better account segmentation to predictions about customer behavior, that drive intelligent and personalized experiences.

A CDP brings together customer data from all sources – CRM, ERP, email, website, POS, cases, partner systems, firmographics, and social networks like LinkedIn – and performs identity resolution at the contact and account level to generate unified profiles for individuals and accounts.

The data combined with AI generates insights – accounts to target, content to share, products to recommend, and the best time to call. Insights are activated when they are integrated with business applications and tools like sales applications, marketing applications, workflow, and analytics. In today’s fast-paced, competitive environment, a robust CDP is an essential tool for delivering personalized B2B experiences:

• Account-based marketing – Complete customer profiles and the resulting intelligence lead to better prioritization of high-potential customers and alignment of B2B sales and marketing teams in delivering coordinated and personalized experiences.
• Sales enablement – Organizations that equip their B2B sales team with rich customer data, curated content, and insights from across the customer journey, without salespeople having to search for it, can have more intelligent conversations, deepen relationships, and be more productive.
• Recommended next best action and automated workflow – Proactive recommendations and automated processes based on unified customer profiles including product usage data, ensure a well-orchestrated customer journey. For example, when product trial usage exceeds a threshold, an alert is automatically sent to the salesperson to follow-up with a call.

To deliver personalized experiences at scale, needs a firm foundation on which to better understand and engage target customers. Microsoft’s CDP solution, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, is a pre-assembled and ready-to-go CDP solution that helps B2B organizations achieve a 360-degree view of customers and deliver personalized omnichannel experiences, making B2B experiences as engaging as B2C experiences.

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Posted in Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Digital Messaging – 1November 2019

November 4th, 2019

There is a new release today – the new Dynamics 365 Customer Service digital messaging offering that expands and unifies the core capabilities of Omnichannel for Customer Service.

Further empower contact centers to provide seamless, and more personalized customer service across a wide range of channels. Combine digital add-ons into one end-to-end offering, for your agents to engage customers, including:
• Chat for Dynamics 365 Customer Service
• SMS (requires additional TeleSign agreement)
• Microsoft Bot Framework integration
• Facebook Messenger, available today in preview*

The solution incudes real-time sentiment tracking, which supports more than 40 languages.

The solution also includes seamless escalation support from bot to live agent so that the agent receives the complete context of the conversation, and the customer never has to repeat information they’ve already shared.

In addition to launching this new offering, look forward to additional capabilities coming to Dynamics 365 Customer Service over the next few months:
• Agent-facing bots Help agents to resolve issues faster and to provide quick responses based on conversation context, knowledge article suggestions to share, or suggestions on the next best action the agent can take to resolve the issue.
• Skills-based routing Ensure conversations are routed to the available,best-fit, agent based on a specific agent’s area of expertise. This ensures the right agent with the right skills will more quickly resolve customer issues.
• Macros Enable agents to automate routine responses or repetitive tasks with a single click, such as updating a field, sending acknowledgment emails or performing session wrap-up activities.
• Agent scripts Help agents to accelerate issue resolution, ensure regulatory compliance, and deliver a consistent customer experience. Create step-by-step guidance scripts for agents and then automate the steps based on session type.
• Unified entity routing and auto-assignment Enable customers who have implemented custom entities to route and automatically assign those activities to agents.

*This feature is currently a preview, before general availability so you can test and evaluate the preview.

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Posted in Uncategorized

HA for UiPAth Orchestrator

November 2nd, 2019

High availability and geo-redundancy are popular topics as our customers scale their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) infrastructure, and the business impact of robot downtime becomes greater.
“high availability” means having two or more instances of a service running and synchronized so that if one fails, the service remains available.
“Geo-redundancy” is a specific approach that places those instances in different countries, to protect against potentially more significant threats.

For on-premises, third-party, and hybrid configurations, the new solution form UiPath is the High Availability add-on for UiPath Orchestrator. It’s built on, and replaces, REDIS, which many customers have used previously – but it comes from UiPath and delivers on key capabilities customers have been asking for:
• A fully supported, enterprise-grade UiPath redundancy solution
• Active-Active failover support with local latency
• Easy upgradability from REDIS (open source or Enterprise), our previous recommendation
• Scalability from two UiPath Orchestrator instances up to the largest global installations

Orchestrator, lets you optimize your robot workforce. Among other things, Orchestrator prioritizes (and in some cases initiates) robots’ work, shares information between them, and lets you manage, monitor, and audit robots from one place. With Orchestrator, software robots do more for your business, and as your business scales robot use, Orchestrator itself becomes more and more critical to your RPA environment.

One Orchestrator can handle a lot of robots in a typical configuration, but any product running on a single server is vulnerable to failure if something happens to that server. This is where the High Availability add-on is like an insurance policy that keeps your robot fleet running. The High Availability add-on enables you to add a second Orchestrator server to your environment that is always fully synchronized with the first server. If anything happens to one of the servers (from disaster to planned maintenance), then the workload is picked up seamlessly by the other. Your robots carry on supporting your business as though nothing happened.

The High Availability add-on can be used further to enable geo-redundancy: two or more Orchestrator servers can be installed in multiple countries, providing local latencies under normal conditions. However, if one of those servers fails, the others immediately pick up the workload.If you are running Orchestrator in a third-party cloud, then you may be less concerned about hardware failure – but you may still want to regionalize your Orchestrators and protect against needing to take one offline, especially when your compliance requirements mandate the ability to provide a full audit 24/7.

The High Availability add-on is always required when you want to run more than one connected and synchronized Orchestrator instance, whether you are running these on your own physical hardware, virtualized hardware in the cloud, or a hybrid scenario.

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Posted in RPA and DMS, Technology