2nd iPaaS Puzzle: Prevent “Epic Fails” in Customer Service

[Irene_Cramer]

This is the second in a series of 5 iPaaS Puzzles we are posting in the next couple of weeks. Don’t we all love a little puzzle, even more if it helps us keep our webMethods skills sharp. If the solution is practical and immediately applicable to the benefit of the environment even better!

2nd iPaaS Puzzle: Prevent “Epic Fails” in Customer Service

Bad Customer Service Montage - YouTube

Not sure what BAD customer service is? Check out this YouTube video for some inspiration …

But how does GOOD customer service look like, in contrast? (Lots and lots of research shows,) the top 3 aspects are:

1. Friendly & knowledgeable agent
2. Resolution in ONE interaction
3. (As a customer) not having to repeat oneself

Hence, customers expect that support & maintenance agents know everything about them, the products that they bought, the support issues that they raised. And have the right solution to every (technical) problem (now!). Sounds challenging? Well, it is if you aspire – what in analyst lingo is call – a customer 360° view.

It is however pretty easy to let a maintenance agent or a sales rep see (in their favorite application) what support tickets a customer has raised. And in case of an IoT-connected device, the agent might even be able to check out the current state of the device, scan past error messages and automatically triggered maintenance processes.

Our 2nd iPaaS Puzzle question to be solved is as follows:

What applications can you integrate to help agents or sales reps become more knowledgeable and offer GREAT customer service?

There are lots of free trial versions of apps that are relevant in customer service. Create an integration that breaks up silos of data about customer touchpoints (and, if you like, also about technical solutions).

Stretch goal

Let’s assume you are about to test your new customer service solution. How would you set-up an A/B-test? How would you fine-tune to fit the specific needs of your customer set?

Data Sources

Relevant applications are among others (free trial versions only):
• CRM Free Trial: Salesforce 30-Day Trial - Salesforce
• Get Started With HubSpot’s Software
• Free - Jira Software | Atlassian
• Customer service software for the best customer experiences | Zendesk
• Sign up for a free Help Scout trial
• Freshdesk Sign Up | Free Trial Today | | Freshworks
• Pricing | Mention (including Free Plan of Mention)

A related project is described here:
• Customer satisfaction story integration | webMethods | Software AG

Also, don’t forget to consider using Cumulocity to provide the support & maintenance agents with fresh data from their customers’ devices (whenever possible).

Submissions

Please post your solution to the puzzle as replies to this thread.
Use the “blur spoiler” tag to hide your results so that folks must click on your solution to indicate they want to see it!

iPaaS Puzzle Show

Every Friday for the next 5 weeks, starting on the 9th of September, we are hosting an iPaaS show you hopefully join us to explain your thinking behind your interesting solution.

We will briefly talk about the different solutions for this week’s puzzle, what to learn from them, and introduce next week’s iPaaS Puzzle. Hope you can join us.

We are officially kicking off the 2nd iPaaS Puzzle on Friday the 9th of September:

• APJ/EMEA 11.30am IST / 8am CEST
• EMEA/Americas 11am EDT / 8am PDT / 5pm CEST

The 2nd iPaaS Puzzle show will be on Friday the 16th of September 8am CEST! and 5pm CEST! Details to come!

Deadline

Just have your solution posted before the iPaaS Puzzle Show on Friday the 16th of September 8am CEST. If you want to be invited on the show, please post your solution by Thursday the 15th 8am CEST.

Prizes

The winners get fame and glory. We want this to be a friendly competition and we want to highlight great work, without having to crown a weekly winner.

Suggest a Puzzle

If you have another great idea for an iPaaS Puzzle, please suggest it in this form. It must be a little challenge that is doable within a week and has easy access to the source data needed. If your challenge is geared towards improving our lives, then even better!

If your iPaaS Puzzle suggestion does get selected, we’d invite you to personally introduce it in our iPaaS Puzzle Show and you will receive a wooden Tangram game as a token of our appreciation.

The actual prize may look differently!

[Dave_Pemberton]

To stimulate the conversation and solutions, here’s one such example, that is actually used live by Software AG as part of our Customer 360 view.

We have an API Maturity assessment live on our website:
API Maturity Assessment Registration | Software AG
which helps you to understand how mature your organization is in relation to APIs across 5 categories.

This assessment is facilitated by a SaaS platform (pointerpro - formerly survey anyplace) that we used to provide the assessment, however we wanted to make sure we understood who was using the assessment, and for that, we use Marketo. So the starting page is a marketo form, but once your assessment is complete, we wanted to make sure that was also understood, and therefore we use our own integration products for this to create the final loop back into Marketo (and then Salesforce).

Solution (click to unblur):

This integration takes the notification from pointerpro (via a webhook call), then looks to see if the contact already exists in Marketo. This should really always be the case, but irrespective, the check is there much as a best practice in case the unexpected occurs.

We query (queryLead) and find the most recent/active lead in marketo, and then ‘upsert’ (customUpsertLead) the data into marketo, linking this to the API maturity assessment campaign (addLeadsToList).

In this example, Marketo then instigates the integration into SalesForce (our CRM).

I’m working on a different solution to also post/demonstrate… that one I’ll hold back on for a day or two

[Mark_Finnern]

That is a wonderful example solution to our current Puzzle. I love that it is in use currently on our site

Folks may not know that we have an API Maturity Assessment Registration | Software AG that can be call for free.

Thanks for posting!

[Mark_Finnern]

Join us in under an hour at the top of the hour for the APJ/EMEA iPaaS Puzzle Show
Click here to join the meeting

[Irene_Cramer]

My 1st facet of the digital customer service that I tried to model as a simple workflow: Let’s assume that you sell a product, and you know that your users are now & then publishing interesting solutions to technical problems (or complain about your product). Hence, you want to track the mention of your product in social media.

In this workflow we scan Youtube for new videos that mention the name of the product (in our case “webMethods”):

We add information (like URL, title, etc.) about the new video into a Google spreadsheet:

And finally attach the spreadsheet to a task on a respective Trello board for the support organization to watch the new videos and decide if it is worth adding it as a resource to their knowledge base or not.

[Dave_Pemberton]

That’s a cool idea Irene.

I’ve done something similar before, but using twitter, as you can see in the following screenshot

Here I trigger a workflow (in this example based on a like to control this) when a new tweet is received, and this uses the Watson analyzer to understand the sentiment of the tweet. This then allows us to take action based on whether the tweet was positive, negative, or even somewhere in the middle

[Holm_Steinland3 (Holm Steinland)]

Not only that, you also put an error hander in. So just in case the feedback was too large to digest you also deal with it. This should also remind developers on important security best practice for input validations (type, size etc.) of values. Especially in cloud this is most of the time ignored. A big mistake.

[Irene_Cramer]

This is my 2nd facet of the digital customer service that I tried to model as a simple workflow: Let’s assume that you are selling B2B products, very complex technical systems. In this case customer support agents are highly qualified engineers and they interact on the customer side also with highly qualified engineers. Let’s further assume that the customer wants to request some support for a maintenance activity on the customer side that is planned for next week.

The following workflow is to plan for free slots in the support engineer’s calendar and accordingly plan for a slot. (Again it’s a simple workflow that can obviously be enhanced a lot – but it’s just to convey the idea.)

We fetch a new JIRA issue in the trigger and use Freebusy to get availability of the support engineer in the respective week.

I haven’t yet specified the Issue Types but that would be very valuable to do – so that this workflow is only triggered when the customer requests a certain type of support.

Finally, the workflow creates a new event in my Google calendar at the first available slot. As I don’t regularly use my Google calendar (other than for webMethods workflows) it’s pretty empty.

As soon as I have a bit more time, I plan to better coordinate between the availability of the customer and the availability of the support engineer(s). It is much more realistic that there are several calendars to take into consideration and that in the JIRA issue there is more information to parse & re-use …

[Irene_Cramer]

This is my 3rd facet of the digital customer service that I tried to model as a simple workflow: Let’s assume that your company (be it B2B or B2C business) works with a new account and one of the contacts of this account just recently created a free trial.

Let’s further assume that you want to make sure that this free trial runs smoothly and therefore you want to support the free trial users the best you can. To make sure that these free trial users are visible to your support organization, you want to check if this account already exists (case 1 of the switch) and accordingly update it OR, if the account doesn’t exist yet (default of the switch), you want to create it.

Obviously, in this case there are also a lot of possible improvements & refinements. First, the follow-up of a sales representative is completely missing in this case. Second, it doesn’t include the contacts of the account, just the account itself. Third, it doesn’t handle any exceptional cases.