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Not so long ago, customers only had a couple of ways to interact with brands. 

If you had an issue with a product or service, you could reach out through the customer service phone number or send an email. Occasionally, sites would introduce dedicated forms on their website that allowed consumers to send support tickets straight to the service desk – but that was it.

The problem with this kind of service was all the waiting. 

Send an email or ticket, and you have no idea when the company is going to get back to you. Customers end up refreshing their inbox all day, waiting for a response. Call the company, and 9 times out of 10, you’ll be placed on hold. You can’t exactly do much when you’re stuck listening to hold music, so customers are gradually getting more frustrated as they wait for a response. 

Fortunately, the evolving digital age has introduced a new solution: live chat.

Transforming Your CX With Live Chat

Live chat is a quick and convenient way for your customers to contact your business and get a response immediately. The result is happier clients, better customer satisfaction scores, and even opportunities for bigger sales. 

More than 41% of customers say they expect to see live chat on a site. 

Even if you don’t have an agent on hand to answer a chat message immediately, you can create an automated system that notifies your customer when someone is available. That means they can go and do other things while they’re waiting for a response. Live chat solutions with bots can even allow your customers to fix problems for themselves. That’s pretty convenient!

Widgets equipped with answers to commonly asked questions can automatically deal with customer queries or help them find solutions to their problems before passing them over to an agent. This means that your customer gets a solution faster, and your agents don’t have as much pressure to deal with. It’s a win-win – as long as you get it right. 

Unfortunately, a lot of companies don’t know how to implement live chat experiences correctly. 

Kayako’s study into 400 customers found that 47% couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a positive experience through a live chat tool.  

How to Upgrade Live Chat CX

The evidence shows that customers love the idea of live chat, but the reality of how businesses implement this technology isn’t always ideal. 

However, since 86% of customers say they’re willing to spend more on a better customer experience, it’s worth figuring out what separates a good live chat interaction from a bad one. 

1. Set Expectations Instantly

Setting the right expectations is crucial if you want to generate better satisfaction for your customers at a later date. When customers know what to expect from your live chat strategy, they can also make more informed decisions about which support channels they’re going to use, and whether they want to hang around for someone to answer their messages. 

The first thing you should do is showcase your agent’s availability. In this example from Help Scout, you can see whether the team is active, online, and ready to talk. The company also sets expectations for how quickly you can get an email response if you don’t want to chat.

Other ways to set expectations include:

  • Showing your opening hours: List when team members are usually available to answer questions if you’re not currently online. 
  • Topics: Offer your customers some topics that they can ask about or use the welcome message on your chat tool to direct your customers to an FAQ page. 
  • Restrictions: If there’s anything you can’t deal with over live chat, like changing a customer’s password, let them know in advance so they don’t waste time.

2. Leverage Pre-Chat Forms

Pre-chat forms are some of the most important parts of the live chat experience. They ask your customer to explain their issue to your chatbot so that they can be directed towards the right agent. Using these forms correctly ensures that your agent has all the information they need to solve a problem fast. 

You can even set up automated systems that direct customers to different agents and teams based on their needs. For instance, the live chat app on Outgrow.co gives customers the option to fill out different forms depending on whether they want answers to a question, a demo, or something else.

The button you click on dictates which professional you’ll get through to. Although filling out a form can seem like an extra friction point for your customer at first, it helps to streamline the customer journey. After all, if you can direct the customer to the right agent the first time, there are fewer chances that they’ll need to explain their issue to various different people. 

Here are a few things you can ask for in the live chat form to make it more effective:

  • The customer’s name: This will help to personalize the conversation. It could also be an opportunity to track down any background information you have about an existing customer and the orders that they may want to speak to you about.
  • An email address: Having an email address will allow you to bring up a customer’s record on your CRM. It also means that you can send any information that the customer needs to their email inbox at the end of the conversation.
  • A brief explanation: Ask your customers to share what they’re reaching out to you about and use keywords in their message to assign the chat to the right agent or professional. You could even add a drop-down menu of topics for them to choose from. 

Remember, don’t ask for too much information straight away, or you’ll risk your clients feeling that the service experience is too complicated. 

3. Make Sure It Works Everywhere

We’ve reached the point now where every customer expects a brand’s website to be responsive on any device. Most web-building templates automatically work on mobile tablets and smartphones. Additionally, it’s becoming increasingly easy for companies to transform their website and online store experiences into dedicated apps too. 

However, while most businesses know that their site needs to be responsive, they often forget about the mobile element when it comes to live chat. If your live chat function is only available on the web browser version of your website, then this is going to end up making your mobile customers pretty unhappy. They don’t want to have to stop browsing on their phone just to connect with you. 

Ideally, you’ll want to create a separate component for your mobile app where your customers can easily access the same live chat functions they’d have on your browser-based site.

If you’re just offering live chat through a mobile version of your website, make sure that it’s easy for your customer to click into the chat section and send messages without accidentally ending up on a different tab or page. It might also be worth setting up functions that allow your chat app to send push notifications to your customer’s phone whenever they get a new message. 

Being able to put their smartphone down or switch to another app while they wait for a response will provide a much more intuitive experience for your audience. 

4. Make Sure You Support All the Right Languages

You’d think that this CX tip for live chat would be obvious, but it’s shocking how many companies fail to offer support for all the languages that their customers might use. If you’re selling your products throughout the world, and you know you have customers in China, then it doesn’t make much sense to only offer live chat in English. 

Some of the available live chat apps on the market today come with features that allow you to automatically translate languages when your agents are talking to foreign customers. For instance, LiveChat currently supports 45 languages

If you’re creating your own chat app from scratch, then you’re going to need to work with your developer or designer to make sure that the right languages are supported. Remember, you don’t have to cover everything, but at least make sure that you can connect with the most common groups of customers in your CRM. 

Ensure that if you are using multiple languages, your customers know how to switch to their preferred option too. Usually, the best way to do this is with a drop-down menu. You could also use little flag icons of the countries that you support. 

5. Find Ways to Reduce First Response Time

Speed is probably one of the biggest advantages of live chat, and the main reason that customers like it so much. According to the CMO council, fast response time is the number one thing that a customer looks at when measuring satisfaction. 

While you might not be able to have someone on-hand to answer your customers 24/7, you can improve the way they perceive your load times in a variety of ways. For instance, start by making it clear when your people are online to talk to your customers. Setting expectations on when you’ll be available to immediately respond should help to avoid frustration.

  • Keep all chats in the same place for agents: Having a combined contact center solution on the back-end makes responding to queries much easier for your agents. If they can see all of your brand’s live chat, social, and email conversations in one place, they don’t have to waste time jumping between different platforms and tabs. 
  • Set routing queues: Use an automated system to send every message you get to the most appropriate agent available. You can intelligently route conversations based on the issues that your customers have or the things they want to discuss. It’s also worth ensuring that your system prioritizes routing conversations to the first agent available. 
  • Send notifications: Make sure that you set your live chat system up to send push notifications to agents when a new message is waiting. It’s also with notifying your customer when they have a response, just in case they’ve switched to another tab. 

The notifications you send to your agents could come with access to a customer’s CRM file, so that your agent can go into a conversation with the context they need. Agents that instantly get context on a conversation don’t have to waste as much time tracking down the right information. Giving your agents context also means that they don’t have to ask repetitive questions, which could annoy your customer. 

6. Make the Chat Experience On-Brand

Every company wants to give their customer a slick experience with live chat. The solution you build needs to be easy to use, and responsive across every device. However, it also needs to be something that your customer associates with your brand. 

Companies generally have a lot of options for how a live chat window can look. You can adjust the appearance to suit your brand by picking specific colors, tweaking button shapes, and even changing the available fonts. 

Working the visual elements of your brand into the design of the live chat experience is the best way to make your customers feel comfortable and confident that they’re dealing with your company. For instance, Hubspot uses matching colors, rounded edges on chat bubbles, and even a fun illustration to make their chat experience more “branded.”

Remember, when you’re creating a Live Chat experience that’s “on brand”, it’s also a good idea to think about things like voice and tone. Infusing live chat with the unique personality of your brand will make the experience more memorable. 

If you usually stick with informal language and use a lot of slang, then it makes sense to continue that in live chat – even when you’re sending automated messages. To make sure your brand identity really shines through:

  • Write scripts for your automated messages in your brand’s tone of voice
  • Write guidance scripts for employees that highlight your tone for agents
  • Provide training on brand tone of voice for your support team
  • Encourage support agents to connect with customers on a personal level
  • Remember to set guidelines on how to use things like gifs, slang, and emojis too!

7. Make a Checklist For Security and Tech Issues

One of the most significant things that will affect the experience your customer has with your live chat service, is technical and security issues. Choose the right developer or designer to help with your app, and the risk of problems dwindle. You can also address the issue of having to constantly maintain, check, and update your live chat experience by using a pre-existing solution, like Intercom.

No matter how you choose to approach live chat, these are the things you’ll need to check for most:

  • Page load times: Page load times are crucial for user experience and SEO, so you should be taking them seriously already. Check your web chat software isn’t dragging down the performance of your page or causing unnecessary problems.
  • Cross-channel conversations: If your website has various subdomains, make sure that moving through these in chat won’t mean you lose the session. Customers don’t want to have to repeat themselves!
  • Functionality with browsers: Your chat app needs to work just as well on every browser and operating system – including mobile devices. 
  • Data management: Under things like GDPR, you need to ensure that you’re controlling user information safely. Ensure you have a DPA in place, and make sure that your web channel doesn’t affect any PCI-DSS compliance systems you have in place. Your chat solution may need to automatically mask credit card information, for instance.

Time to Enhance Your Live Chat Strategy

Ultimately, whether you like it or not, your customers love live chat technology, and they’re not going to stop looking for it on your website. Today’s consumers expect you to serve their interests by delivering customer support on the channels that they choose. Unfortunately, most companies just aren’t living up to expectations.

Following the tips above could help you to transform the way that you interact with your clients and improve your chances of better satisfaction overall.

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Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

Google Fonts may be the single most significant contribution Google has made to the evolution of the web — yes, more significant than search, advertising, or analytics.

Google Fonts gives every business access to a visual voice with which to distinguish itself. Fonts can be downloaded for use in design software and then embedded using best practices for a consistent experience on the web.

If there’s anything wrong with Google Fonts, it’s that its default listings are based on “Trending,” a self-fulfilling criterion that keeps Noto Sans high up the list, destined to be over-used.

But if you spend a little time lower down the listings, you’ll find some exceptional typefaces that are hardly used. Yes, some of them are highly stylized, but there are also usable sans, serifs, and display fonts worthy of your consideration.

All you have to do is scroll; here’s a selection of some of the treasures you’ll find if you do…

Piazzolla

Piazzolla features dramatic and expressive angular shapes when previewed in large sizes, but its real strength is in setting large amounts of body text.

Mulish

If you’re looking for a solid workhorse sans, look no further than Mulish. Halfway between a humanist and geometric sans, there’s even a variable font version.

Ceviche One

Reminiscent of the cool lettering of 60s advertising, Ceviche One is packed with energy, thanks to the dramatic zig-zag formed along its baseline.

Vollkorn

Released by Friedrich Althausen in 2005, Vollkorn is an excellent typeface for body copy, excelling at small sizes. It now boasts a variable font option.

Merienda

Merienda is a delightfully energetic display script. The bold weight feels more confident, but both weights have a dancing rhythm that brings the page alive.

Raleway Dots

Raleway is a hugely popular — and perhaps overused font — but this dotted version is less known. It’s a simple geometric sans that functions as a display face.

Kenia

Kenia is a wonderful, uncategorizable typeface. The stencil forms result in entirely original letter constructions, and the lowercase s is magnificent.

DM Sans

DM Sans is a low-contrast geometric sans-serif that performs wonderfully well at smaller sizes. It only has three weights, but each comes with a matching italic.

Oxygen

Designed by Vernon Adams as part of the KDE project for GNU+Linux, Oxygen is a very readable sans-serif, with a generous x-height and a hint of pen stroke.

Alice

Ksenia Erulevich’s Alice was inspired by Lewis Carrol’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It presents itself as an Edwardian serif with fanciful flourishes.

Carter One

Carter One uses bold strokes, with a medium amount of contrast, to create a sans-style script. It has dozens of beautiful details like the notch on the lowercase o.

Bodoni Moda

Bodoni Moda is a didone-style serif with strong vertical strokes and high-contrast slab-like serifs. It’s the best variable font in this genre that I’ve found.

Ultra

Ultra is a slab-serif that you won’t even consider for body text. Its sculptural shapes are almost American-western. The counter on the lowercase n is charming.

Azeret Mono

Most mono-spaced fonts fail to inspire; practical they can be, charming they are not. But Azeret Mono bucks that trend, its bold weights being particularly fantastic.

Nunito

It’s tough to find a serious sans-serif with rounded terminals, but Nunito is it. There’s also a Nunito Sans with square terminals, but I love the rounded tips.

Bungee Inline

Designed for signage, Bungee is great for display sizes and works well vertically. There are several versions, but my favorite is this classy inline version.

Oi

Oi is unapologetically loud. A slab-serif that swallows its own detail, the counters and ink traps give it a 3D quality, and the curves feel almost nautical.

Expletus Sans

One of the significant trends in typography is the angled clip of adjoining strokes, creating the effect of shadow. This effect is brilliantly achieved in Expletus Sans.

Lustria

It’s comparatively unusual to find a serif face designed to work well at display sizes. At large sizes, Lustria’s rounded terminals evoke ink spread delightfully.

Yatra One

Yatra One is a Devanagari and Latin typeface that uses the Devanagari brush angle for its strokes, giving the Latin text an unusually slanted, stand-out character.

Amiko

Amiko is a highly legible typeface and excellent at tiny font sizes. It’s perfect as a secondary font if your main font is too fancy for elements like legal notices.

Keep Scrolling

It’s always tempting to leap at the first typeface you find that meets your needs, but if you dig a little deeper into Google Fonts, you’ll find a vast range of typefaces that offer both practicality and character.

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The post 21 Exceptional Google Fonts You Probably Haven’t Discovered Yet first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.


Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

WALLDORF, Allemagne – 16 septembre 2021 – SAP SE (NYSE : SAP) annonce la disponibilité de SAP® Product Footprint Management, une solution qui permet aux entreprises de calculer l’empreinte carbone de leurs produits ainsi que l’ensemble de la chaîne de valeur. Cette solution prend en compte l’ensemble du cycle de vie, ce qui aide les entreprises à révéler l’empreinte environnementale de leurs produits aux organismes de réglementation et leur permet de les rendre plus durables.

SAP Product Footprint Management fait partie d’un nouveau portefeuille d’applications de gestion axées sur le développement durable, offrant transparence et capacité de mesure tout au long de la supply chain, ce qui permet ainsi aux entreprises de réduire leurs émissions de carbone et d’adopter des activités plus durables.

« Les clients le souhaitent, le monde en a besoin. Il n’y a pas de temps à perdre pour que les entreprises agissent de manière plus responsable et plus durable. Les objectifs de développement durable sont de plus en plus importants pour la réussite des entreprises, au même titre que les objectifs financiers« , a déclaré Thomas Saueressig, membre du conseil d’administration de SAP SE et Responsable de l’Ingénierie des produits SAP. « Lorsque les entreprises intègrent les données relatives aux émissions dans les processus de gestion sous-jacents, les dirigeants peuvent provoquer un véritable changement. En prenant des décisions conscientes tout au long de la chaîne de valeur, ils sont en mesure d’échelonner la transition vers des voies à faibles émissions. SP est particulièrement bien placé pour favoriser ce changement à travers des réseaux d’entreprises collaboratifs, intelligents et durables. »

En intégrant les datas de toutes les solutions qui régissent les processus de production aux données de base des applications de gestion telles que SAP S/4HANA®, SAP Product Footprint Management peut calculer l’impact environnemental de divers scénarios de production. Par exemple, un fabricant de cookies peut choisir sa source d’approvisionnement en chocolat en fonction du coût de la matière première et de son empreinte carbone.

L’approche data-driven de SAP permet aux entreprises d’intégrer les enjeux de développement durable de manière exhaustive pour obtenir des informations exploitables sur l’ensemble de la chaîne de valeur et ainsi les aider à passer à des processus de gestion à faible émission de carbone. En adoptant une approche différenciée, SAP permet aux entreprises d’identifier de manière proactive l’impact carbone au début du cycle de vie du produit et non plus de manière réactive après la fabrication du produit. En outre, SAP Product Footprint Management permet aux entreprises de réduire les émissions de carbone tout au long de leur chaîne de valeur, mais aussi d’échanger des données avec leurs clients, fournisseurs et partenaires commerciaux, ce qui favorise la transparence des émissions de portée 1, 2 et 3 d’une entreprise.

Alors que les réglementations gouvernementales proposées dans le but de lutter contre les effets néfastes du changement climatique pourraient coûter jusqu’à 120 milliards de dollars aux entreprises, SAP Product Footprint Management, solution cloud-native et basée sur SAP Business Technology Platform, est conçue pour mesurer et signaler l’impact des émissions de gaz à effet de serre. Une solution dans l’ère du temps pour les entreprises, dont une récente enquête d’IDC*  a pu démontrer que l’établissement de liens entre les indications financières et environnementales dans les rapports financiers, ainsi que la réduction des émissions de carbone, sont des sujets prioritaires pour les décideurs informatiques.*

 

L’engagement de SAP pour le développement durable

Depuis plus de dix ans, SAP montre l’exemple en matière de pratiques commerciales durables. En plus d’avoir été nommé leader de l’industrie du logiciel dans le Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) pendant 14 années consécutives, l’adhésion de SAP à la Value Balancing Alliance et le SAP Integrated Report illustrent notre engagement à intégrer les performances économiques, environnementales et sociales pour guider les décisions commerciales.

« SAP se concentre depuis longtemps sur ses propres opérations de développement durable. Le lancement de la solution SAP Product Footprint Management, associé au projet Pathfinder du WBCSD, représente une occasion unique de réunir des entreprises pour qu’elles mènent conjointement la décarbonisation à travers les chaînes de valeur et les industries « , a déclaré Marta Muñoz, Directrice de Recherche Senior et Responsable de la Pratique Technologie et Développement durable, IDC EME.

Pour en savoir plus, visitez le SAP News Center et suivez SAP sur Twitter à @SAPNews.

 

*IDC, The Increasing Importance of ESG Principles for Enterprises, Doc # EUR147475621, février 2021.

 

The post La solution SAP Carbon Footprint permet aux entreprises de se transformer durablement appeared first on SAP France News.

Source de l’article sur sap.com

Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.

The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!

Medusa – Headless Open-Source Ecommerce Platform

28 Free Website Testing Tools

Google Search Finally Has a Dark Mode

Top 10 Good Website Designs

A Minimal Image Viewer for Windows

PHP is Still The Most Used Server-Side Language

22 Best Typeform Alternatives In 2021 (Free & Paid)

Grainy Gradients

25+ CSS Page Transitions (Free Code + Demos)

Doodle Ipsum – The lorem ipsum of illustrations

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The post Popular Design News of the Week: September 13, 2021 – September 19, 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.


Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

Content is the king of the digital world. This is an undisputed fact among marketers and business owners alike.

However, not all content is created equal. Interactive content is a more immersive form of marketing specifically intended for the digital age. Great for companies that need to develop deeper relationships with their audience. 

There are various kinds of interactive content for brands to explore these days. For example, you can create a poll where your customers vote for certain answers to questions. In addition, some companies hire developers to build immersive gaming experiences with prizes and rewards. 

Even standard content like blogs and articles can become more interactive with things like animations, buttons, and elements that ask visitors to do something. 

One of the most valuable forms of interactive content is the quiz. So, how can companies use quizzes to engage their audience effectively? Let’s find out…

The Benefits of Quizzes in Interactive Content

According to studies, 93% of marketers believe interactive content is extremely effective for educating and entertaining customers. Interactive content is meaningful because it’s engaging, and many marketers state that creating engaging content is one of their toughest challenges. 

In an environment where the average attention span is constantly dwindling, interactive content reduces the risk that your customer will end up being distracted by something else before they have a chance to convert on your website. 

Quizzes are an excellent form of interactive content, but many marketers don’t take full advantage of them yet. Quizzes, like some other forms of interactive content, can come in different styles. For example, you could have a personality quiz that tells your customer what kind of vegetable they would be. That might sound odd, but it helps to give your customer a sense of belonging, gives them a feeling of being understood, and offers entertainment. 

Some quizzes can answer questions for your customer. 

For instance, a quiz on “what to buy your dad for father’s day” is an excellent way to solve a customer’s problem while guiding them towards potential products that you sell. 

Z Gallerie, a retail company, launched a quiz called “What is your Z Gallerie Style personality?” The quiz offers a personalized recommendation experience on what to purchase for every current and potential customer. 

The personality quiz became a great way of bringing product recommendations to leads without being pushy. Z Gallerie could, therefore, consistently provide a unique experience to each customer based on their results. 

So, how do you make a quiz that’s really effective for your content marketing plan?

Step 1: Creating the Quiz

Quizzes are a kind of interactive content that can almost feel like a conversation with a brand. They’re an opportunity for you to show your audience how well you understand them. 

According to TryInteract, people take quizzes because they want to know themselves better or want to confirm what they think they already know about themselves. These content solutions solve problems, even if they’re handling a person’s curiosity about what kind of celebrity they’re most like. 

Before you start making your quiz, you need to know your goal and what you’re trying to do for your audience. If your goal is to get more people to feel more attuned to your company, you might need to create something that demonstrates how well you know your visitors.

The goal for the company is to demonstrate a deep knowledge of the industry and target market. If the quiz is helpful and informative, it adds to the brand’s credibility and makes it more likely that customers will want to continue purchasing.

Before you build your quiz, ask yourself:

  • What do you want to get out of your audience taking this quiz? (More conversions, better brand loyalty, improved engagement?)
  • Why would your audience want to take the quiz? (Is it relevant to their interests, will it give them some vital information?)

Knowing exactly what you and your audience should accomplish with the quiz will give you a good platform to begin building on. 

Step 2: Choose the Title and Quiz Type

Titles are important in any content marketing. 80% of readers decide whether to check out an article based on its title. The same process is common for people who want to decide whether they should take a quiz or not. 

There are a lot of great ways to pique your visitor’s attention with a quiz title. For instance, you could challenge your audience to prove their knowledge with the word “actually.” For instance, “How much do you actually know about Kale?” That kind of title immediately appeals to the competitive nature of the human being. 

Another great example of a challenging title is to tell your audience that they can’t do something. Buzzfeed did that with its millennial quiz. The great thing about this quiz title is that it speaks to the competitive nature of the reader but also gives that reader a chance to show that they belong to a specific community. 

Another option could be to ask a question and hope that curiosity will do the rest of the work for you. For instance, “Which celebrity chef are you most like?” The key to success here is understanding your audience and knowing exactly what they most want to know. 

Once you’ve figured out the title, choosing the kind of quiz you want to create is the next step. For instance, you can try:

  • Personality quizzes: People like hearing good things about themselves because of a psychological phenomenon called self-serving bias. A personality quiz that recognizes the features your customers like about themselves will make them feel happier and more connected to your brand.
  • The knowledge test: Commonly found on social media, these quizzes challenge a person’s knowledge on a specific subject. The benefit here is that your audience can learn something and share their knowledge with their friends for social points. This quiz from Unicef is an excellent example of the “knowledge” style quiz.

Step 3: Crafting Quiz Questions

Once you have a good idea of the kind of quiz you want to create and the title you’re going to put alongside it, you’ll need to begin bringing your interactive content to life. That means designing the right questions. 

Writing questions for a quiz is just like creating any excellent content. First, you need to keep your target audience in mind. Next, think about the kind of personality you’re trying to appeal to. Breathing some life into your quiz by injecting your unique sense of personality into it will be an excellent way to strengthen your bond with your customers. 

Other tips for making the most of your quiz questions include:

  • Use visuals in your questions: Having text-only questions is fine in some cases, but it’s worth looking into images too. Using pictures helps to keep things relevant and interesting and makes your quiz feel a lot more immersive. 
  • Don’t make questions too long: In-depth and complicated questions will only scare your audience away. Remember that they’re looking for something fun and lighthearted to do. This means that your questions should be as short as possible. 
  • Make it interesting: Don’t just ask basic questions like “what’s your favorite color” try to go beyond what your customers usually see on quizzes and make it relevant to the quiz topic. Again, this is your chance to show your audience how much you know.

Step 4: Creating Results That People Want to Share

If you want to design a quiz that really blows your audience away, then the results are one of the most important things to focus on. The results you offer your customers dictate whether they enjoy your quiz so much that they want to share it with other people. Creating share-worthy results is how you boost your chances of finding new customers and even going viral. 

So, how do you design results that people want to share? Start by helping your customers to feel positive about themselves. The results should make them feel like a better person or confirm the good things they already believe about themselves. Research tells us that positive emotions are more likely to promote sharing

For instance, this quiz from the PBS company makes people feel good by demonstrating that they know their books. This confirms a customer’s idea that they are well-read.

Using share-worthy images is another way to improve your chances of designing results that people want to share. You’ll need to use interesting pictures here that speak to your audience. Bright and entertaining pictures will make results more eye-catching on a social media feed. 

Don’t forget to include a call-to-action on your results page too. It’s always helpful to give your audience a nudge in the direction you want them to move in. Providing a call-to-action that asks your customers to share their results increases your chances of positive sharing behavior. 

Step 5: Know How to Distribute Your Quiz

Once you’ve put all of the essential components of your quiz together, the next step is ensuring you can distribute that quiz and share it with as many people as possible. For instance, you can promote your quiz on social media to reach more possible customers. Twitter and Facebook are always great places to get started but don’t be afraid to experiment elsewhere. 

Sharing snippets of the quiz experience in an Instagram Story could be a great way to generate engagement or posting a picture on your Instagram feed. 

When promoting your interactive content on social media, use an attractive image to highlight the experience and ensure you make that captivating headline stand out. Share both the caption and image with a shortened link to measure results. Shorter links are more likely to attract audience attention and encourage sharing later. If your links are too long, they can end up looking spammy or unprofessional. That’s not the image you want to build with your quiz content. 

If you need an extra boost for your quiz, promoting through Facebook advertising could be the ideal solution. Paid ads are a great way to get extra attention, but you need to choose your target audience carefully. Select your audience according to demographics, behaviors, connections, and locations. 

Remember that Facebook gives you plenty of opportunities to track down the kind of customers you want to speak to. Creating a custom audience could be a handy step too. This is always useful if you have a lot of information from an email list or a collection of contacts you’ve generated over time.

Step 6: Following Up on Your Quiz

Once you’ve successfully attracted people to your quiz experience, the next step is to follow up on the leads you’ve hopefully collected. When designing a quiz, it’s always a good idea to ask your customer for their email addresses before you give their results. This ensures that you can collect plenty of leads in the long term for nurturing purposes. 

Marketing company, The Foundation, designed a quiz that asked customers whether they had an entrepreneurial mindset. The quiz was based on an existing eBook offered by the company. The quiz, combined with a Facebook ad campaign, helped the business collect new leads to advertise their ebook. The Foundation managed to reduce its cost per lead from $6 to $3.80 using this method. 

When following up on your quiz experience, make sure that you get the tone right. The first thing you need to do is thank your audience for taking the quiz in the first place. After someone opts in and offers their email address, send a quick email that shares their results and says “thanks.” 

After a couple of days, you can follow up on your thank you email by asking your audience to retake the quiz or take a new one. Encourage these repeat customers to share their testimonials and gradually introduce more interesting content you have that’s connected to your quiz. For instance, if you create a quiz to determine whether someone has an entrepreneurial mind, you could advertise articles that cover similar topics. 

Finally, after regular engagement from your audience, you can begin to implement strategies that might convince your audience to purchase your products. This could mean showing off your entrepreneurial eBook, asking someone to sign up for a webinar, or something else entirely.

Don’t forget to track the performance of every quiz too. Examining metrics like click-through rates for your quiz advertisements and conversion rates will help you see which quizzes generate the most attention and action from your intended audience. 

Time to Add Quizzes to Your Interactive Content Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is one of the best ways to engage with your audience and strengthen your position in any industry. The right content demonstrates your knowledge, develops trust, and helps you to attract new customers. With interactive content, you can take the relationship you build with your audience to the next level. It’s your chance to engage with your customers and create an emotional relationship. 

Quizzes are one of the most effective forms of interactive content, and they’re also one of the easiest to implement into your existing strategy. It doesn’t take a lot of time or money to create a good quiz, and you can usually find tools online to help you with things like structure and formatting. You could even hire a professional to design a quiz for you. 

Once you’ve got the kind of quiz that’s really going to interest your target audience, the next step is distributing it in a way that generates as much attention as possible. Remember, you can advertise on social media and various other channels. However, it’s also helpful to pay attention to your options for helping do your promotion for you. For example, many customers will be more than happy to share quiz results that confirm the identity they’re trying to build online.

 

Featured image via Unsplash.

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The WordPress themes and plugins you choose for your clients’ sites don’t just impact how the interface looks or how well it works. They also impact your ability to build them.

The point in using WordPress themes and plugins is to make your life easier, not to create more work for yourself or limit what you’re able to do. If you’ve struggled to find WordPress tools you can rely on from job to job, BeTheme might just be the total package you’ve been looking for.

BeTheme has it all:

  • A backend builder
  • A frontend builder
  • A WooCommerce builder
  • 600+ pre-built websites

There’s nothing extra to pay with BeTheme. One fee gets you all the tools you need to easily build professional-grade websites for your clients.

Get to Know BeTheme’s All-In-One WordPress Solution

Want to see how the BeTheme powerhouse works? Check it out:

1. Build and Manage the Backend With Muffin Builder 3

Let’s be honest, WordPress page builder plugins leave something to be desired. While they all have their strengths, it’s hard to find one that offers different tools for how you want to work.

Many of them offer a visual drag-and-drop builder, leaving designers with little flexibility in how they build websites. With BeTheme, you don’t have to compromise.

Muffin Builder 3 is the intuitive backend editor that gives you full control. And if you want to code it all by hand? You can. If you’d prefer to tap into BeTheme’s wide array of templates, pre-built sections, and predefined settings? You can do that as well.

What’s more, the backend builder makes it easy to add sliders to your website, optimize your pages for search, and more.

2. Design and Perfect Your Site on the Frontend with Muffin Live Builder

One of the reasons why drag-and-drop website builders have become so popular in recent years is because they empower everyone — from the DIY business owner to the professional web designer — to build websites visually. There’s just one problem:

While it’s great that developers both inside and outside of the WordPress ecosystem are creating these intuitive builders, they sometimes come at a cost.

One thing that tends to get sacrificed is speed. Because they take the editing out of the WordPress dashboard and onto the frontend of the website, many of them can take a while to load. (Some of them are known for stalling out on occasion, too.)

Another thing that gets sacrificed is how much you’re allowed to customize. You either have to design your website with the features and settings available from your page builder plugin or you have to do all the work inside of WordPress.

Muffin Live Builder doesn’t suffer from these issues.

For starters, the visual builder is lightweight, so it won’t keep you waiting around for pages to load or changes to reflect on the frontend.

Also, you don’t have to choose which builder you want to use. If you want to primarily build sites with the backend editor and then perfect the designs on the frontend, you can. With BeTheme, you don’t have to pick-and-choose which editor you want to use.

3. Create Great Looking Monetized Sites with the Muffin Woo Builder

Many page builders are built for one purpose: To help WordPress users visually design websites so they can see their work reflected on the site in real-time.

That said, many page builder plugins haven’t accounted for the ecommerce piece.

Users can design and customize the regular pages on their websites with the visual builder, like the Home, About, and Contact pages. However, their ecommerce pages — Shop, Products, Cart, Checkout, and more — have to be managed through WooCommerce’s interface.

WooCommerce is a great ecommerce plugin. However, it’s not ideal having to design different parts of your site with different tools.

Be now has a solution for this: Muffin Woo Builder.

The Muffin Woo Builder allows designers to build their own single product and shop templates instead of just customizing the default ones provided by WooCommerce or the theme.

It also gives you design editing capabilities that no other page builder plugin can. For example:

  • Create design rules for your ecommerce pages
  • Choose from 11 product gallery styles
  • Switch between Shop and Catalogue mode
  • Set custom variation swatches
  • Show or hide the cart button
  • Add a sidebar
  • Configure settings for how product images render
  • Enable a Wishlist
  • Pick and choose which icons appear in the header

If you want this level of control over the layout and look of your ecommerce pages, you have to install other plugins or custom-code those changes into the backend. So, this is definitely a unique feature amongst page builders.

4. Instantly Design an Attractive Website With One of 600+ Pre-Built Sites

BeTheme isn’t just the fastest WordPress builder because it’s lightweight or because there are various builder options that allow you to work the way that’s best for you.

BeTheme also comes jam-packed with 600+ pre-built websites, with new ones released every week.

When you install a pre-built site, BeTheme is going to do a number of things for you:

  • Install all the specific plugins you need for the site
  • Load a fully designed and fully functioning website into your WordPress installation
  • Add placeholder content and imagery throughout so you can easily swap in your own

That’s going to save you a lot of time. Think about the cost savings, too. You get access to more than 600 pre-built websites without having to pay anything extra for them.

Is BeTheme the total design package? You bet it is!

It can’t be overstated what a game-changer BeTheme is for WordPress designers. Two page builders, one WooCommerce builder, and 600+ pre-built sites all rolled into one?

Everything you need to design high-quality websites is baked in.

That’s something you rarely see in any product or service, let alone in WordPress.

If you’re ready to say “Goodbye!” to page builder plugins and transform the way you work, get the BeTheme powerhouse now.

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In my experience, the biggest challenge that freelancers face — more than winning clients or setting prices — is project management; take on too much work, and you’ll start missing deadlines, take on too little, and you’ll start missing your rent.

Some people are naturally organized; they rock up at their desk at 08:59, fully confident in what they will spend the next 8–12 hours working on. Let’s be kind and say that I am not one of them, and leave it at that. The only way I have managed to survive the industry is by self-consciously micro-managing my schedule on a daily basis.

When I worked in an agency, I knew what I would be working on days in advance. Now, I know 90% of what I’ll be working on, weeks in advance.

That level of organization requires very, very, very careful planning. I hold team meetings at the end of the day, yes, “team” meetings of one person. To do that I use a number of tools that suit me.

How to Choose a Project Management App

The most important aspect of any project is the end. That’s when the client will assess your work, and that’s when you get paid. So when you choose a project management solution, make sure it gives you a clear path to the project conclusion.

I know one freelancer who sets himself a hard stop at 7 pm every day. At 7 pm, he downs tools switches off, and walks away. I once heard him end a client call at 7 pm because he’d reached his cut-off point. It made me wince — I would have stayed on until the call concluded — but it hasn’t affected his business.

I know another successful freelancer who works on a budget. When she has earned the money she needs for that day, she stops. She bills by the hour to make this work, so when she sits down in the morning, she knows exactly what time she’ll finish.

Personally, I prefer a task-based approach. I know what I have to get done; if I can get ahead, then great, but my main focus is ensuring I don’t fall behind. I believe that if you hit your deadlines, everything else will take care of itself. Admittedly, there have been a few late-nights (and all-nights) over the years, but thankfully they’re less common these days.

No one style of project management suits everyone. And it doesn’t matter what approach you take, provided you take an approach.

8 Best Project Management Apps for Freelancers

As a freelancer, the most important thing characteristic you can have is reliability. Cultivate a reputation for delivering on your promises, and you’ll become invaluable to your clients. The best project management app is the one that helps you keep your promises.

There are some excellent tools on the market that facilitate project management, but most are aimed at SMEs, or project managers running a team of freelancers.

The tools here are listed from least, to most useful for the average freelancer. I’ve avoided too many time-tracking apps because I find these tend to encourage billing by the hour, which is potentially damaging to your business long term. If you do need pure time-tracking, check out Harvest. I’ve also avoided solutions that are too large-scale to benefit freelancers. If you’re looking for a project management tool for teams, then Basecamp, Jira, Project.co, and Redbooth are all worth considering.

Sadly none of these apps are perfect, and there’s a good chance you’ll need to use two or three to manage your projects.

8. Todoist

Todoist is hands down the best to-do app on the market. The downside is that its feature set is minimal.

Todoist really excels at lists. You can break down tasks into sub-tasks, and sub-sub-tasks. The downside is there’s no real scheduling or comparison of multiple projects in a single view.

The mobile apps are great, and Todoist recently introduced boards, a form of kanban board that gives you a good overview of everything. If it introduces a gantt chart, I can see myself relying on it more.

Todoist has a free forever plan that is fine for most freelancers, and the paid plans start at just $3 per month.

7. Bonsai

Bonsai is an excellent service for freelancers that grew from a simple invoicing app to include proposals, contracts, time-tracking, and more.

I used Bonsai for invoicing for a couple of years, and it does everything it claims to do. However, there are a couple of significant areas where it falls down. Firstly, its invoicing is super-aggressive and cannot be customized — make sure you’re on friendly terms with any client you send a Bonsai invoice to. Secondly, while it does a good job of tracking what you have done, it doesn’t help you plan what needs to be done beyond a formal proposal.

If you’re running a few simple projects, then it’s possible Bonsai is right for you. Pricing starts at $19 per month.

6. Monday

Monday is one of the biggest players in the project management market. It offers a dizzying array of options, and if this list were aimed at project management for agencies, Monday would be further along our countdown. Monday may suit freelancers, particularly those who have migrated from agency work, but for most, it’s more than we need.

There is a free-forever plan that covers almost everything you could want. However, if you need to view your projects as a gantt chart — and I strongly suggest you do — then you’ll need to update to the standard plan, which starts at $8 per user per month, with a minimum of three seats, meaning at least $24 per month when billed annually.

5. AND.CO

AND.CO stands out as a slick, easy-to-use option for managing a freelance business. Like Bonsai, it allows you to manage proposals, invoicing, time-tracking, expenses, and more.

AND.CO also has extremely well-liked customer support. An underestimated consideration when you don’t have your own accounts team to resolve problems.

As with other solutions of this type, the task-management is lacking. It does include a simple to-do list, but in my opinion, it’s not sufficient, and you’ll need to supplement it with something that supports gantt charts.

There’s a free forever plan, but it’s barely more than a free trial. Pricing for full-featured access starts at $18 per month when billed annually.

4. ClickUp

ClickUp is a SaaS that aims to replace just about everything else you could need. Unlike some options on this list, it includes a CRM, which is a bonus because there’s nothing worse than relying on the search function in your email to track down someone’s contact details.

ClickUp also offers a genuinely free-forever account with enough features to make it usable. If you choose to upgrade to a paid plan, it’s just $5 per user per month, which is excellent value.

If anything, there’s just too much in here. If you’re someone who considers themselves a power-user who enjoys digging into every nuance of a UI, then ClickUp could be for you. But, if, like me, you favor a simple tool that does what it’s told and gets out of the way, then there are better options.

3. Asana

Asana is probably the best-known project management tool on the market. It offers a tremendous number of options and is flexible enough for any style of project management.

There’s a free forever plan that is ideal for getting started and offers you most — you may be sensing a theme here — of the features you’ll need. But Asana’s best feature is its excellent timeline implementation of the gantt chart, for which you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan costing $10.99 per user per month, with a minimum number of 2 seats that translates to a rather expensive $21.98 per month.

2. Trello

Trello is famous for its kanban boards, and many people prefer them to gantt charts, which has helped the app grow rapidly in the last few years.

If you’re prepared to pay $10 per user per month, Trello actually offers gantt charts as well, in the form of its timeline feature.

Trello is mainly designed for teams, not freelancers. However, if you do have the budget for a premium plan, Trello gives you an enviable ability to switch project management styles on a whim.

1. Toggl

Toggl is perhaps the perfect balance of time-tracking and gantt chart that is ideal for freelance projects.

As with most tools, Toggl is designed for teams, with billing starting at $8 per user per month. However, it offers a solo plan, designed for freelancers, that is free forever.

The main thing you miss out on with Toggl’s Solo plan is team timelines, which you won’t need unless you’re outsourcing work. One other obvious omission is unlimited planning boards, which you may find yourself paying for sooner or later.

But for a mixture of simplicity and powerful features available for $0, Toggl is hard to beat.

 

Featured image via Pexels

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J’ai récemment eu une conversation avec le responsable produits d’un grand fabricant d’équipements industriels. Chaque machine comporte de  multiples variantes, est vendue à des centaines de clients, ce qui représente des milliers d’installations à travers le monde et peut être utilisée pendant des décennies. Mon interlocuteur m’expliquait qu’il avait reçu un appel d’un de ses clients  pour la mise à niveau d’une de ses machines pour en augmenter la productivité et optimiser. De ce fait, les équipes de ce responsable produits  vont être très occupées pour répondre à cette demande au cours des prochaines semaines, voire des prochains mois. Imaginez maintenant le nombre de ressources et le temps qui seraient nécessaires s’il avait à répondre à plusieurs demandes similaires en parallèle.

Voyons quelles sont les tâches les plus importantes qui sont requises pour élaborer un plan de réponse complet à destination de ce client :

  • évaluer le potentiel de revenus de la demande de mise à niveau ;
  • analyser la réplicabilité de la solution auprès d’autres clients ;
  • vérifier l’état de fonctionnement de l’équipement ;
  • évaluer le mode d’utilisation de la machine ;
  • valider la compatibilité de la dernière configuration proposée par l’ingénierie ;
  • comprendre les nouvelles exigences applicatives ;
  • effectuer une analyse des risques ;
  • analyser les perturbations de la chaîne d’approvisionnement ;
  • collaborer avec les fournisseurs et les partenaires pour élaborer le plan d’exécution ;
  • et probablement bien plus encore…

Il est également important de noter le nombre de systèmes, de processus et de partenaires requis pour construire et appliquer ce plan d’intervention.

Tout est question de stratégie globale

Nous voyons de nombreux clients de tous secteurs, en particulier dans la haute technologie, l’énergie, les équipements industriels, la santé, l’aérospatiale et le pétrole et le gaz, cherchant à tirer une part croissante de leurs revenus de services stratégiques. C’est un objectif commun aux fabricants d’équipements d’origine (OEM) recherchant des marges plus élevées, une proximité accrue avec leurs clients et des revenus récurrents.

Pour y parvenir, les entreprises doivent élaborer une stratégie globale, en intégrant les services d’ingénierie à la gestion des actifs, afin de rapprocher les OEM des opérateurs.

Dans cet article, je vous expose les éléments stratégiques liés à l’intégration du monde de l’ingénierie et de l’opérationnel, qui permettront aux OEM et aux opérateurs de maximiser la valeur de leur collaboration et de mettre en place une base permettant d’explorer de nouveaux business models, tel que le Product as a Service.

Éléments stratégiques d’une intégration des services d’ingénierie à la gestion des actifs

Ne serait-il pas intéressant de disposer d’un package de solutions prêt à l’emploi permettant de gérer tous les actifs installés, prenant en compte leur durée de vie et leur état ?

Comment y parvenir ?

Voyons quelques-uns des éléments stratégiques qui permettront de briser les silos fonctionnels, pour bénéficier d’une vue à 360 degrés du cycle de vie des produits et des actifs.

 

 

  • Tout d’abord, un OEM doit savoir déterminer la configuration d’un actif existant à partir des spécifications du produit issues de l’ingénierie. Il s’agit ici de la capacité à suivre et à gérer entièrement l’actif lors son installation, puis tout au long de son cycle de vie et jusqu’à sa mise hors service. L’un des aspects importants est de comparer dynamiquement l’actif en fonctionnement avec les configurations d’ingénierie les plus récentes, afin de prendre les bonnes décisions de maintenance ou de mise à niveau.
  • Le deuxième élément est la façon dont les partenaires collaborent et partagent des données. En créant un écosystème collaboratif de nouvelle génération basé sur le cloud, les équipementiers, les opérateurs, les fournisseurs et les partenaires de service vont disposer d’une plate-forme commune. Elle permettra de rassembler l’ensemble des partenaires, de partager du contenu, des données, et même d’étendre les processus métiers au-delà des murs de l’entreprise. L’objectif est de permettre aux OEM et aux opérateurs de déterminer quelles mesures doivent être prises et à quel moment.
  • Le troisième aspect est l’efficacité avec laquelle nous utilisons les données d’ingénierie en amont pour améliorer la gestion des actifs. Avec une ingénierie de service efficace, nous pouvons établir une nomenclature des services, des conceptions de services, identifier des systèmes critiques, définir des caractéristiques de performance, planifier des stratégies de service, créer des aides visuelles et bien plus encore. Les données de l’ingénierie de service peuvent être utilisées efficacement dans plusieurs flux de gestion des actifs, tels que la planification de la demande, les services sur le terrain, la gestion des garanties, les plans de maintenance et les stratégies d’actifs. En activant une continuité numérique de bout en bout, il est possible de connecter les données tout au long de la chaîne de valeur d’un service, de sa conception à son utilisation.
  • Enfin, l’un des éléments clés est de permettre aux entreprises de capturer et d’analyser les données transactionnelles et de performance des actifs opérationnels. Une fois restituées sous forme exploitable, ces informations permettront de générer des plans de service dynamiques, mais aussi d’identifier les modifications de conception à apporter, ainsi que les mises à niveau possibles afin de maximiser la valeur d’un actif. Cette boucle de rétroaction continue reposant sur l’ensemble de la base installée permettra aux OEM de proposer de meilleurs produits, plus durables.

Afin de répondre à cette évolution des besoins métiers sur le terrain de l’intégration des services d’ingénierie à la gestion des actifs, SAP et Siemens Digital Industries Software ont récemment annoncé  une extension de leur partenariat qui leur permettra de fournir de nouvelles solutions de gestion du cycle de vie intelligent des services et des actifs. Il est essentiel que tous ces éléments stratégiques soient liés aux processus métiers de la chaîne d’approvisionnement et qu’ils soient accessibles sur une plate-forme unique pour que les équipementiers et les opérateurs puissent en tirer une valeur commerciale.

 

Découvrez la valeur stratégique qu’il y a à gérer le cycle de vie de produits intelligents et connectés avec des technologies numériques à travers l’ensemble de votre entreprise et de l’entreprise étendue.

Demandez le livre blanc PLM 2021 de CIMdata.

 

The post Que se passe-t-il lorsque l’ingénierie et la gestion des actifs convergent ? Place au rapprochement ! appeared first on SAP France News.

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Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.

The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!

Pollen – A Library of CSS Variables Inspired by TailwindCSS

Using the Platform

Why You Should Switch to Code-Based Design

15 Great Chrome Extensions for Web Designers and Developers

Exciting New Tools for Designers, September 2021

24 CSS Javascript Animation Effects

3 Psychological UX Design Principles to Enhance User Experience

UX vs. UI – Which Should You Focus?

Customize TailwindCSS to Give Your Sites a Unique Look

10 Fundamental UI Design Principles You Need to Know

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