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Le Mayennais Diricks souhaite booster son activité services. Mais il lui faut pour cela s’équiper d’un outil de gestion des interventions. Pourvu d’un ERP SAP, l’industriel a opté pour la solution SAP Field Service Management.

Dirickx est le premier fabricant français de clôtures, portails et contrôles d’accès, à destination des particuliers comme des professionnels. Tissé, soudé, rigide, barreaudé ou sur mesure, Dirickx peaufine son savoir-faire depuis 100 ans déjà. La société emploie plus de 300 salariés et réalise 50% de son chiffre d’affaires au travers de la grande distribution : BigMat, Castorama, Leroy Merlin, Point.P…

En 2017, la société est reprise par des investisseurs belges, avant de devenir la filiale d’un nouveau groupe, PICOT, toujours implanté à Congrier, en Mayenne. En plus de son activité industrielle, le groupe assure des tâches d’installation et de maintenance, au travers de Dirickx Espace Clôture et de Dirickx Services.

Dirickx Services est une entité en pleine croissance. Fin 2021, elle faisait déjà travailler une dizaine de techniciens, mais avec un processus de gestion des interventions encore très basique. « Les fiches d’intervention étaient transmises sous forme papier à nos bureaux, qui se chargeaient de facturer le client, ce qui pouvait faire prendre jusqu’à une dizaine de jours, témoigne Laurent Dargelosse, Manager de Dirickx Services. Pour développer cette activité, il était impératif que nous options pour un outil capable d’accélérer la remontée et le traitement des informations de terrain. »

Un projet couronné de succès

Comme toutes les autres sociétés du groupe, Dirickx Services réalisait déjà sa comptabilité sur un ERP SAP. Il était donc logique d’y intégrer la facturation client, puis d’y rattacher un outil de gestion des interventions. La solution SAP Field Service Management (SAP FSM) est apparue assez rapidement comme un bon candidat pour gérer les opérations de maintenance réalisées sur le terrain.

« SAP FSM répondait à tous nos besoins, confirme Benjamin Subile, Responsable informatique chez Dirickx : gestion du planning des techniciens, enregistrement des temps, remplissage et signature de la fiche d’intervention, remontée de photos et notes, automatisation de la facturation dans l’ERP. Le tout à l’aide de tablettes qui accompagnent les techniciens sur le terrain. »

Dirickx cherchait un intégrateur SAP FSM capable de travailler en français. Une relation tripartite s’est mise en place, avec d’un côté Codilog, se chargeant des licences et de l’interaction avec SAP, et de l’autre l’entreprise Canguru, pour son expertise sur la solution SAP FSM.

Le projet a démarré en février 2021, avec une mise en production début décembre 2021. Le temps nécessaire pour permettre aux équipes de réaliser toutes les tâches requises : achever la bascule de Dirickx Services vers l’ERP SAP, activer le module de gestion des ventes, mettre en place SAP FSM, puis former les utilisateurs et les équiper en tablettes.

« L’un des points sensibles était la connexion de SAP FSM, qui est une solution cloud, à notre ERP SAP ECC, qui est déployé on premise, signale Benjamin Subile. Nous avons pour cela utilisé le connecteur standard proposé par SAP, qui permet aux deux solutions de communiquer de façon fluide. Cette intégration facilitée est un des avantages d’avoir opté pour une solution qui fait partie de l’écosystème SAP. »

Un outil rapidement adopté par les techniciens

Après une courte phase d’adaptation, les techniciens se sont approprié la solution. « S’ils ont pu être un peu sceptiques au départ, dès les premières utilisations, ils ont adopté l’outil, explique Laurent Dargelosse. Il leur permet de travailler plus efficacement et d’avoir une vision plus claire sur leur planning et leur stock. SAP FSM a apporté beaucoup d’améliorations pour les intervenants travaillant sur le terrain. »

Et il était temps, car l’entité Dirickx Services s’est fortement développée depuis début 2021, en passant de 13 à 18 techniciens, assurant chacun 2,5 à 3 interventions par jour. « Une telle charge n’aurait pas pu être gérée efficacement avec un processus papier », confirme le manager de Dirickx Services.

Cette croissance devrait se poursuivre, avec une vingtaine de techniciens d’ici la fin de l’année et un redécoupage du territoire français en trois régions, contre deux actuellement. Le groupe étant également très présent en Belgique, il envisage de développer l’activité Dirickx Services au Benelux, ce qui devrait – là encore – se traduire par de nouvelles embauches de techniciens de maintenance… lesquels seront équipés de tablettes connectées à SAP FSM.

The post Dirickx modernise et accélère son activité services avec SAP FSM appeared first on SAP France News.

Source de l’article sur sap.com

Plusieurs événements ont complètement bouleversé le statu quo ces dernières années. Inutile de les rappeler, vous l’avez sans doute remarqué par vous-même. Notamment au moment où, en tant que responsable financier, on vous a demandé d’apporter votre aide continue pour piloter la stratégie globale de votre entreprise (en plus, bien sûr, de votre travail quotidien qui consiste à gérer chaque centime dépensé par la société).

Les choses changent, c’est une évidence. Mais la véritable question est : avez-vous été en mesure de vous adapter ?

Notez que j’ai dit : « avez-vous été en mesure de vous adapter ? ». Car il est fort probable que votre capacité à suivre le rythme des évolutions du marché ne dépende pas d’un manque de volonté. Mais plutôt, comme de nombreuses autres entreprises, de solutions ERP ou financières, qui ne sont potentiellement pas assez agiles pour vous permettre de vous adapter à des bouleversements soudains.

 

Selon un récent rapport Aberdeen intitulé « Le pilier de l’agilité des fonctions Finance et Comptabilité », les entreprises se rendent compte que les solutions sur site ne sont tout simplement pas à la hauteur. Et si vous êtes condamné à travailler avec ces systèmes hérités, chaque jour est un constat de leur ancienneté et de leur manque de flexibilité :

 

  • La budgétisation et la prévision prennent trop de temps et de ressources.
  • Les processus de gestion ne sont pas adaptés à la volatilité des marchés.
  • L’évolution des demandes client dépasse la capacité de votre organisation à changer.

 

De quelles solutions disposez-vous ? Comment êtes-vous censé faire évoluer les systèmes, processus et politiques de votre entreprise de façon suffisamment rapide pour rester au fait des changements mondiaux qui vous imposent cette évolution ?

C’est le genre de question qui empêcherait de dormir les responsables financiers les plus aguerris. La réponse vous intéresse ? Consultez le rapport Aberdeen. Ou cette page sur l’ERP Cloud. Vous connaîtrez enfin la réponse.

La réponse : l’ERP Cloud

La première tranche de 20 % des entreprises les plus performantes est 39 % plus susceptible d’avoir adopté l’ERP Cloud pour accélérer et simplifier les processus comptables et financiers. Qu’en retire-t-elle ? Des données plus fiables et plus rapides, ce qui se traduit, bien sûr, par des décisions plus fiables et plus rapides.

Être en capacité de réfléchir et d’évoluer plus vite dans le cloud aide ces entreprises ultraperformantes à améliorer encore davantage leurs performances. En moyenne, elles sont :

  • 35 % plus susceptibles d’avoir une meilleure collaboration entre le service financier et les autres fonctions de l’entreprise ;
  • 40 % plus susceptibles de disposer d’un workflow standard pour la prise de décision ;
  • 52 % plus susceptibles d’être en capacité de faire le lien entre les performances et les processus de gestion.

Si vous allez encore plus loin dans les détails, vous observerez que les entreprises basées sur le cloud sont plus agiles que leurs pairs, grâce à :

  • une prise de décision 111 % plus rapide ;
  • une durée de cycle réduite de 111 %.

Imaginez disposer d’informations financières instantanées et précises, que vous pourriez partager avec les décideurs de toute l’entreprise. Quelles différences verriez-vous dans votre quotidien si vous pouviez résoudre les problèmes immédiatement, au lieu d’attendre d’être en possession des données dont vous avez besoin ? En quoi votre capacité à piloter l’entreprise serait-elle différente si vous disposiez de ce type d’informations et d’agilité ? Comment pouvez-vous observer des conclusions telles que celles présentées dans le rapport Aberdeen et ignorer les changements que vous devez apporter pour rester compétitifs ?

Rassurez-vous : parmi tous les changements à venir, le passage à l’ERP Cloud fait partie de ceux auxquels vous pouvez vous accommoder. En réalité, c’est peut-être même la seule façon de survivre.

Lisez l’article d’Aberdeen ici.

The post Vous n’aimez pas tout ce changement ? Ne vous inquiétez pas, ça va changer. appeared first on SAP France News.

Source de l’article sur sap.com

Live chat is one of the most powerful tools for customer experience in the current marketplace. 

In a world where customers are constantly connected to the online world, online chat is a reliable way of getting quick solutions to common problems. 

Today’s consumers prefer talking to an agent over chat to calling a contact center, and they often feel that live chat is less frustrating than waiting for the right person to answer the phone. 

Of course, like any digital tool, live chat is only effective when using it correctly. Today, we’re going to show you the crucial KPIs you need to consider if you want to ensure that your chat strategy is delivering a tangible return on investment. 

The Most Important Metrics to Measure for Live Chat

These days, implementing live chat tools is easier than ever. 

You don’t necessarily need to hire a professional developer unless you want a specialist widget with specific functions and unique branding. Many plugins and tools for sites built on Shopify and WooCommerce allow you to instantly access chat functions. 

However, just because implementing live chat is easy doesn’t mean that there aren’t countless ways for your strategy to go wrong. Keeping an eye on these crucial KPIs and metrics ensures you’re making the right impression with your chat strategy. 

1. First Response Time

First response time is a crucial live chat metric. This measures how long customers need to wait before someone responds to them. Technically, this metric only refers to how quickly an actual agent responds to your customer, so automated “thanks for getting in touch” messages don’t count. However, immediately responding with one of those messages can convince your audience to stick around for a little longer. 

The faster your agents can respond to messages and solve problems, the better your brand reputation becomes. The good news is that a good live chat strategy can lead to pretty quick response times. The average time for an agent to see a live chat message is around 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

To improve your FRT statistics, make sure you:

  • Invest in chatbots: AI chatbots can support customers 24/7 with handy, self-service functionality. These tools will also filter out the customers waiting for an agent who can find a solution to their problem on your FAQ page.
  • Prepare canned responses: Quick responses to common queries can help you to address a problem much faster. In addition, preparing canned responses will ensure that your team members can quickly respond to more customers. 
  • Increase your resources: Ensure you have the right hand and enough agents to handle peak demand.

2. Average Resolution Time

The first response rate only looks at how quickly someone responds to a customer’s message for the first time. However, it doesn’t show how rapidly you deal with client problems. Average Resolution Time is the metric that helps to measure customer satisfaction by seeing how long it takes to get to a point where your customer can close the chat. 

If it takes too long for your employees to solve problems, there’s an increased risk of your customers becoming annoyed and frustrated. Additionally, the longer agents take dealing with each individual chat, the more other consumers will have to wait for someone to become available. Finally, the longer it takes to resolve an issue, the more customer satisfaction decreases.

The key to success is ensuring that the right agent deals with the correct customer and that everyone on your team is empowered with the appropriate tools and information. Boost resolution time by:

  • Giving customers a quick self-service solution: For common questions, make sure that you have an FAQ section that you can direct your customers to. In addition, a chatbot that can offer quick canned responses to regular queries can save time. Plus, they’re great for reducing the pressure on your agents’ shoulders. 
  • Integrate CRM tools with live chat: Make sure your agents have access to information about each customer as soon as they start the conversation. This information should include the customer’s name, what they’ve purchased before, and if they’ve issued any support tickets. Integrating with the CRM makes it easier for agents to jump straight into the action without needing the customer to explain everything first. 
  • Keep resources handy: Your team members should have instant access to all the information they need to answer customer questions. Ensure that searchable data repositories are available for everyone on your live chat team. 

Remember, routing tools that automatically send customers to the agent with the proper knowledge or skills will also improve response times and reduce the number of times a customer needs to repeat themselves. 

3. Chat to Conversion Rate 

Live chat tools aren’t just an avenue for problem resolution. Although customers can get excellent service through live chat, they also look to chat to collect information before a potential purchase. Around 38% of customers say that they end up purchasing a positive live chat experience. 

The live chat app on your website can provide real-time assistance for sales queries, converting leads, and maximizing your return on investment. However, to determine how successful your chat system is at encouraging sales, you must look at the chat to conversion rate metric. 

Essentially, you measure the number of chats your company has been involved in, then compare that number to the total number of conversions from those customers. It might be helpful to narrow down your results here by using your data and analytics tools to separate your total number of live chats into those intended for sales information and those requiring assistance. 

If your chat to conversion rate isn’t as high as you would like, there are lots of things you can do to start making a positive impact:

  • Automatically launch a chat: As soon as someone comes to your website, launch a chat window with a bot that asks whether you can help your customer. You can even include a list of commonly asked questions so your customer can get help faster. 
  • Follow up on chat conversations: Make sure you follow up on any questions that customers ask on your chat widget with an email. This is a great way to reach out to customers that may have been distracted and ended up abandoning their cart.
  • Personalize suggestions: Use AI insights and information from your customer management tools to determine which products are most likely to appeal to each customer, then suggest those items. Remember to ensure that your tone of voice in the chat matches your brand too. 

Remember, the faster you can answer customer queries and address their concerns with your live chat strategy, the more likely the chat will lead to a sale. Ultimately, customers are convinced to purchase when they believe they can trust your business to deliver excellent experiences. 

4. Customer Satisfaction Score

The customer satisfaction score is probably one of the most critical metrics in any customer experience strategy. It directly measures customer satisfaction levels and gives you an insight into how well you’re doing from the perspective of your target audience. 

The best way to measure CSAT through live chat is to add a survey to the end of the chat session. For instance, you could ask, “How would you rate this session on a scale of 1 to 10”. Then, based on the score, you’d calculate a “Net Promotion Score.” Each score falls into one of three categories: “Detractors 0-6”, “Passives 6-8,” and “Promotors 9-10”.

The more information you collect about your CSAT score, the easier it will be to determine where you’re going wrong with your live chat strategy. On the other hand, if the score is pretty good after a chat session, you’re probably on the right track. To improve your overall score:

  • Encourage feedback: Getting people to leave feedback, even on a live chat app, can be difficult. Offering customers the chance to win something in exchange for their insights could help you to get more data. 
  • Follow up: Connect with your “detractors” to find out what you did wrong. Follow up in the live chat session by asking if they’d like to leave a more comprehensive review. Alternatively, you can send an email asking for additional information. 
  • Reach out to promotors: Connect with the people who give you the most favorable scores to ask them for their insights. Find out what they enjoyed most about the experience and request a review that you can place on your website for social proof. 

5. Missed Opportunities

The longer someone waits for you to answer their question in a live chat or respond to their initial message, the more likely they’ll give up on the conversation. Unfortunately, this means that your company ends up with missed opportunities. You lose the chance to potentially make a sale, delight a customer, and strengthen your brand reputation.

While you might assume that your customers will know you can’t be available to answer all of their questions immediately, that’s not the case. INC tells us that 51% of consumers believe a business should always be open. So every missed chat is another negative mark against your reputation. 

If you discover that your team is missing a lot of chat chances, this could be a sign that you don’t have enough resources available in this area. However, there are a few ways that you can reduce your chances of missed opportunities, such as:

  • Hiring more team members: If you know that there are times of the year or week when you have peaks in demand, ensure that you have the correct number of staff members available. 
  • Using chatbots: Chatbots won’t be able to answer all customer questions, but they can deliver quick responses to commonly asked queries and reduce the risk of lost opportunities.
  • Provide alternative forms of communication: if your customer can’t reach you on live chat, make sure that there are other options available, like a phone number and email address or a form where your customer can automatically submit a ticket. 

6. Total Number of Chats and Tickets

Keeping track of the total number of tickets your customers submit, alongside the number of chats your employees engage in, will give you helpful information. First, the total number of conversations shows how many customers are taking advantage of your live chat function on the website. 

You’ll also be able to compare your total number of chats to the number of resolved problems you deal with for your customers. For example, comparing your total number of chats to an unlimited number of tickets shows you how many customers have been left to rely on other sources of communication. You can also see how good your employees are at following up with tickets issued by customers. 

When you’re analyzing your number of tickets and chat sessions, you might notice that many of the queries you dealt with were connected to specific questions or topics. If that’s the case, you might be able to create a new FAQ page for your customers or provide your chatbot with extra information that it can use. 

If you’re getting more support tickets through alternative means than live chat, it might be time to ask yourself what’s wrong with your live chat performance and why your customers choose not to use it. 

Improving Live Chat CX for Your Business

Live chat can be a powerful tool for improving customer experience and an excellent way to strengthen your relationship with existing and potential clients.

Step into the shoes of your customer and discover what it feels like to walk through the whole live chat experience, from the moment that you send a request to the live chat team to the moment when you close down the chat with a solution to your problem. Other quick tips include:

  • Getting the software right: Make sure your live chat app is easy for your end customers and your employees. The chat app you use should be convenient and suit your brand. It also needs to collect information effectively without causing problems like GDPR and regulations. Get a developer involved if you think you have a problem with your chat functionality. 
  • Guide your team: Remember that your team needs to know how to use the live chat tools available effectively if they’re going to deliver the best results to your customers. Make sure you give your employees scripts to deal with problems if needed. In addition, chatbots that can quickly grab information from integrated CRM tools and other solutions could make your agents’ lives much more manageable. 
  • Pay attention to feedback: Ask your customers for feedback on their live chat experiences whenever you can. Ensure you pay attention to what they say they like and dislike about the encounter. If you can listen to your customer’s opinions, they’ll give you a lot of helpful information to work with when you’re enhancing and optimizing your live chat strategy. In addition, listening to your audience shows that you have their best interests at heart.

Remember, as well as customer feedback; you might be able to ask your employees for their insights into how you can improve live chat performance too. Employees also work with these tools regularly, so they know which features are more problematic than others. 

Measuring and Improving Live Chat

Live chat functionality isn’t something that you implement into your website and forget about. Instead, like any form of customer service or engagement tool, your live chat solution should be something you test regularly and constantly update to suit your customers’ needs. 

Knowing which metrics to measure when examining live chat functionality and performance will boost the experience you can give your audience and even open the door for better relationships with clients in the long term.

Source

The post How to Measure Live Chat Performance first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

API management solutions, also known as API gateways, are a must in the day and age of APIs. However, once you’ve set up such a gateway, you can use it for different purposes unrelated to APIs. Today, I want to show you how to improve the security of web apps.

Prevent Sniffing

Browsers are fantastic pieces of technology that try to make the life of users as comfortable as possible. However, the balance between ease of use and security may sometimes tip on the former to the latter’s detriment. For example, if an HTTP response doesn’t set the content type, the browser may try to infer it:

Source de l’article sur DZONE

Levallois-Perret, le 21 juillet 2022. SAP annonce la nomination d’Olivier Nollent au poste de Managing Director de SAP France. Olivier Nollent reporte à Rohit Nagarajan, Président EMEA North de SAP.

Olivier Nollent dirigera l’activité de l’une des plus importantes filiales commerciales de SAP, leader mondial des logiciels d’entreprise. Il aura pour mission :

  • de renforcer les synergies avec les clients, ainsi qu’avec l’écosystème de partenaires, dans leurs grands enjeux de transformation numérique (gestion de l’expérience, gestion intelligente des dépenses, réduction de l’empreinte sur l’environnement…), et d’innovation (intelligence artificielle, big data, blockchain…) grâce à ses technologies avancées et ses centres de R&D (SAP Labs) et avec son accélérateur de startups SAP.iO basé en France.
  • de poursuivre la croissance de SAP en France via le développement de ses activités Cloud auprès des grands comptes et des PME. Il s’appuiera à cet effet sur l’expertise du Groupe dans les domaines des logiciels ERP, Analytics, Supply Chain Management, RH et de gestion de l’expérience client, ainsi que sur le plus large portefeuille de solutions modulaires disponibles sur site, Cloud ou hybrides.

Olivier est diplômé de l’INSEEC et a débuté sa carrière chez HP, puis a passé 13 années chez Microsoft où il a occupé avec succès plusieurs rôles de direction commerciale, jouant un rôle clé dans la transition de l’entreprise vers le Cloud.

En avril dernier, après 5 années chez Salesforce, il rejoint SAP en tant que Senior Vice President Industries.

Son expérience des grands acteurs du secteur, sa solide expertise dans le développement des business de la Tech et son leadership éprouvé auprès de grandes organisations commerciales sont autant d’atouts pour accompagner la dynamique de croissance de SAP France.

Gérald Karsenti reste Président du Conseil d’Administration, assurant la direction générale de l’entreprise. Il accompagnera également Olivier Nollent dans sa transition vers son nouveau poste, en consolidant la notoriété de SAP sur le marché et en cultivant les relations avec ses clients et son écosystème.

The post Nomination d’Olivier Nollent au poste de Managing Director de SAP France appeared first on SAP France News.

Source de l’article sur sap.com

Le passage au Cloud est devenu une évidence pour bon nombre d’entreprises, mais il serait erroné de l’appréhender sous le prisme d’une marche technologique forcée. Si cette transition s’opère, c’est avant tout parce que les entreprises perçoivent aujourd’hui un moyen de renforcer leurs positions et de réaliser leurs potentiels pour demain.

SAP France a récemment réorganisé ses équipes au service de son nouveau positionnement stratégique centré sur le Cloud. Une transformation qui n’a qu’un objectif : répondre aux besoins de ses clients. Au cœur de ces changements, Fiamma Ferrero, Directrice Cloud Success Services, explique ce virage stratégique décisif pour l’avenir de toutes les entreprises, quels que soient leur taille ou leur secteur d’activité.

Les entreprises constatent que cette nouvelle façon d’aborder leur business s’adapte à leurs propres enjeux. De la gestion comptable du stock, à la prévision de vente et à l’analyse de données, le Cloud garantit une transition technologique sans rupture d’activité, en utilisant des outils en phase avec les enjeux et besoins, ceci afin de continuer leur cœur de métier avec facilité.

Ce socle, bien que nécessaire, ne représente en réalité qu’une partie de l’intérêt du Cloud. Par sa connexion constante avec des solutions complémentaires et des modules parfaitement imbriquables, le Cloud délivre un nombre infini de possibilités en matière de transformation business. Exit la gestion du stock en temps réel pour ouvrir la porte à une technologie en constante performance qui prédit vos besoins futurs grâce au Machine Learning.

Cette modularité représente un enjeu majeur dans le développement du potentiel business de chaque acteur. L’intégration de technologies innovantes comme de l’intelligence artificielle, permet d’accompagner les entreprises dans leur voyage transitionnel vers le Cloud. C’est en soulignant l’intérêt pour le client que nous pouvons créer chez lui l’envie de passer au Cloud.

En outre, ces entreprises voient un intérêt pour leurs clients et consommateurs, de la même manière que nous, qui accompagnons nos clients de A à Z dans leur transition. En 2021, le National Business Research Institute a constaté que les entreprises en mesure d’offrir un excellent service à la clientèle et de se positionner comme partenaires de confiance, pouvaient viser une augmentation de 20 % ou plus de leur chiffre d’affaires.

Par leur agilité, et grâce à la formation et l’accompagnement de professionnels, les entreprises peuvent exploiter les innovations technologiques, faciliter l’engagement des consommateurs, et être en mesure de générer de grandes quantités de données pour les aider à repérer des problèmes, identifier de nouvelles lignes de produits et des opportunités de marché.

La fidélisation du client passe d’abord par une empathie business, une compréhension de ses envies. La captation comme la rétention du client passe notamment par une cohérence technologique de grande échelle. Nous accompagnons nos clients dans la création et la mise en place de solutions qui sont bénéfiques à l’intégralité de leurs business unit, où qu’ils soient dans le monde. Cette omnicanalité et cette cohérence globale, d’outils comme d’interface, permettent d’assurer un voyage client stable, sans accroche ni obstacle, pour inciter à rester sur la plateforme visitée. Selon une étude de Bain & Company, une augmentation de 5 % du taux de fidélisation des clients accroît les bénéfices de 25 à 95 %.

En phase avec leurs besoins, répondant aux attentes de leurs clients, les entreprises transitent aujourd’hui vers le Cloud non par nécessité mais par ambition. Notre rôle est de leur permettre d’accéder à cette nouvelle étape de leur évolution en garantissant une transition souple, fluide et fructueuse.

The post D’un besoin business à l’envie d’agilité : la réponse évidente du Cloud appeared first on SAP France News.

Source de l’article sur sap.com

An unreliable, semi-broken and unresponsive website is an excellent way to lose leads and visitors — regardless of how aesthetically pleasing or well-designed, the visual elements are.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen more initiative to deliver faster internet to regions of the world that were previously devoid of it. With online communities expanding and more people becoming receptive to online shopping, ensuring your site’s dependability is now more important than ever. 

One way to achieve this is by employing uptime and downtime monitoring tools. This guide will examine the best ways to get alerts when something goes wrong and your website falters.

Why Is Website Uptime Monitoring Important?

Downtime is bound to occur occasionally. Nonetheless, the goal is to minimize it. The longer the downtime occurs, the more traffic and potential clients you lose. A dysfunctional website is also detrimental to your credibility and reputation. People may associate your website’s unreliability with your real-world products or services.

With web developers charging an average of $200 per hour, high-quality websites can be expensive to build and maintain. Nevertheless, it’s often worth the investment. However, an unreliable website can backfire on you. Instead of attracting more customers, it could potentially repel them. This can result in lost revenue.

An uptime monitoring solution can help you prevent or reduce these losses. It verifies if your website is up and functional and notifies you if it’s not. This allows you to troubleshoot the issue and get your website back up and running as soon as you’re alerted. The most common issues behind your website’s downtime include: 

  • Server faults;
  • Network outages;
  • Power outage;
  • Traffic spikes;
  • Cyberattacks;
  • Domain name issues;
  • An erroneous web application deployment;
  • Increased server loads;
  • DNS Resolve issues;
  • Human error.

Thus, you must employ a dependable tool that detects downtime or any interruptions related to your website as soon as they occur. They are must-have tools for web designers, developers, and network administrators. However, not all of them are built the same. So how do you identify the best uptime monitoring tools?

Essential Features of Uptime Monitoring Tools

Uptime monitoring tools typically detect interruptions by running network tests such as pings and trace routes. You could practically monitor your website’s uptime by constantly running these tests yourself. 

However, this isn’t an efficient way to monitor your website’s uptime. A comprehensive uptime monitoring tool will automatically monitor your website’s uptime in the background. It will then alert you through various channels as soon as it senses that your website may be down. 

Furthermore, high-quality uptime monitoring solutions tend to offer additional information regarding your website’s uptime/downtime and its performance. These tools commonly feature dashboards, status pages, badges, exportable records, etc., to help you keep track of your site’s overall health.

9 Best Features of an Uptime Monitoring Solution

The ideal uptime monitoring tool or service should feature: 

  1. Website security features that notify of and repel potential cyber attacks;
  2. 24/7 uninterrupted background website monitoring;
  3. Multi-channel alerts (email, SMS, push notifications, instant messages, social media, etc.);
  4. Report generation;
  5. 24/7 customer support available through different channels (email, phone, chat, etc.);
  6. Be capable of monitoring multiple websites and proxies at the same time;
  7. Offer insights and suggestions to improve your website’s performance;
  8. Be affordable;
  9. High customizability should allow you to choose which features to enable and disable.

Another optional feature to look out for is public status pages that your clients can access to determine if all your services are up and running. GetWeave is an excellent example of this. The website features a well-organized systems status page where customers can check if all of Weave’s services are functional. 

Nevertheless, you can use the above information as a buying guide when assessing potential uptime monitoring tools. The rest of this guide will supply a few suggestions as to which tools you should use for your website.

3 Best Website Uptime Monitoring Tools 

Some of the best uptime monitoring tools for website downtime alerts include:

1. Uptrends

Uptrends isn’t just a downtime detection tool; it’s a complete web performance monitoring solution. It will notify you as soon as it detects any disturbance in your website’s performance. It features highly customizable checks. For instance, you can set performance check limits for load times. Uptrends will notify you instantly if your website takes too long to load.

You can also configure from which locations you want it to monitor your website. Uptrends will then point you to where your website usually suffers performance dips in the real world. 

The service uses multiple communication channels to send users notifications: email, phone calls, and SMS. Alternatively, you can download one of Uptrend’s mobile applications and receive push notifications. Additionally, you can integrate Uptrends with messaging and communication applications such as PagerDuty, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.   

Another impressive Uptrend feature is its ability to emulate your website’s performance on different browsers. It runs Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge on its servers. Thus, you can compare how your website runs on these web browsers without installing them on your servers or computer. 

Uptrends supplies users with various charts, reports, and graphs to help identify sudden spikes or dips. Waterfall reports display the complete page-load from the initial request to the last download. This allows you to compare the history of your website’s performance element by element. It comes with three price plans whose costs depend on the number of monitors you would like. Starting at $16.21 (at the time of writing) the Starter Plan is the most affordable.

2. Oh Dear

Oh Dear is a slightly cheaper option than Uptrends, with the most affordable plan starting at $12 per month (at the time of writing). However, while Uptrends offers a 30-day free trial, Oh Dear only provides a 12-day trial period. Nevertheless, Oh Dear’s interface is a lot cleaner and more minimal. 

Since Oh Dear runs servers in different locations across the globe, it can track how your website performs in various regions. Oh Dear will scan through your website and index all the pages. If it detects any issues, it will alert you immediately. 

Oh Dear also features a continuous certificate monitoring function. Site owners who are concerned with their website’s security may find this feature to be especially useful. It will verify your SSL certificate expiration dates and alert you of any changes.  

Oh Dear’s public status page enables your clients to keep track of your website’s availability.

Oh Dear uses email and SMS text messages to alert site owners of any issues. It also features integrations with communications and social media applications such as Telegram, Discord, Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc. Oh Dear ensures that messages are as detailed and user-friendly. This makes it easier to troubleshoot and find the origin of your problem. Oh Dear is more than a worthy alternative to Uptrends. 

3. WP Umbrella

WP Umbrella is a little different from the previous entries. It’s intended to help users manage and monitor multiple WordPress sites. Thus, it is far more particularized in its approach to website uptime monitoring. Again, as is the primary function of the uptime monitoring tool, it offers a real-time alert system that will contact you through email, SMS, Slack, etc. 

WP Umbrella employs a simple minimal UI. Its main screen consists of a dashboard that allows you to view all your WordPress websites. By default, this dashboard features four columns: Site, Uptime, Speed, and Issues.

WP Umbrella will alert you of any outdated or erroneous plugins or themes. While it doesn’t offer dedicated public status pages, it does have a client report generation feature. You can automatically send these reports to your various subscribers or clients when your website is down. 

WP Umbrella is the most affordable option on this list. Users are charged $1.99 per month (at the time of writing) for each website monitored. In addition, WP Umbrella offers a 14-day trial and does not require your credit card details. It’s an excellent option for anyone running a WordPress website or two.

Conclusion

This guide has only explored three possible uptime monitoring solutions. They won’t only assist you in detecting downtimes, they can also help you find the reason your site may be slow.

These solutions are an excellent place to start. But there are many other options coming to market all the time. You may find that this is the first step to converting more leads and reducing your bounce rate. 

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Personalized marketing is when you attune your marketing efforts based on customer data. This data can be anything from the first and last name to purchase intent, concerns, and history.

Personalized marketing has revolutionized the way businesses market their product and service to their audience. It brings value to people’s lives, spiking the sales graph for brands and businesses. So it’s a win-win situation for both the company and the consumer.

Even big companies do this for their campaigns. They do so because it gives them great results and ROI for their marketing initiatives. If these multinational businesses do this, it’s a good idea to incorporate this strategy and learn from a top resource on digital marketing.

This article aims to explain every nook and cranny of personalized marketing. By the end of this 5-minute read, you will know the impact of personalized marketing on our lives. And how you can integrate this into your marketing strategy to benefit your business.

What Is Personalized Marketing?

Have you ever encountered a business that knows what you’re going through? Or did you see an ad online that you closely relate to? Chances are, you were one of the target markets of those marketing materials. And if you could associate yourself with the ad, their marketing strategy worked.

That is what personalized marketing does to your audience, market, or particular demographic. This style of advertising leverages personalization in your marketing materials. The details of your marketing content are tailored to a specific audience and address the issues or real-time problems of a particular segment in your market.

Personalized marketing has become popular because more people demand it from businesses. Once the people have experienced what it felt like, they want to feel more of it.

To objectively see the demand for personalization, here are some statistics to back it up.

Accenture reported that 91% of consumers are likelier to shop with businesses that offer them relevant content. This shows that the right product recommendations can increase the chances of shopping with you.

Salesforce mentioned that 66% of consumers expect companies to understand their individual needs. This statement proves that a generalized way of marketing isn’t as effective as before. The consumer mindset has already developed, and they demand more personalization from businesses.

A striking piece of data from Statista showed that 90% of consumers in the US find the idea of personalization appealing. If that figure is accurate, almost all businesses should start incorporating this into their strategies. There’s no reason for them not to try this out.

Given the high positive demand for personalized marketing, it’s no secret why more and more businesses are doing this. However, not every company out there is doing this right. A wrong way of doing this can bring a loss of clients and a negative ROI.

To help you go on the right track of using personalization in your marketing, read up on the next section of this article.

Know These 6 Tips To Correctly Do Personalized Marketing

You’d agree that knowing your customer’s first and last name is essential. But with the dynamically changing strategies, personalized marketing is going beyond that. It’s actually about understanding what your targeted consumers need, merging with a way to convey the message that your business is the solution.

To help you achieve this, take note of the things below:

1. Leverage Your Customer Data

The foundation of personalized marketing is laid on customer data. The best marketing professionals and strategists emphasize gathering relevant data if you want to scale. Excellent digital marketing courses will teach you that customer data will help you build a solid foundation for your content and campaigns.

Consumer behavior has always been the most important detail for target marketing. With every click, it has become easier to gather data about individual customers, their interests, hobbies, purchase history, buying behavior, and more.

You’ll be able to get this information if you’ve practiced data management and collecting customer data throughout the years of your operation. However, it’s not too late to begin if you haven’t started with this yet. There is a lot of marketing automation software that aids marketing teams in doing this. For example, many businesses use lead scoring software to gain insight into their clients’ needs and categorize them appropriately.

For your personalization efforts, you can use questionnaires, surveys, and feedback forms to capture personal data on the internet. A customer will happily fill out a survey form if a reward in return entices him. This reward can be in any form– a voucher, a first buy discount, free shipping, or more.

This initiative will help you get more data in a shorter time frame.

2. Understand Your Customer’s Needs

Hoarding data will be a complete waste of marketing efforts, capital, and efficiency if you do not extract consumer behavior from it. When you have access to a rich set of data, you have the privilege to understand your customers’ trending needs deeply. After gaining insights from the data, create a marketing strategy based on those findings to target your audience.

Doing this doesn’t just apply to B2C; it also works for B2B companies, which is why the demand for custom software development, tailored services, personalized packages, and B2B data providers have been on the rise in these recent years.

It is a two-way road. While you are on the lookout for your target market, at the same time, the customers expect businesses to know what they need. The market you’re currently serving expects you to know what products or services are fit for them.

So this is where it gets crucial: you have to dig deeper into your niche and find the specs of your audience’s needs. Having a general idea about the needs of your target audience and personalized marketing usually don’t go harmoniously.

Planning a better-personalized marketing strategy will not be a piece of cake but will be much more rewarding for every aspect of your business. May it be sales, return on investments, customer relationships, or personalized marketing campaigns.

3. Personalize Every Stage Of The Customer Journey

The first rule of business is convincing the customer that you are their best friend. Now that you know what they want, you pledge to provide them with whatever best you can. Limiting personalization to marketing is not the solution. You have to be vigilant in meeting these individual requirements at every stage. And remember that consistency is the name of the game. That is how you bring your business into the running.

You can integrate CRM automation, email marketing tools and deploy other content marketing strategies to help make this process a lot simpler. Personalized live chat and chatbots, such as those offered by ThriveDesk, allow businesses to personalize their offerings and build their brand reputation.

As a customer, my requirement would be reading content, browsing, and experiencing products that would hit home. A personalized experience is what every consumer demands. And this is what makes them want to go back and do business with you again.

By creating helpful and relevant content, recommending the right products to them, and giving out convenient payment options, you are setting your business apart from the rest. Doing this allows you to have personalized every touchpoint that your customers do with your business.

4. Present In An Engaging Way

Consider customer engagement as absolutely necessary. Having the best data set and knowing what your customers want is not enough. In the competitive space of business and marketing, everyone is trying to get the attention of one another. And this is what you are supposed to do. This helps in building consumer-brand relations.

When a consumer engages, meaningful things happen. Engaging content pushes the consumer through the funnel and hence promotes conversions. Your content should be creative and eye-catching.

Engaging content blended with personalization boosts the brand experience. Increased loyalty, trust-building, and improved customer experience enhance the conversion and sales speed.

A great way to use personalization in an engaging manner that most businesses overlook would be through exit-intent popups.

5. Be Where Your Customers Are

This is an element that some businesses miss out on. They have created excellent social media marketing content but only distributed it on the wrong channel. For personalized marketing to be effective, it needs to be seen by people.

Are you questioning your marketing techniques because all you see is stagnancy? You have set up an engaging online store on Shopify or Wix, collected all the relevant data, your content is engaging enough, and your marketing strategy is top-notch. But you are still unable to reach your clientele.

You start wondering what you are missing out on. Your content and your strategies will not be prolific if you are on the wrong channel. Remember: the message of your content has to reach the right people for it to be effective.

Should you be on social media? If so, which one? Do you get more traction with email campaigns? Or do you have more engagements on forums?

Find out where your market is, then spend your focus there. Now the next step is how to know where they spend most of their time?

This is where we go back in the loop. And hence we again emphasize that data collection is the foundation of any great marketing strategy.

6. Improve Marketing Content

Don’t rest on your laurels when you’ve gotten everything down to a tee and have attained your desired marketing analytics behind your personalized marketing content. Always think of ways how you can improve.

Evolving at every step will keep you in the running. Don’t be misguided into thinking that your work is done if you feel like you have reached the pinnacle. Keep looking for ways to get better. Set bigger goals and status for your business.

Always go back to the drawing board and brainstorm with your team on how you can change and strive with the dynamically changing world and mindsets. In the end, all you want is to build better relationships with your customers, new and existing.

For enhanced productivity, your marketing team should always look for new strategies. This is how fresh and great marketing ideas are made.

See How You Can Benefit From Personalized Marketing

Irrelevant information can waste energy and time for both customers and the business. Personalized marketing hits the bull’s eye 99% of the time. It brings immeasurable value to the company as well as the customer.

Here are some of the top benefits of personalized marketing:

1. Better Engagement

The first target personalized marketing aims at is grabbing an individual’s attention. And this results in better engagement eventually. If you are presenting your customer with something that wows them, needless to say, it will grab their attention.

This will help bridge the gap between your customer and your brand. Identifying customers’ needs and then giving them what they want will help improve customer interaction with your brand.

It can even be enough for them to follow your call to action. The next thing you know, they will be checking your website, signing up for a list, or even purchasing a product right then and there.

2. Higher Conversions

Are you there for your customer at the right time and place? One-on-one marketing provides easy solutions to customers because you hit them with just what they are looking for at the right time.

When potential customers realize that you understand what they’re going through and provide the solution, most won’t hesitate to try your business out.

Personalization isn’t just focused on content. It can also be integrated into your processes. This results in aiding the increase of higher conversion rates.

3. Improved Customer Experience

Offering personalization will significantly improve the user experience. Once you provide the products, services, and content that meet their needs, their opinion of your business automatically improves.

Considering the statistics about personalized experiences, it is evident that consumers demand personalization strategies from companies. And if you offer such an experience, you increase the chance of making them do more business with you. Personalization helps businesses in reducing cart abandonment rates, better customer journey, increased customer satisfaction, and many more.

4. Customer Retention

Retaining persisting customers is equally important to your business as bringing new ones. Most businesses face low customer retention. It’s also a factor that some companies overlook. You must understand that it’s not all about converting prospects into paying customers. Your focus should also be on retaining those customers to make them loyal advocates of your brand.

One of the major benefits of consistent personalization is an improved customer retention rate. Consumers tend to stay with a business that understands their needs and provides solutions to their problems.

Once you can transfer a customer to a loyal advocate, you can also receive a ton of benefits. These are people that are going to defend your brand from critics. These are the same people who will give you free marketing via word of mouth and positive reviews.

5. Better Customer Relationships

Personalized experience leads to customer retention, eventually building better relationships with your nurtured customers. These entities are connected in a loop.

Customer relationships are an aspect of business that significantly helps with scalability and higher revenue. So connecting with your customers and building a relationship with them is as important as the product you are selling. This is why strengthening customer relationships should be a top priority for businesses.

Personalization makes you an expert on your target market trends. You get to know your audience deeper, which helps you build a foundation for creating a great customer relationship. And this requires marketing and customer experience teams to work together in a symphony.

For this, you can use team collaboration software which aids in the optimization of content and your approach toward the market. You’ll have a better strategy in getting their attention, providing what they want, and recommending things they’ll be interested in.

All of these things help in building customer rapport. When a customer feels that you treat them as more than just a paying customer, their customer loyalty goes to your business.

Best Examples Personalization Marketing

To inspire you to integrate this marketing strategy into your operations, below are different personalization marketing campaigns done exceptionally by various businesses. Grab inspiration, ideas, and motivation from these examples.

1. Coca-Cola

We all know the most basic form of personalization is addressing your customers’ names, but Coca-Cola took this simple idea into a massive global campaign. Their “Share a Coke” campaign started in 2011, wherein they printed different popular names on their Coke bottles and cans.

It seemed like a regular campaign at first, but it started getting traction as more customers wanted to get the name of their family, friends, and themselves. Coca-Cola said the campaign’s purpose was “to create a more personal relationship with consumers and inspire shared moments of happiness.”

The soft drinks giant used personalization and tied such a strategy with its mission: to bring memories and happiness to its consumers. You, too, can do the same – combine your mission and personalization strategy to create a unique campaign.

2. Spotify

Spotify leverages user data in its marketing strategy. They have several campaigns that make users want to use their application more often because it gives out a more tailored experience.

Other than their year-end campaign( #spotifywrapped), where they show the most played songs and podcasts their users listen to (which was a viral hit), they now also have an #OnlyYou campaign that shows your unique listening taste partnered with a musical astrology reading.

3. Nike

Nike has consistently been recognized for authentic, personalized, and heartfelt ad campaigns. This personalization always makes them capture an audience who can relate and those who start connecting to the brand. So Nike isn’t new to personalization. Their aim is robust community engagement.

Their highly inspirational campaigns with real-life heroes induce inspiration in their audience. Nike is great at converting people because of its excellent storytelling ability while adding personalization to the mix.

Nike’s just launched a new app that offers personalized content and rewards for committed fans. They tackle challenges and issues head-on, but they always make their marketing messages relatable to their audience. That is why they “just do it.”

Conclusion

Personalized marketing is the secret sauce to thriving businesses in the world today. However, incorporating this marketing strategy and finding success is not as simple as you might think. You will face challenges, but with enough perseverance and brainstorming, you can surpass them and successfully create a great campaign.

Remember, this marketing approach can be a hit or a miss. The first step to making it a success is relevant data collection followed by judicious implementation. This isn’t an overnight activity that you can do. It requires months of diligence in the right direction with the proper guidance. And you can gain valuable insights into this guidance via the content marketing strategies outlined in this article. But remember, once you start rolling, there is no looking back.

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A good application lifecycle management (ALM) package has software that is able to carefully manage and monitor all aspects of software development.  ALM applications provide tools for managing and completing the phases of design, development, testing, deployment, and ongoing enhancements.   With an ALM solution in place, organizations can significantly improve the way they design, build, test, and adapt their software.  Greater customer satisfaction, speed of development, and reduction of cost is the often the result.

Top ALM Tools:

VersionOne

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