#How to use Macros in Salesforce

[manamediamarketing]

The Future of Digital Marketing in 2025 – Trends Every Business Must Adopt

Introduction

As we step into 2025, digital marketing is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Businesses that stay ahead of trends will increase brand visibility, attract more leads, and boost conversions. From AI-driven SEO to hyper-personalized marketing, the digital landscape is more competitive than ever.

Whether you’re a small business owner, entrepreneur, or marketing professional, understanding these trends will help you craft a winning digital marketing strategy. Let’s explore the top digital marketing trends for 2025 that will shape the future of online success.

1. AI-Powered SEO is the Future

Search engines are becoming smarter and more intuitive. With AI-powered algorithms like Google’s MUM (Multitask Unified Model) and BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), traditional SEO tactics are no longer enough.

How AI is Transforming SEO in 2025?

✔ AI-driven content creation: Advanced AI tools analyze search intent to create highly relevant, optimized content. ✔ Predictive analytics: AI predicts user behavior, helping businesses optimize content for better engagement. ✔ Voice and visual search optimization: As voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant become more popular, brands must adapt their SEO strategy to long-tail conversational queries.

Actionable Tip: Optimize for natural language searches, use structured data markup, and ensure website accessibility to improve rankings in 2025.

2. Video Marketing Continues to Dominate

With platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, video marketing is becoming the most powerful form of content in 2025.

Why is Video Marketing Essential?

📌 80% of internet traffic will be video content by 2025 (Cisco Report). 📌 Short-form videos increase engagement and hold attention longer than static content. 📌 Live streaming and interactive videos help brands connect with audiences in real-time.

Actionable Tip: Focus on storytelling, behind-the-scenes content, product demonstrations, and influencer collaborations to boost engagement.

3. Hyper-Personalization with AI & Data Analytics

Consumers expect highly personalized experiences, and AI-powered marketing automation makes it possible.

How Does Hyper-Personalization Work?

✔ AI analyzes customer behavior and past interactions to create tailored marketing messages. ✔ Email marketing campaigns are dynamically personalized based on user interests. ✔ Chatbots and voice assistants provide real-time, customized support.

Actionable Tip: Leverage tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Marketo to automate personalized marketing campaigns.

4. Influencer Marketing Becomes More Authentic

The influencer marketing industry is projected to reach $21.1 billion by 2025. However, brands are shifting from celebrity influencers to micro and nano-influencers for better authenticity and engagement.

Why Micro-Influencers Matter?

🎯 Higher engagement rates than macro-influencers. 🎯 More trust & relatability with niche audiences. 🎯 Cost-effective collaborations for brands with limited budgets.

Actionable Tip: Partner with influencers in your niche and use user-generated content (UGC) to enhance brand credibility.

5. Voice & Visual Search Optimization is a Must

By 2025, 50% of all searches will be voice or image-based, making traditional text-based SEO insufficient.

How to Optimize for Voice & Visual Search?

✔ Use long-tail keywords & conversational phrases. ✔ Optimize images with alt text & structured data. ✔ Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and fast-loading.

Actionable Tip: Implement Google Lens-friendly content to appear in image-based search results.

Conclusion

The future of digital marketing in 2025 is driven by AI, personalization, and immersive experiences. If you’re not adapting, you’re falling behind!

 Looking for expert digital marketing strategies? Mana Media Marketing can help you grow and dominate your niche. Contact us today!

[transcuratorsblog]

How Digital Marketing Agencies Set and Track Micro-Conversions

In digital marketing, it’s easy to get fixated on the big wins—final purchases, sign-ups, or lead submissions. But savvy brands (and smart agencies) know that micro-conversions are just as important. These small, measurable user actions signal intent, engagement, and progression through the funnel—even if they don’t immediately lead to a sale.

So how does a digital marketing agency set, track, and use micro-conversions to drive stronger campaign performance? Here's a breakdown of the strategy.

✅ What Are Micro-Conversions?

Micro-conversions are non-revenue-generating actions that indicate a user is moving closer to your main goal (macro-conversion). Examples include:

Watching 50% of a video ad

Adding a product to cart

Signing up for a newsletter

Downloading a free guide

Spending more than X seconds on a page

Clicking “Read More” or “Book a Demo”

While they may not directly impact revenue, they show user intent, engagement, and trust—making them critical signals for optimisation.

1. Setting Micro-Conversions Based on Funnel Stage

A digital marketing agency first maps out the customer journey and assigns micro-conversions at each stage:

Top of Funnel (Awareness)

Page scroll depth (25%, 50%, 75%)

Time on site (e.g., 60+ seconds)

Social post shares

Engagement with videos or interactive tools

Middle of Funnel (Consideration)

Clicking pricing or feature tabs

Subscribing to a newsletter

Downloading a whitepaper or checklist

Visiting multiple product pages

Bottom of Funnel (Intent)

Starting checkout or filling part of a lead form

Adding items to wishlist/cart

Returning to the site within 48 hours

Interacting with live chat or chatbot

This funnel-aligned setup helps agencies measure progress, not just outcomes.

2. Custom Event Tracking Setup

To track micro-conversions accurately, the agency configures custom events using tools like:

Google Tag Manager

GA4 custom events

Meta Pixel or TikTok Pixel

LinkedIn Insight Tag

CRM-based goal tracking (HubSpot, Salesforce)

For example, the agency might set an event to trigger when:

A user downloads an ebook

A visitor scrolls 75% of a long-form article

Someone views a pricing page for more than 15 seconds

This event-driven approach makes it possible to collect meaningful behavioural data, not just binary yes/no conversions.

3. Assigning Value to Micro-Conversions

Not all micro-conversions are created equal. Agencies often assign a conversion value or weight to each based on:

Historical correlation with macro-conversions

Engagement level required

Funnel stage relevance

For example:

Downloading a whitepaper might be worth 10 points

Watching a demo video might be worth 30 points

Clicking “Request Pricing” could be worth 50 points

This scoring system helps prioritise leads and audiences in remarketing or sales handoff strategies.

4. Using Micro-Conversions for Campaign Optimisation

Agencies rely on micro-conversion data to:

Optimise ad targeting (e.g., build lookalike audiences based on video viewers or cart abandoners)

Improve landing pages (e.g., reduce bounce rates by analysing scroll and click behaviour)

Refine content strategy (e.g., produce more of what drives mid-funnel engagement)

Improve lead nurturing flows (e.g., send tailored follow-ups based on what someone clicked or downloaded)

Rather than wait for final sales to roll in, agencies use micro-conversions to react fast and iterate smarter.

5. Reporting and Attribution

Micro-conversions are built into agency reporting dashboards using tools like:

Google Looker Studio

GA4 path analysis and funnel visualisation

CRM integration (tracking lead scores across interactions)

Agencies can then show:

Which micro-actions lead to higher-value users

Where in the funnel users are dropping off

What creative or content assets generate the most forward motion

This layered view of user behaviour allows for data-driven strategy—not just performance reporting.

6. Retargeting Based on Micro-Conversions

A digital marketing agency uses micro-conversions to build intelligent remarketing lists, such as:

People who started a checkout but didn’t finish

Users who watched 75% of a product video

Visitors who viewed 3+ service pages

This allows for hyper-relevant retargeting, ensuring ads feel timely and personalised, not repetitive or random.

Final Thoughts

In 2025, the brands that win aren’t just the ones with the most traffic—they’re the ones that understand every step users take before converting. That’s why a modern digital marketing agency treats micro-conversions not as minor data points, but as strategic levers to improve ROI.

By setting, tracking, and acting on these intent signals, agencies help brands nurture smarter journeys, spot missed opportunities, and turn passive browsers into paying customers—one micro-step at a time.

[manrastechnology]

Maximizing ROI with Salesforce Service Cloud Implementation: Best Practices

What is ROI?

It’s a measure of money that looks at the return on investment in terms of its cost. The net profit from the investment is divided by the investment’s original cost to determine ROI, which is then expressed as a percentage. At Manras, we help integrate salesforce Service Cloud that helps customers, companies, and investors to determine the success and efficacy of new investments. 

How to maximize Roi with Salesforce Service Cloud Implementation?

One of the best ways to maximize ROI with Salesforce Service Cloud implementation is to understand your company’s objectives and modify the use of social media platforms accordingly. Clients always need to make sure that it aligns with their business goals. Here are some of the best practices:

Define Clear Objectives: right before implementing Salesforce Service Cloud, you need to understand your objectives. Make sure that you know what you want to achieve with the platform, like for example its improving customer satisfaction, increasing agent productivity, or reducing response times.

Customize to Fit Your Needs: Salesforce Service Cloud is very flexible; it can always be modified according to your needs. Modify it to fit your specific business needs and procedures. Like for example, case management, workflows, email templates, and reports to match your unique workflows.

Complete Training: You can opt for investing in comprehensive training for your team. Make sure that your agents are professional in using Service Cloud features and also know how to use them effectively to serve customers.

Incorporation with Other Systems: You can try in adding Salesforce Service Cloud with other systems within your organization, such as CRM, ERP, or marketing automation platforms. At Manras we make sure of smooth data flow and a better view of customer relations and history.

Utilize Automation: One of the other ways is to use automation features such as workflow rules, process builders, and macros to simplify certain repetitive tasks. This allows users to improve agent efficiency. This can help in solving issues and sending automated responses when necessary.

Make use of Multi-Channel Support: You can try out Omni-Channel support to answer customer inquiries across various channels (e.g., email, chat, social media). This helps you to choose the most suitable agent based on skills, availability, and priority. This ensures a steady and personalized customer experience across all touchpoints.

Implement Knowledge Base: Another measure is to create and maintain a complete knowledge base within the Service Cloud. At Manras we allow your agents with easy access to useful information, FAQs, and solutions to common issues. This helps in solving customer queries faster, evolving workplace practices, and lowering the need for emergency decisions.

Regular Updates and Maintenance: Make sure that you have access to all Salesforce releases and updates. Make sure to regularly review your Service Cloud to make sure that it aligns with evolving business needs and also takes advantage of new features and upgrades.

Seek Feedback and Iterate: Gather feedback from both customers and agents regarding their experience with Salesforce Service Cloud. At Manras we make use of this feedback to identify areas for improvement and modify your ideas regularly.

Conclusion:

Companies and individual clients need to regularly go through and analyze key performance metrics such as first response time, resolution time, customer satisfaction scores, and agent productivity. You also need to make sure that your goals align with the company’s procedures. Salesforce Service Cloud helps in a smooth data flow and also simplifies repetitive tasks.

At Manras we help install Salesforce’s reporting and analytics tools so that companies can look for areas for improvement, and also make data-driven decisions.

[saaky]

What are the barriers to TOD in America, and how can cities overcome this issue? Support your view with a successful example of TOD (in or outside the U.S.)

We think the obstacle to TOD in the U.S. is that the whole process of implementation is subject to legitimacy challenges.

The implementation of TOD in the capital markets is often predicated on land appreciation, and due to the large upfront investment, it must be guaranteed that land prices in the area will rise in order to operate. But there are huge risks involved, and most of these risks are borne by the city, not the developer. In order to promote a TOD strategy, the city usually has to provide upfront infrastructure funding, project management and community engagement services. As the founder of TOD, Peter Calthorpe reminds us that "affordable housing must start with affordable neighborhoods." Increasing the supply of affordable housing and providing more jobs must be urged by the government to accomplish this. And it is impossible to do so by relying on the capital markets, which tend to create eye-catching hedonistic environments that employ glamorous, highly educated elites.

Addressing this obstacle depends in large part on the ability of cities to develop appropriate housing strategies to make government affordable.

TOD does not work in isolation; it and affordable housing strategies accomplish each other. As people use public transportation more, the less they spend on transportation, which increases the overall affordability of the community. Extremely low-income households will move farther into the suburbs because they can't afford to pay downtown rents, spending even more than 50 percent of their household income on transportation to do so. While moving to the suburbs reduces the cost of housing, the additional cost of transportation makes it difficult for poor families to survive. Housing compensation in the form of affordable housing could therefore be provided for low-income residents displaced by regional development. Provide affordable housing for low income households within a half-mile radius around each transit hub. This is because the preservation of older homes and the development of affordable housing around transit stations is consistent with the State's macro-strategy of continued support for affordable housing.

The San Francisco Bay Rim project is a success story.

In executing the planning for the TOD project, the management recognized at the outset of the project that public interest and private enterprise complement each other ---- The private economic growth driven by public transportation will be used in part to pay for the cost of public transportation, and the public-private partnership needs to continue throughout the project. The Transbay redevelopment not only plans for residential land to match the office space, but also provides affordable housing at 35% for low-income people. The first project completed in the Transbay Redevelopment Area, Rene Cazenave Apartments, was developed by two local non-profit organizations. The eight-story building consists of 120 apartments with condominiums for the homeless, supportive services, and ground-floor retail space.

With the opening of the Salesforce Passenger Center, the redevelopment of the Bay Rim area opens up a new urban revitalization scenario: one that is transit-oriented and provides a high level of public amenities and a diversity of employment opportunities in a mixed-income community. The development is expected to increase the value of properties within 1.2 kilometers of the Salesforce Terminal by an average of 5%, with an estimated 11% increase in the value of properties directly adjacent to the Terminal.

Currently, the implementation of the TOD project not only pushes the construction of the surrounding land, but also attracts high-tech research and development industries to the city center with the perfect transportation system and new public facilities.

[reasoningdaily]

https://www.fastcompany.com/3061482/one-googlers-insider-guide-to-using-google-docs-at-work

One Googler’s Insider Guide To Using Google Docs At Work

When Google Docs launched back in 2007, it was a scrappy, lightweight document editor. Today, it’s a full-blown workplace powerhouse, with all the features you need to create, collaborate, and share your ideas quickly.

As a product manager at Google, I’ve not only helped the team build and develop these tools, but I’ve used them every single day, often to write product requirements docs for our next feature. So here’s an insider look at five ways to incorporate Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides into your own work that you might not know about.

1. Design Professional-Grade Documents In Google Docs

You probably just use Arial out of habit, but there are actually over 600 fonts available in Google Docs, not to mention lots of professionally designed templates that do much of the work for you. There are built-in themes, and a large suite of formatting features you may not even know exist.

Our goal in adding these features has been to make creating beautiful, polished documents and presentations a breeze. For instance, easily organize the ideas from your next team brainstorm by choosing a meeting notes template from the carousel at the top of the Docs home screen.

2. Turbocharge Google Sheets With Powerful Functions And Pivot Tables

Sheets is way more than just a way to throw a quick table or list together. It has over 340 powerful functions, including dozens that other spreadsheets don’t offer, such as Google Translate, which lets you automatically translate one language to another.

We’ve also designed Sheets to offer advanced pivot table functionality, including the ability to define custom Calculated Fields. And Docs and Sheets both support custom scripting and advanced API functionality via Apps Script, which is Google’s equivalent of macros. Basically, if your job entails a lot of number crunching, Sheets can handle it. Related Video: Are Work Habits Spoiling Your Productivity?

3. Present Painlessly To Groups With Google Slides

We’re big fans of the “show up, don’t set up” philosophy when it comes to presenting to groups. Giving a great presentation can be a big enough challenge on its own, so we’ve added a few tricks to make the A/V side as easy as possible.

With just a couple taps on your phone or tablet, you can use the iOS or Android Slides apps to present on any screen equipped with Chromecast or AirPlay. And if you’re on a Hangouts video call, the mobile apps let you present directly to everybody in the call–no more wires and set-up stress.

We also added a feature called Slides Q&A to help you talk with your audience, not at them. Q&A allows participants to submit questions and weigh in on them from their phones, laptops, and tablets using a shared link, which also lets the speaker collect real-time feedback.

Tired of trying to get feedback over the annoying, unreliable, audio-only conference line you’ve been dialing into for your remote meetings? Here’s how to use the Q&A Slides feature instead:

4. Use Google Docs While You’re Offline

We’re moving toward a world of constant Internet connectivity, but the real world doesn’t work that way yet. That’s why Docs, Sheets, and Slides work offline in the Chrome browser on your laptop as well as in the Android and iOS apps.

Chrome will even preemptively sync your recent files so you can keep working if you go offline unplanned. Whether you’re holed up in a Wi-Fi-less cafe writing the most epic report your boss has ever seen, or just dealing with a spotty in-flight Wi-Fi connection as you scramble to wrap up a project before takeoff, Docs has you covered.

5. Hook Google Docs Up With Loads Of Other Apps

Today’s digital workflows are complicated, and people rely on lots of apps and services to get their jobs done. That’s why both Google Sheets and Slides announced new feature-rich APIs at Google I/O this year. And Salesforce, SAP Anywhere, Sage, Anaplan, Asana, Trello, Prosperworks, and others will soon all be launching rich integrations with Sheets or Slides over the next few months. Soon you’ll be able to access all the functionality, whichever app you’re using.

These are a few of the nifty things you can do with Docs, Sheets, and Slides to improve how you work, communicate, and interact. From the very start, we built these Apps with collaboration in mind so that it’s fast and easy to work together with your team.

But as someone on the front lines–building these tools as well as using them myself–it still sometimes seems to me that we’ve only scratched the surface. We’re now using machine learning to create new features for Google Apps, like super-accurate voice typing and one-click data analytics, that take you beyond basic productivity and help you stay focused on the highest-value tasks.

The way we work, of course, is always changing both because of technology and in response to it. And sometimes keeping up to date on that evolution can be a challenge. So hopefully these five tips will help. My job at Google, in one sense anyway, is to help you do yours better. Which means there’s always work to be done. Welcome to the future.

[sfdcpanther]

How to use Macros in Salesforce?

How to use Macros in Salesforce?

 A macro is a set of instructions that tells the system how to complete a task. When a user runs a macro, the system performs each instruction. Macros help your team save time and add consistency. You can create macros to perform multiple actions. For example, a macro can enter the subject line of an email and update the case status. A single macro can perform multiple actions on different parts…

[yadavti]

How do I Create Custom Object Using Lightning Object Creator?

It is a low-code app development tool on the Salesforce Lightning Platform, called as Lightning Object Creator. Lightning Object Creator is a new tool that turns spreadsheets into apps with just a few clicks.

We are covering basic to advance level of concepts involved in our Salesforce Lightning Web Component Training. This course gives you in-depth conceptual knowledge of the new Lightning Web Component and programming model along with mini project to work on which helps candidate to implement all knowledge to finish project. After completion of the training the candidate has basic to advance understanding of Aura and lightning components onto the concepts that exist in the new framework programming model.

You will be learning:

What is Lightning Web Component?

Lightning Web Component Testing

Lightning Web Component Framework

Lightning Web Component Development

LWC & Aura Communication

With the Lightning Object Creator, it only takes a few steps to translate the columns of a spreadsheet into fields, define field types and import all the spreadsheet data. Take spreadsheets from Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or comma-separated value (CSV) files, and turn them into apps. We have really feasted on these tools to automate our business processes.

[digitalexperiencemonitoring2021]

7 Reasons Why Real User Monitoring (RUM) Matters

Extend Your Monitoring Vantage Point Beyond Synthetics

Did you know?

Microsoft had a stellar quarter in Q3 of this year beating expectations in all its three core segments.

And the demand for its Azure cloud services continues to grow. The other heavy tech giants such as Google and Amazon also reported gains, thanks to an increase in stimulus e-commerce spending and work from home extension policies!

But as several companies follow the lead of Microsoft and Google, IT leaders will need to quickly adapt to a new normal and adjust strategies to accommodate its distributed workforce. So, let’s learn why would real user monitoring matter to IT.

Keep reading…

7 Reasons You Need Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Capture Beyond Synthetics

Pre Covid, it was easier to capture end-user performance metrics for SaaS services using synthetic sensors when employees were working at the office. But after Covid struck, circumstances changed. Employees are now working in a different home setting (LAN, WAN, VPN) where one expects varying degrees of internet connection, Wi-Fi, application, and network monitoring issues. Earlier, IT would receive tickets in ServiceNow where fixing one ticket would immediately remediate technical issues across the entire organization.

However, in present times, IT teams are getting inundated with tickets that represent individual home settings and a challenging troubleshooting process. There is no visibility into end-user experience metrics and additional time is being spent trying to resolve issues. When more tickets get created in ITSM, it becomes burdensome for any team to manage and successfully close them.

No one knows where the fault really lies, and war rooms escalate. RUM makes it possible to collect applications and network monitoring performance data from the browser and individual machines. IT can employ the crowdsourcing model along with Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solutions to quickly determine if it is an end-user or corporate-wide issue.

Putting Customers First

Gone are the days when companies built a product, but its information on a website, and assumed customers would buy from them. This product-centric model has now shifted to becoming a customer-oriented model. Engineers, UI experts, and customer success teams now work backward to understand all the hops in the buying journey that would make a customer happy.

As part of this journey are changing variables that can impact the end-user experience of the website such as slow page load and server response time, high latency, traffic bottlenecks, product cart page timeout, DNS delays, etc.

By combining synthetics and real user data, IT can monitor in real-time how well the newly developed SaaS applications are performing and execute root cause analysis faster. This SaaS visibility can help designers and developers build pages that can streamline the end-user experience.

At a macro level, collecting application and network monitoring usage metrics of the website user experience from a wider audience can determine the success and future of the newly released SaaS product.

Microsoft Teams Productivity

Remote work is here to stay, and regular citizens continue to adapt to working from home. Consequently, millennials are moving out to the suburbs in search of a better cost of living. Application usage of productivity tools such as Microsoft Teams, Office 365, Salesforce, Zoom, etc. continues to rise.

If employees continue to receive poor experience on these applications, productivity suffers, and business gets impacted. RUM can provide critical insights on end-user response time for mission-critical applications like Teams and help IT remediate performance issues.

Crowdsourcing data can reveal if the issue is local or across the board. The less time IT spends on investigating and resolving tickets, the faster can employees and customers be happy.

Companies meet their SLA and employees become proactive and productive.

SaaS Application and Network Transparency

Just because Office 365 is up and running, does not necessarily mean that it is performing optimally. Enterprise applications of today run from the cloud in a microservices architecture abstracting complexity between the frontend, middleware, and backend. Instrumentation of these applications via legacy tools for collecting cloud performance metrics is not possible.

End-users utilize applications in several different ways for respective workflow and functionality needs.

Moreover, certain users prefer running their applications on specific browsers and devices. Application performance monitoring (APM) use cases have become different and personalized and therefore, monitoring needs to incorporate all scenarios.

With different combinations and the path to success involved, IT needs RUM to understand Office 365 application transactions that touch different endpoints (modules, systems, and devices) and the underlying Azure infrastructure that supports the application.

Integrate Exoprise Solutions to Maximize Your Systems Management Investments

Take back control, get back visibility

Read this short whitepaper to understand how you can maximize your existing IT investments in this day of cloud-based services by integrating Exoprise solutions with your existing workflows.

Download the Whitepaper

Move to Mobile

Statista projects that the number of mobile users worldwide will reach 7.41 billion up from 6.95 billion in 2020.

Mobiles have already penetrated our daily life as PC sales decline. Within our professional lives too, mobiles have found their place to conduct business transactions via apps. Exchange online, outlook, Office 365, and Salesforce are some of the examples.

Mobile app synthetic monitoring exists today. However, continually assessing the impact of BYOD on digital strategy via RUM and how mobile users can gain the same experience as PC users become critical as mobile adoption increases.

Automated 360-degree View into Digital Experience

RUM can detect and monitor the end-user SaaS experience whether working from HQ behind a firewall or connected directly to the cloud from home.

Understanding page views and load performance, browser usage, etc. for mission-critical business applications across all the locations is key for evaluating the normalcy of the new work setup we all are living in today. Gaining automated insights with a 360-degree view for passive monitoring is a reliable strategy to accurately detect issues and fix them quickly.

Slow is The New Down

Uptime is an important metric that SaaS companies originally relied on. But today, downtime is equally significant considering that IT is responsible for 24/7 performance and reliability. If your Microsoft Teams application is slow or degrading in performance before that next important call, it can result in loss of business deals and poor experience to clients.

Additionally, a new DevOps cloud migration change introduced in the production environment can introduce new bottlenecks and impact the customer buying decision.

Nevertheless, IT should be able to proactively manage downtime if only they can measure downtime. End-user application monitoring becomes critical to the company’s success and needs to be integrated into IT strategy.

Free Real User Monitoring Tool for End-User Digital Experience

Exoprise Service Watch Desktop introduced in September of this year provides the best real user monitoring for SaaS and cloud apps.

Combined with synthetic user monitoring, RUM extends into the end-user digital experience by monitoring browsers, devices, endpoints, and collecting advanced telemetry machine performance data. Associate your digital brand with agility, speed, and not slowness. See why RUM and Synthetic monitoring matter from the video below

Monitor real-user behavior and assess areas to optimize with Service Watch Desktop. Detect, identify, and troubleshoot application and network performance issues in real-time with a modern monitoring tool.  

Gartner recently recognized the Exoprise Application Performance Monitoring tool as a leading solution for monitoring Office 365, managing SaaS end-user experience, and pinpointing performance monitoring issues.

Learn more about Exoprise end-user experience monitoring solution and get a free 15-day trial.

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This blog was originally published at The Crowd-Powered Blog on Nov 5, 2021.

[manrastechnology]

Top Advantages of Salesforce For Commercial Real Estate

Firstly, it is necessary to understand why salesforce for commercial real estate is required. So the answer to this question can be the trouble that every real estate agent goes through because most of their time goes into data entry, building trust, updating, and managing excel sheets. But if salesforce gets into the picture then all these tasks can be handled very easily and a lot of time can be saved. In this blog, we are going to discuss how salesforce can benefit commercial real estate. So here you go.

Benefits of Salesforce for Commercial Real Estate

Common Database-

With the help of salesforce, it is possible to get a 360-degree view of the database, which is common for clients and employees. This helps to keep updated on each change made to data instantly. This view is provided on both micro and macro levels. Also, if you hire salesforce partner companies for the salesforce implementation, then you can trace customer behavior and feedback about the property so that strategies for selling can be improved.

Key Process Automation-

Salesforce can automate the processes of an organization like sales, marketing, back office, and many more. These key processes take up so much time and study of the market to get executed. For example, salesforce can help in understanding market situations and trends so that marketing strategies can be improved accordingly.

Security-

Salesforce introduces different security levels in organizations for data security. These organizations can manage their data well so that any confidential information does not get disclosed. Real estate agents need to communicate and share many documents with clients, so these documents get delivered safely this is why access is also available like edit, read, and open.

Lead conversions-

Salesforce for commercial real estate make sure that a real estate organization does not miss out on any important leads and gets involved with non-worthy leads. This is why it predicts and provides proper analysis of leads so that you can work on those clients that can provide good business to the organization. Also, salesforce forecasts the sales so that strategies for selling the property can be better than before and also can be customized according to a particular client.

Feature Configuration-

Different real estate organizations have different needs from the salesforce. So, every product of salesforce doesn't need to be useful for every organization. This is why customized packages are available for companies so that you only pay for those services which are useful for your organization.

Bottom Line

The moral of the story is that salesforce is a very beneficial technology for real estate organizations. Manras Technologies can be your perfect partner in implementing salesforce in your organizations. It is one of the leading Salesforce partner companies that work in many sectors like IT, insurance manufacturing, fintech, and many more. It ensures the best customer support and easy implementation so that you can focus on business development with expertise in the market. For more information, please check out www.manras.com today.

[ralphlayton]

Inside B2B Influence: Brian Solis of Salesforce on the Future of Influence in B2B Marketing

If this is your first time, Inside B2B Influence is a podcast series that goes behind the scenes of B2B marketing and highlights insights with top business executives on influencer marketing for B2B companies. At TopRank Marketing we're doing our best to connect readers and listeners with B2B marketing insiders on strategies, trends, tactics and the future to elevate the practice of growing influence within and outside of B2B brands. In Episode 17 of Inside B2B Influence we have a returning guest who needs little introduction given his accomplishments and yet, we'd all be missing out if I did not mention that Brian Solis is Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, an 8X best selling author, global keynote speaker, digital pioneer and has been a good friend for over 10 years. [caption id="attachment_30272" align="alignnone" width="500"] Lee, Valerie, Brian - 2008 (Photo: Brian Solis)[/caption] As someone who has been at the forefront of studying, innovating and practicing influence in the B2B business and technology world, I reached out to Brian for his thoughts on what the future holds for influence at B2B organizations inside and out, what to look for with business influencers and thoughts on how to scale influence. Highlights of episode 17 include:

Advantages influencer marketing creates for B2B brands in 2022

The most important qualities B2B brands should look for in influencers

The importance for B2B brands to grow influence from within

The next evolution of influence for B2B companies

What B2B companies should consider in order to scale influence

Take a listen to The Future of Influence in B2B Marketing with Brian Solis:

Transcript – Inside B2B Influence Episode 17: The Future of Influence for B2B Marketing

In the first ever research report on B2B influencer marketing, you shared that "in a time of darkness, chaos or confusion, B2B brands have an opportunity to be the light for their customers." As we finish off 2021 and head into another year of the pandemic, what kind of advantage does influencer marketing bring for B2B brands?

I think (B2B influencer marketing) is more important than it's ever been. @briansolis

Brian: I think it's more important than it's ever been and kudos to you for launching that first report. I understand that it was incredibly successful, so thanks for letting me be part of that. I'll try to connect the dots this way for those who are listening. At Salesforce, our mission is to help businesses, not just transform, but to be relevant and to thrive in what's going to be what I call, a novel economy. It's the word novel, like in novel coronavirus means new and unusual, and that means that we're heading into new years, a new genre of business without a playbook. When we take that stance, that means that we have to have a very solid position on how we're going to help you. What does business look like on the other side? What does every function look like on the other side? Marketing, sales and service? How do they all come together to essentially create the enterprise of the future right now? And so that's going to take a lot of work, a lot of thought leadership, a lot of content, a lot of video, a lot of articles, a lot of social media to reach those looking for insights - to connect the dots between valuable information and actions to those who need them.

We have all become marketers now. @briansolis

In that regard, you can't just have the ideas. You can't just have the solutions. You also have to have the ability to connect the dots between those ideas and people who need them. So, in a sense, we have all become marketers now. And I think that's a good thing. I think marketing itself becomes a much more value added, it rises in the ranks of helping to serve, I guess, is the best way to put it, Not just to market or promote or to gain eyeballs, but to serve people. I think it's like a call to arms or this enlightenment that gives us a greater sense of purpose, a more noble sense of purpose. So with that said, I have a lot to read, a lot to learn and relearn in these times because there's certainly a lot of really smart people out there. I'm just hoping to continue to, not just think about ways to help companies, but to also think about ways to reach people their way. And that has me "control alt deleting" a lot of assumptions, that's for sure. B2B marketers have learned many lessons from our B2C counterparts including what makes an influencer. B2B influencers are more than experts with industry credentials. They are increasingly creators as well. What are the qualities most important in an influencer that brands should look for? Brian: Oh, man, let's start with the question of what makes an influencer. You know, I think back to some of the conversations, how many years have we been having these really these awesome conversations? I really appreciate how long we've known each other. We've done a lot of really cool things together. I think this is a time where it's almost as exciting as when we first met. You remember? Social media was just coming together. It was just chaos. It was the wild west. And I think this is that time. I don't know that people are going to pick up that it's that time, but it really is. I want to call it out for this reason. What is an influencer? Because coming into 2022 I think we could all have these visions of some beautiful human being on a beach in Thailand. Somebody walking and seeing their back with their hand extended holding their hand. You know, that's what I think a lot of traditional marketers think about in terms of influencer marketing. I'm not going to knock it. It has been, for B2C, some of the most innovative, creative stuff that I've seen in a long time. There's nothing to say though, that when it comes to B2B that you can't be human being either. I think that's really where we should start thinking about this.

Every single day I get emails, "We need you to be part of this." Very rarely does someone take the time to read my work and then reach out and talk about ways that we might be able to collaborate. @briansolis

I too, have been the recipient of these types of requests. Every single day I get emails, "we need you to be part of this. We want to give you some content to publish. Can you make a video? Can you do this?" And it's simply because of the number of people who follow my work. Very rarely does someone take the time to read my work and then reach out and talk about ways that we might be able to collaborate, because there was some idea that they felt could help them connect the dots of markets they're trying to cultivate. That's where it starts: who are you trying to reach and why? And then building bridges between those people who have earned the trust of those that you're trying to reach, whether it's a macro influencer, certainly in the B2B world, there are people with a lot of followers, more followers than I'll probably ever have. And at the same time they have reached the micro influence that is so critical right now. The people that you trust because they will tell you something specific that you need to do and you believe that their insights are going to help you succeed in how you're measured for success. I'm a big believer in experimenting. So I'll experiment with the wide swaths and the big audiences. But I also want to experiment with direct outcomes. If we can together, do some work that helps people make better decisions or move markets or launch products that help other companies, then that's what I'm talking about. For example, I remember some of my greatest work in the past, aside from what I'm doing right now. So I don't know that I've ever had so much fun while having such an impact, was back in the day with Google when we launched, we introduced the concept of micro-moments. Micro-moments was our way of helping marketers understand that a mobile first customer does not go through the web journey like a traditional customer sitting in front of a big screen or a laptop journey. You have to think about TikToK or Snapchat versus amazon.com, right, in terms of how you go through that. The work that we did cast a wide net because Google is very good at that. My responsibility was the micro stuff. Can we beat the drum of micro influence by talking about micro-moments in every single aspect of how a customer goes through the journey and what they're missing and what they need from marketers, from digital marketers, from web marketers to create that ideal journey.

If I didn't have that audience, I would go build that audience. @briansolis

So, we talked about micro-moments, we talked about mobile first things. We talked about stats, we ran all kinds of research. We did micro-moments for travel, micro-moments for insurance and micro-moments for auto sales. I was a mad man during that first year to 18 months, every single day developing new content, putting it in the places that were going to reach those people. If I didn't have that audience, I would go build that audience. That was my life for a year and a half. And I think the result of that is that everybody knows about micro moments and it's still important after all of these years today. But that was the hard work, dedicated work of cultivating those communities, not just relying on somebody because they had the numbers. I think that in this post pandemic economy that's going to start taking shape, as soon as we can get people vaccinated, that the new world, that next normal needs more work like that. Not just intention to promote stuff, but to build stuff, to help those who are looking for insights, understand that we can build that playbook together.

What is your problem? How has the world changed and how can I help you? Go create (content) around that. @briansolis

I think there's a lot of people asking questions. There's a lot of people looking for help. For those influencers who are going to take the time to think about it, not just promote or say something, or try to get a lot of views or clicks or what have you. But to think about like honestly think about, what is your problem? How has the world changed and how can I help you? And then go create around that. That's the answer to your question. That's what makes an influencer and it's not even an influencer at that point. That's a business partner who's helping you and helping others solve problems and create opportunities. One of the significant trends we've seen with many enterprise B2B brands is growth of investment in building influence from within. This comes in the form of employee advocacy programs as well as building thought leadership and influence for key executives by collaborating on content with industry experts. How important is it for B2B brands to grow influence from within? Brian: Such a great question. I joined this company because I wanted to be part of this culture. The Ohana, it is a very special culture, They, we, I should say, believe in that employee advocacy and empowerment. Because the frontline for us are those individuals who are having to help our customers solve some pretty big problems and transform overnight like most companies that got hit in March, 2020 with remote work and e-commerce, and chat bots and automation, and all of the things that had accelerated roadmaps, digital transformation roadmaps by 10 years. So Mark Benioff, at our big corporate kickoff get together, he talked about how we all need to as individuals, as employees of the organization, not just sell technology, which is a really big thing for a CEO of a hyper-growth company to say. He was basically saying, he wants all of us to think about the outcomes that our customers are trying to solve for and the things that they don't know, that they need to solve for and go be that go be that person, go be that resource so that they can trust you beyond just being a sales person or a service person.

Employee advocacy is the belief in your people that they can provide solutions and help. @briansolis

That's a big call to all of us, right? Not just me and my colleagues who do this every single day, but for everybody. That's employee advocacy. It's the belief in your people that they can provide solutions and help, not just the things that are going to hit the bottom line. To build relationships, as my colleague Henry King, and I have written about it in a serious this last year, we talk about relationship transformation. What do you want the employee to do, or employees do in aggregate and as individuals? Well, essentially it's to build relationships. You know this better than anybody. You build relationships by adding value and consistently adding value.

Business outcomes are natural byproducts of investing in relationships. @briansolis

To do that, it means you have to understand what value looks like. Value is in the eye of the beholder. Then you train, you empower, you re-skill or skill to help people get there. And then you measure that because we're all in the relationship business. You measure the relationships that you want to see come to life. Then business outcomes are natural byproducts of investing in those relationships. So then it's not just a conversation. How can we empower employees to create, to share, to answer questions that maybe haven't been asked and to answer those questions en masse so that a lot of people find those answers. Essentially you build an infrastructure that can help create that type of advocacy. I think that's a pretty big deal, going beyond all of the apps to see, hey, what is it like to work there? You really start to invest in the culture where part of that culture is, you have smart people who are sharing smart things. I think that's part leadership, but also you need a program that isn't just about ghost writing for executives. It's really about giving a voice to the executive who actually believes in those things and scaling them. Thank you Brian! You can find Brian on Twitter, LinkedIn, his website and you can watch Brian along with his co-host John Kao and special guests on their Intersections show every Thursday morning at 10:30am PT. Be sure to stay tuned to TopRank Marketing’s B2B Marketing Blog for our next episode of Inside B2B Influence where we’ll be answering the B2B marketing industry’s most pressing questions about the role of influence in business to business marketing.

Have you taken the 2021 B2B Influencer Marketing Survey?

Help elevate the practice of influence in B2B marketing by sharing your experience and opinions about B2B marketing and working with influencers in our latest research project. The survey takes just 10 minutes and you'll not only get an advanced copy of our research report featuring insights from Brian Solis and an incredible mix of B2B industry experts, but we're also giving away some sweet incentives. Take the survey today though, because we'll be closing it down soon.

The post Inside B2B Influence: Brian Solis of Salesforce on the Future of Influence in B2B Marketing appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Inside B2B Influence: Brian Solis of Salesforce on the Future of Influence in B2B Marketing published first on yhttps://improfitninja.blogspot.com/

[vbeyonddigital]

Business Process Automation Trends in 2021

Business process automation has made enterprises more resilient and empowered employees during remote work. In 2021, then, we can expect to see BPA technologies and automation strategies evolve as enterprises target long-term digital transformations.

The importance and urgency of business process automation (BPA) has grown substantially over the past year. As organizations were forced to give up in-office operations and on-premise systems and shift to remote work due to the pandemic, the question of productivity and business continuity was a daunting one.

On one hand, those organizations that had already begun digital transformation were scaling up their deployments to go fully digital. On the other, organizations began to deploy BPA and intelligent process automation along with remote collaboration tools. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for digitization and future-ready automation has risen as businesses look to simplify processes and build resilient, adaptable systems. This indicates that certain business process automation trends will mature in 2021 as companies ramp up digital transformation.

Business process automation trends in 2021

Organizations across industries — from financial services to retail, manufacturing to healthcare — are steadily implementing new tools and technologies to adapt to new virtual models of conducting business and reaching customers. In 2021, the pursuit of delivering better customer experiences will be driven not only by new digital processes but also by frequent innovation.

The proliferation of cloud services, data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT) will provide organizations the means to become more competitive in crowded markets. We can, therefore, expect to see some of the following themes in terms of automation trends for 2021, as also suggested by Gartner:

An overall increase in data and new sources of data will drive the adoption of new computational and storage technologies such as the cloud.

The speed of automation adoption is increasing as more companies build fully automated value chains.

CIOs and other technology leadership positions are increasingly focusing on customer experience and simplifying operational processes.

1. Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation refers to the approach wherein any process in an organization that can be automated should be automated. The need and demand for hyperautomation are expected to be driven by organizations wanting to move away from non-streamlined legacy business processes that lead to costly and persistent issues for operational efficiency. The goal, therefore, will be to eliminate all time-consuming, repeated, and low-value tasks, and automating them at a granular level to free up time and resources such as costs and employee productivity.

2. AI engineering

Artificial Intelligence has come to play a significant role in BPA technologies and organizations continue to invest in building AI models for both internal as well as external, customer-facing functions such as sales, supply chain management, finance, etc. However, businesses will also need to create an effective AI engineering strategy to ensure scalability and sustained performance from their systems. More importantly, this will also ensure that organizations are able to derive the full value out of their AI, automation, and digital investments.

3. Digital “anywhere” workforce

As the ongoing pandemic has spurred remote work by a geographically distributed workforce, we are witnessing several companies make a permanent transition towards more futuristic, digital business models. With remote here to stay for the foreseeable future, another major trend we can expect to see is companies investing towards intelligent process automation and robotic process automation to enable remote collaboration and productivity for their employees.

4. Distributed cloud

Cloud is going to be one of the biggest drivers of remote work as it companies will look to decentralize access to business systems and resources for a distributed workforce while keeping data and operations tied to a single, central source. The distributed cloud model will, therefore, help organizations leverage cloud services distributed across various physical locations, while a public cloud oversees the operation, governance, and development of the connected clouds.

5. AI and robotics in customer service

Artificial intelligence and robotics have important brand management tools, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic when both B2B and B2C businesses have had to contend with fewer people to interact with customers on the ground. Even before the pandemic, a large number of marketers often struggled, on a daily basis, to correctly understand their consumer’s perception of their brand and how best to target and engage them. With artificial intelligence and intelligent automation, understanding customers and their needs can become much simpler. AI and robotics deployed in customer-facing activities can be used to automate sales, marketing, and customer service activities, thus empowering human employees to create value for their customers through data-driven insights.

Business Process Automation Benefits

As organizations look to deploy process automation in 2021 and beyond, they must also focus on creating robust BPA and RPA strategies and roadmaps. Business can extract the full value of their deployments when they focus on larger business goals rather than simply checking a box. Here are a few such benefits of business process automation:

Cost-efficient: Automation helps in reducing costs previously incurred in repeated processes involving human resources. by replacing manual work, which is significantly costlier, with automated work, organizations can increase process efficiency and ultimately, customer satisfaction.

Time-efficient: Automation saves time by reducing workload while ensuring by design that processes and workflows are structured such that they deliver the intended results with minimal to no intervention.

Reduced errors: Errors are reduced through automation and users of automated systems also gain visibility to processes in real-time to identify and rectify errors, if any.

Employee productivity: Automation reduces human efforts to such an extent that employees can spend much more time on tasks that help drive high-level business results. This way, they can also focus on creative problem-solving and providing better customer experiences or conducting research and development to improve products.

Collaboration becomes easier: Automation and collaboration tools running on operating systems help employees connect faster and more efficiently on an individual level as well as on a team/department level. Real-time collaboration and visualization tools enable all team members and managers to gain a macro view of operations – from the beginning of projects, to monitoring, discussing, and evaluating processes across each stage.

Business process automation: The foundation for next-gen digital enterprises

Technologies such as automation, analytics, data sciences, among others are proliferating at such a rate that businesses can no longer defer them for the future if they want to remain competitive in the present. What makes business process automation especially lucrative for organizations, particularly for medium and small businesses, is that it does not a huge capital investment and can be deployed through minimal coding.

Here’s where VBeyond Digital comes in, with a team having cumulative experience of over eight decades and a wide spectrum of domain expertise such as Microsoft Technologies, Salesforce, SAP, BPA, RPA, Machine Learning, and Analytics. From developing the right strategy, implementing technologies, to dedicated support and maintenance, we serve as an end-to-end partner for your BPA needs.

This content was originally published on VBeyond Digital.

[freesuitwhispers]

Global  Hotel CRM Software Market Audience, Geographies and Key Players 2020-2025

Summary – A new market study, “Global Hotel CRM Software Market Report 2020 by Key Players, Types, Applications, Countries, Market Size, Forecast to 2026 (Based on 2020 COVID-19 Worldwide Spread)”has been featured on WiseGuyReports.

The Hotel CRM Software market is expected to grow from USD X.X million in 2020 to USD X.X million by 2026, at a CAGR of X.X% during the forecast period. The global Hotel CRM Software market report is a comprehensive research that focuses on the overall consumption structure, development trends, sales models and sales of top countries in the global Hotel CRM Software market. The report focuses on well-known providers in the global Hotel CRM Software industry, market segments, competition, and the macro environment.

Also Read: https://www.openpr.com/news/2123533/global-hotel-crm-software-2020-global-market-key-players

Under COVID-19 Outbreak, how the Hotel CRM Software Industry will develop is also analyzed in detail in Chapter 1.7 of the report.

In Chapter 2.4, we analyzed industry trends in the context of COVID-19.

In Chapter 3.5, we analyzed the impact of COVID-19 on the product industry chain based on the upstream and downstream markets.

In Chapters 6 to 10 of the report, we analyze the impact of COVID-19 on various regions and major countries.

In chapter 13.5, the impact of COVID-19 on the future development of the industry is pointed out.

 A holistic study of the market is made by considering a variety of factors, from demographics conditions and business cycles in a particular country to market-specific microeconomic impacts. The study found the shift in market paradigms in terms of regional competitive advantage and the competitive landscape of major players.

 Key players in the global Hotel CRM Software market covered in Chapter 4:

Guestware

Revinate

Salesforce

Cendyn

Freshsales CRM Software

NetSuite

HubSpot

Amara

Zendesk

 In Chapter 11 and 13.3, on the basis of types, the Hotel CRM Software market from 2015 to 2026 is primarily split into:

Cloud based

On premise

 In Chapter 12 and 13.4, on the basis of applications, the Hotel CRM Software market from 2015 to 2026 covers:

Large Enterprise

SMB

 Geographically, the detailed analysis of consumption, revenue, market share and growth rate, historic and forecast (2015-2026) of the following regions are covered in Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13:

North America (Covered in Chapter 6 and 13)

United States

Canada

Mexico

Europe (Covered in Chapter 7 and 13)

Germany

UK

France

Italy

Spain

Russia

Others

Asia-Pacific (Covered in Chapter 8 and 13)

China

Japan

South Korea

Australia

India

Southeast Asia

Others

Middle East and Africa (Covered in Chapter 9 and 13)

Saudi Arabia

UAE

Egypt

Nigeria

South Africa

Others

South America (Covered in Chapter 10 and 13)

Brazil

Argentina

Columbia

Chile

Others

 Years considered for this report:

Historical Years: 2015-2019

Base Year: 2019

Estimated Year: 2020

Forecast Period: 2020-2026

FOR MORE DETAILS :  https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/5541897-global-hotel-crm-software-market-report-2020-by

About Us:

Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe.                

 Contact Us:

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sales@wiseguyreports.com       

Ph: +162-825-80070 (US)                          

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[joeyrob1]

Customer Acquisition & Retention with Help Desk Support SaaS

Customer Acquisition & Retention with Help Desk Support SaaS

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Cloud computing came into existence operationally in 2000 even before the dawn of mobile apps. It matured and gained traction five years ago which enabled a new wave of technology consumption trend to emerge. One of them would be to view software as a service (SaaS) instead of as a product. The advantage is obvious here. You can save on significant upfront software investment cost. In addition, you would can deploy and scale your help desk solution much faster. There is also the advantage where businesses don’t have to buy and maintain their own hardware for help desk. All they need is a reliable connection to the Internet.

All you need to do is to pay affordable monthly subscription fees to the software vendor and the vendor will be responsible for continuous upgrading of the hardware and software. The vendor would benefit from a steady stream of subscription income instead of lumpy revenue when software is sold as a product (e.g. High revenue during initial product launches and lower revenue later). This trend is applicable not only to personal but also business consumption.

SaaS in Cloud Computing

Given this win-win condition, it is not surprising that SaaS had caught fire. According to market research firm Gartner, worldwide spending on enterprise application software would grow approximately 7.5 percent annually from $150 billion in 2015 to $201 billion in 2019. SaaS would account for 50% of this enterprise software spending.

The emergence of the cloud had allowed various computing solution to be hosted there. We would use a slightly dated chart from Gartner’s 2013 studies to keep things in perspective for SaaS in cloud computing.

Source: EnterpriseIrregulars

While SaaS is a sizable market by itself, it is only small piece of the technology pie in the cloud computing application. Today we are going to focus on one particular segment of SaaS and that would be help desk management.

Importance Of Help Desk Support

Source: Statista

As the above Statista chart shows, help desk management had grown steadily from $13.5 billion in 2005 to $19.9 billion in 2015. The only time that it dropped was in 2009 during the Global Financial Crisis. This chart also underscores the importance of help desk Support for enterprises.

An organized and scalable help desk software is vital for any successful organization. It would be the single point of contact for customers who would like to enquire about their products and services. The help desk function would also organize the various channels for customers to approach businesses to solve their various problems.

Help desk defines the customer experience when they come into contact with businesses. A good customer experience would allow businesses to acquire and retain customers which would spread their reputation. After all, free word of mouth recommendation has greater marketing power for businesses than other forms of advertisement. Hence in order to satisfy their customers, enterprises continued to invest in help desk software. Despite the difficult financial conditions, business spending on help desk recovered in 2011 as it is essential to their continued survival.

Background of Solutions Providers – Freshdesk and Zendesk

While the concept of satisfying your customers is simple, it is hard to implement in practice.You would need a comprehensive system to ensure nothing fall through the cracks.

Freshdesk and Zendesk are arch rivals and among the best in this competitive field of help desk support. Zendesk is the incumbent dominant force until Freshdesk came along in 2012 to steal its lunch. Ever since, Zendesk responded by cutting its price and offering better products to prevent losing customers to Freshdesk.

Zendesk was started in San Francisco in 2007 and Freshdesk came about in Chennai (India) in 2010 after its founder won the Microsoft initiative Bizsparks. Bizsparks is a talent show for startups to display their business talents and win rewards to finance their business. While both of them started to target the small and medium businesses, they were so good that they encroached on SalesForce target clients of big businesses.

Source: BuildWith

While Freshdesk started in India, it acquired most of its customers in the United States. In terms of customers, Zendesk announced that it has acquired 60,000 clients on August 2015 while Freshdesk has announced that it has 50,000 clients also on August 2015.

Help Desk Features

Any respectable help desk software must have the following features:

Ticket Management

Knowledge Base

Notice Board / Updates

Community forums

Analytics and Reporting

Ticket management is the backbone of any help desk system. This is the central database where all clients contact with the company is being recorded and processed. They can approach the company through email, social media (e.g. Facebook), voice and online chat. The advantage of ticket management is that you can track the start and resolution of a problem and assign it to the best suited person to manage.

A smart ticket management system will also answer commonly asked question with a pre-defined answer (called macro) and anti collision rules to prevent 2 agents from working on the same case at the same time.

It would also merged repeated questions from the same client who asked from different channels (e.g. Email and Chat). Therefore you can provide a coherent answer and the customer service agents can put in Notes for future reference. All emails to your help desk will automatically be ticketed.

Both Freshdesk and Zendesk do their core ticket management well but Freshdesk has an advantage here as it gamify its help desk to encourage your staff to work for their badges.

Source: Freshdesk

Knowledge base is the depository where you answer frequently asked questions. This is useful when your clients want to find help outside of your normal operating hours. They can find useful answers which can be in the form of text, pictures, webinars and videos. Other users are likely to have encountered these problems before and they can help themselves.

This is especially useful when you aim to scale your businesses and also for your own employees to reference solutions like a dictionary. Considering that employees change job frequently, this is also a good way to manage your enterprise knowledge.

Notice boards is self explanatory so I wouldn’t go in depth. Community forums are a place for your customers to discuss their issues. You can then moderate it and also proactively solve their problems. It is better for businesses to create an internal forum for their clients than for their clients to cross over to external forums to vent their anger. On the good side, they can also expressed their appreciation of your service.

Analytics and reporting allow you to see how well your employees are performing compared to industry standards. They also allow you to see where your product weakness where you receive more client’s complain. The age of tracking your analytics through Microsoft Excel had long been gone.

Source: Zendesk

Pricing

Before either platforms charge their clients, they offer 30 days free trial period. After the 30 days trial period, only Freshdesk has a free version in its tiered product offering. Both competitors offer cheaper pricing if you were to sign on for 1 year.

Freshdesk Zendesk Sprout – $0 per agent/month (first 3 agents free) 4th Agent – $15/agent/month Essential – $5 per agent/month (annual billing; $9 for monthly billing) Blossom – $16 per agent/month (annual billing; $19 for monthly billing) Team – $19 per agent/month (annual billing; $25 for monthly billing) Garden – $25 per agent/month  (annual billing; $29 for monthly billing) Professional – $49 per agent/month (annual billing; $59 for monthly billing) Estate – $40 per agent/month (annual billing; $49 for monthly billing) Forest – $70 per agent/month (annual billing; $79 for monthly billing) Enterprise – $99 per agent/month (annual billing; $125 for monthly billing)

As you can see from the table above, Freshdesk consistently undercuts Zendesk in terms of pricing as it has a 30% lower base due to its Indian programming hub. For example, Freshdesk’s Estate is comparable to Zendesk Professional. What Zendesk charges for a annual payment of $49 per month ($49 X 12 = $588 upfront payment), Freshdesk allows you to pay it monthly.

The no-refund policy dictates this pricing. So if you were to pay for 1 year and use up 3 months, you forfeit the rest of the 9 months. It is less costly if you were to pay for it monthly in terms of forfeit.

Besides the standard features which I mentioned above, there are other items in help desk such as integration with other software such as website analytics, time management for billable hours (e.g. Lawyers) , asset management (inventory tracking) and so on.

Conclusion

Zendesk used to dominate the field until Freshdesk came around to offer comparable services for a lower price. While there are other service providers, these 2 provide a strong suite of help desk functions that will keep your customers happy.

The case for adoption has always been simple. It saves you time and money over the long term where you need less agents to deal with the same workload of customer complaints. If you don’t do it, your competitors will and you will lose out both in terms of pricing and customer retention.

This article is contributed by Ong Kai Kiat. He is a professional freelance writer who enjoys the process of discovering and collating new trends and insights for an article. He adds value to society through his articles especially those related to finance and technology. He is reachable at ongkaikiat86@gmail.com.

Brought to you by the RobustTechHouse team (A top iOS and Android developer in Singapore).  If you like our articles, please also check out our Facebook page.

Customer Acquisition & Retention with Help Desk Support SaaS was originally published on RobustTechHouse - Mobile App Development Singapore

[calcbench]

A Look at Cost of Goods Sold

Calcbench occasionally likes to step away from coronavirus analysis, so today we’re going to revisit one of our favorite macro-economic issues: cost of goods sold by Corporate America.

Why? Because we’ve always kept one eye on the U.S.-China trade war, and how tariffs on various goods and materials coming into the United States have pushed up costs for companies selling finished products. For example, back in 2018 we found that cost of goods sold (COGS) was rising faster than revenue — a condition that inevitably pinches operating profit.

So what’s been the larger trend of COGS among the S&P 500? We investigated.

In Figure 1, below, you see the increase in cost of goods sold for 388 firms in the S&P 500 from 2015 through 2019. These were firms that reported COGS in all five years. Collectively their costs rose 15.72 percent, from $5.31 trillion in 2015 to $6.3 trillion in 2019. Note the pronounced acceleration in COGS that began in 2017, coinciding with the arrival of the Trump Administration and its more aggressive use of tariffs.

OK, but that’s the collective direction; and some of that trend might be driven by outlier firms whose COGS changed drastically because of mergers, divestitures, or other factors.

So we also examined the median change in COGS among our 388 firms. Well, that number actually rose even more: 19.2 percent, from $4.37 billion in 2015 to $5.4 billion last year. See Figure 2, below.

Again, you can see a pronounced increase that coincides with the Trump Administration’s arrival in 2017. Of course that increase isn’t entirely due to tariffs. The economy was humming along quite nicely in the late 2010s and demand for goods was rising around the world; so at least some of the COGS increase just came from generally higher demand for components and raw materials. But plenty of firms also said in recent years that tariffs did increase their costs, so it’s a factor to at least some extent.

Specific Examples

At the firm-by-firm level, we also discovered some interesting nuggets.

For example, motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson ($HOG) actually saw its COGS decline 2.3 percent over the last five years — but that’s only because sales declined even faster (down 10.5 percent) over the same period. So the company was buying fewer raw materials, but those materials were more expensive thanks to tariffs.

Contrast that example to Caterpillar ($CAT), which saw its COGS rise by 8.4 percent. Revenue, however, grew by 14.4 percent, giving Caterpillar at least some breathing room to protect operating profit even amid higher materials costs.

Even tech firms were paying more for the services they sell. For example, Google ($GOOG) saw its COGS jump by 60.8 percent. Then again, Google’s revenue also more than doubled, from $75 billion in 2015 to $161.9 billion last year.

And right above Google was Salesforce ($CRM), whose cost of goods sold jumped 60.9 percent — but Salesforce’s revenue nearly tripled, from $6.6 billion to $17.1 billion. So the tech giants aren’t sweating COGS too much.

You can conduct your own research on COGS via the Company-in-Detail or Multi-Company database pages, to give you a sense of the raw numbers reported. Then hop over to the Interactive Disclosures page for whichever firms have caught your eye, and you can find out exactly why those costs were rising or falling by looking into the footnotes.

[140proof]

Getting the file you wish to test

To start with, established a brand-new npm project, as gone over in setting up node and npm in the last chapter. call it something different, like selenium-test. next, we need to install a framework to allow us to work with selenium from within node. we are going to choose selenium's official selenium-webdriver, as the documentation appears relatively up-to-date and it is properly maintained. if you desire various options, webdriver.io and nightwatch.js are likewise good options. to install selenium-webdriver, run the following command, making sure you are inside your project folder:

In the days before web applications, programmers composed applications for a specific platform and utilized that platform's native development environment and interface controls. prior to the application's last release, a tester would check that the application was all set. some testers composed sophisticated files that explained complex scenarios they performed on the software manually. other, more adventurous testers utilized elegant tools that were the quality control version of microsoft's word and excel macro recorders. a tester would record a series of actions on the software under test. these steps were recorded in a high-level language in which the tester might edit the code and add test conditions that would validate that the real results of the test matched the anticipated results. each time a test was run, a report was created that showed which conditions had actually been passed or failed.

Serenity bdd is an open source reporting library that assists you write better structured, more maintainable automated acceptance criteria. serenity also produces abundant meaningful test reports (or "living documentation") that report not only the test results, but likewise which features have actually been tested. an in-depth tutorial on utilizing cucumber-jvm with serenity can be discovered here, and more information on serenity can be found on their main website.

A Simple Guide to Web Browser Automation

100% dependable browser automation tool throughout innovations simple-to-use selenium-based browser automation tool for all web applications no matter the underlying technology. never ever type a single line of code the leapwork automation platform lets both technical and non-technical experts design selenium-based browser automation flows from day one without ever typing or checking out a single line of code.

The chromium browser automation is a simple extension for your browser. it's a full-featured automation tool that assists you prevent repetitive activities. it can assist you automate simple activities like filling out forms while still being complex adequate to support scripting and injection. some of its significant functions: record: here you can record activities you are presently performing on your web browser. record in this sense does not mean a screen recording. it means that the extension stores all your interactions with the websites.

Websites and web applications

Whether youre a software developer or merely running several high-performing, application-rich websites, browser automation is promptly becoming one of the most demanded ways to check numerous site processes and codes. as web-based technology progresses and becomes more dynamic, the requirement for dynamic testing solutions grows. while there are many ways to test the functionality of your website and applications, browser automation offers a means of carrying out such tasks without the requirement for manual control. eventually, browser automation tools and techniques save web designers hours in time and labor costs.

Test design, execution, reporting and integration: ranorex studio is your all-in-one browser automation framework ranorex studio includes all of the tools for browser automation right out of the box, without the need to assemble your own framework. automate tests for every single kind of browser action with or without coding. ranorex studio supports a broad variety of web innovations and frameworks including html5, java and javascript websites, salesforce, sap, flash and flex applications, and a lot more. ranorex studio even supports hybrid desktop applications based upon the open-source chromium ingrained framework (cef). with ranorex studio, you can execute tests throughout browsers and devices, trigger tests from your ci server, get detailed test run reports, and pass test results to tools such as jira, bugzilla or testrail.

Browser Automation Using Selenium

Selenium is one of the most popular browser automation tools. it is not based on a specific programming language and supports java, python, c#, ruby, php, perl, etc. you can likewise write your implementation for the language if it isn't already supported. in this tutorial, we'll learn how to utilize the java bindings of selenium webdriver. we'll also explore the webdriver api.

With tools like selenium and record and replay, it's simpler than ever for groups to attain browser automation in order to shorten testing cycles and improve code protection. rather of manually testing across chrome, safari, firefox, and internet explorer, you can create one test and repeat it across multiple browsers in parallel.

Selenium is a powerful tool for managing web browser through program. it is functional for all browsers, deals with all major os and its scripts are written in different languages i.e python, java, c# etc, we will be dealing with python. mastering selenium will assist you automate your everyday tasks like managing your tweets, whatsapp texting and even simply googling without really opening a browser in just 15-30 lines of python code. the limitations of automation is endless with selenium.

In this tutorial you'll learn advanced python web automation techniques: utilizing selenium with a "headless" browser, exporting the scraped data to csv files, and wrapping your scraping code in a python class.

Browser Automation & Web Application Testing

Selenium is the family name when it comes to test automation. it is considered the industry standard for interface automation testing of web applications. nearly nine out of ten testers are utilizing or have ever utilized selenium in their projects, according to study on test automation difficulties. for developers and testers who have experience and skills in programming and scripting, selenium offers flexibility that is hidden in numerous other test automation tools and frameworks. users can write test scripts in several languages (such as java, groovy, python, c#, php, ruby, and perl) that operate on multiple system environments (windows, mac, linux) and browsers (chrome, firefox, ie, and headless browsers).

Geb is a browser automation solution. it unites the power of webdriver, the elegance of jquery content choice, the toughness of page object modelling and the expressiveness of the groovy language. it can be used for scripting, scraping and general automation-- or similarly as a functional/web/acceptance testing solution via integration with testing frameworks such as spock, junit & testng.

[margaretbeagle]

Social Media Attribution: How to Get Started

When someone makes a purchase or signs up for your product, how do you know where they came from?

Especially when it comes to a top-of-funnel channel like social media, how can you ensure social gets credit for the impact it’s having?

Attribution to the rescue!

Seeing the impact of your social media marketing is definitely possible with an attribution strategy that assigns value to the channels that send new business your way. We’ll show you how to start in a lean way and then go deep with robust solutions as you scale.

Attribution can be a tricky science, so we’re hoping to give you some clear and actionable tips to start measuring attribution today. Whether you’re looking at running some omnichannel campaigns or if you’re wanting to measure the impact of some quick experiments, we hope these tips will have you covered.

Did you know …

The average consumer comes in contact with a brand 6 times on average before they make a purchase. 

So how can you know which of those touchpoints deserves credit for the sale?

This is where attribution comes in. 

Attribution is very close to another key social media metric: ROI. You probably hear about ROI more often because, well, to be honest, attribution is even trickier to measure than ROI — if you can believe that.

So maybe we should begin with defining each term and the differences between them.

The difference between ROI and attribution

ROI stands for return on investment. It is a dollars-and-cents measure of how much you earn based on how much you spend. There are related terms here too like ROAS, which stands for Return on Ad Spend. In either case, these are measuring your earnings.

Attribution is subtly different. Rather than measuring how much you earn, attribution assigns value to the channels that drove an outcome, whether it’s revenue-related or not.

For instance, ROI would measure revenue whereas attribution measures a purchase or a web visit or a download. 

With attribution, you’re basically working backward from an event like a purchase or signup and figuring out what channel or channels get the credit for that event.

We’ll be focusing on attribution in this blog post, but it can get a bit muddled along with ROI. We’ll do our best to keep it all clear for you.

The three main types of marketing attribution

So attribution comes in a few different flavors. You have:

Last-touch attribution

First-touch attribution

Multi-touch attribution

This diagram from digitalthought.me does a good job of showing these different models side-by-side. The multi-touch models include Even, Time Decay, Weighted, Algorithmic, and even more.

Here are some other resources that help explain these concepts because they can get complicated, fast.

A Comprehensive Guide to Attribution

The Complete List of Marketing Attribution Models

What is Marketing Attribution?

Essentially, first-touch attribution gives full attribution credit to a person’s very first interaction with the brand, regardless of how many touchpoints occurred after the fact. If someone sees an ad on Monday and signs up after a Google search on Friday, then the Monday ad gets all the credit.

Last-touch attribution is the inverse. The very last touchpoint gets full credit. If you see an ad on Monday and sign up after a Google search on Friday, then Google gets full attribution.

We’ve found that last-touch attribution is the easiest to measure and is a great starting point if you’re just getting your feet wet with social media attribution. 

However, these single-touch measurements won’t show you the complete customer journey like multi-touch attribution can. The only problem: multli-touch attribution is hard! and it requires a series set of marketing data ops. 

For this reason, we won’t go too deep into multi-touch attribution — we’ll save the details for another episode — but just to give you a taste, here are a few of the models that you could consider with multi-touch:

Linear, which measures all the touchpoints and assigns equal value to every one

U-shaped, which gives 40 percent to the first touch and 40 percent to the last touch and then the remaining touchpoints share the final 20 percent

Time decay, which gives more weight to touchpoints closer to the final conversion event and less weight to those at the very beginning of the journey

We’ll share some quick ideas and tools for multi-touch toward the end of the blog post, but for now, let’s transition from models into the specific tactics for measuring some of this. 

We’ll start with a few of our favorite, scrappy ideas, some of which you might already be trying.

1. Track attribution with UTMs

What are UTMs?

UTMs are the extra parameters you can attach to links so that you can track your traffic from specific sources, mediums, and campaigns. If you’ve seen a funky long URL with question marks and ampersands in it, then you’ve probably seen a link with UTM parameters. 

UTMs appear in your Google Analytics reports. You can see your traffic broken down by all the different UTM parameters you use. 

So, let’s say you’re running a social media campaign about how dogs rule and cats drool. You can add a UTM campaign tag of “dogsrule” to all the links you share on social media. Then, when you hop into Google Analytics later, you can see the exact traffic impact of this campaign.

Yes, there will still be the referral traffic section in Google Analytics that counts your social media traffic in aggregate.

But with UTMs, you can also drill down into utm campaigns to see the total clicks from your specific “dogsrule” links.

If you have Goals set up in Google Analytics, you can then see the attribution to things like signups or downloads or purchases. If you have revenue numbers attached, you can even get the full ROI picture. 

Same goes for tools like Mixpanel or Looker or any other analytics software that you use to track results.

Now with UTMs, you’re typically going to be getting last-touch attribution. Here’s how the tech works: The UTM parameter is added to the browser in a cookie. And if a person clicks on a link with a certain UTM then clicks on a second link with a different UTM, the second UTM is the one that will get credit. And of course, if someone clears their cookies or has cookies disabled, then the UTM attribution won’t work at all.

There are some tools that track the first click also. They call this the pancake stack — first click and last click. You’ll want to check with your analytics provider or your data team to see what exactly you’re tracking.

If you’re looking to add UTMs to your social media links, there are a bunch of easy ways to do this.

First, you can do it manually by typing in the parameters at the end of your URL. These are:

utm_source=

utm_medium=

utm_campaign=

Additionally, we add these for you automatically with the Buffer product. On our paid plans you can customize the text here, too. So if you click on a Buffered link, you’ll be able to track exactly what kind of attribution it brought you.

2. Include a “How’d you hear about us” survey

These are going to be so much easier-sounding than UTMs. All you need for this form of attribution is a simple survey, placed after the event. 

For example, we recently implemented this within our Buffer signup flow.

When you sign up for Buffer, we ask you a few questions, including, “How did you hear about us?”The options are:

Friend, family, or work colleague

Google search

Online advertisement

Blog post

Social media post

Other

With this data, you can then see exactly which sources send you the most attribution. We tend to think of “how did you hear about us” as first-touch attribution, though it does remain a bit open to interpretation. 

At Buffer, social media accounts for our third-biggest attribution source at 10% of signups. Our top two are Google searches and word of mouth. Generally-speaking, you could expect a certain margin of error in the survey results from people giving random answers or clicking incorrectly. Still, it’s useful data to know!

3. Try bit.ly URLs to track attribution

These can help measure ballpark attribution numbers, especially when it comes to the middle of the customer journey. 

Let’s say you’re wanting to see how many people came to your site from the link in your Instagram bio. Well, you can hide UTM parameters within a shortened link, and then go to your bitly dashboard to see some robust stats about clicks and timing. 

This can become especially useful when you’re using a single bit.ly link across multiple channels because bit.ly will give you the conversion by channel. It’s a real-time view of your stats, versus a bigger dashboard like Google Analytics that excels at looking at previous days and macro views.

We’ve touched on some quick ways to get started with attribution — adding UTMs to your links, putting surveys onto your website, or using bit.ly to track click performance. These are great for single-touch moments of attribution. 

4. Multi-touch attribution resources

Resource #1: Find a tool that will help you track the data and then place it into a multi-touch model for you. 

Here’s a few ideas of what tools to try:

Bizible — This tool specializes in end-to-end marketing attribution. It was acquired by Marketo last year, so it has a ton of resources behind it. It’s one of the biggest and best tools out there for attribution. It’s not cheap — you need to hop on a demo call to get pricing. But it is an awesome solution especially if you’re wanting to integrate with a CRM like Salesforce.

In addition to Bizible, there are also tools like Impact and the appropriately-named Attribution. 

Also, some of the major networks like Facebook and Google have their own attribution products that can help with multitouch attribution. Facebook Attribution covers all the different touchpoints that your user might go through in the Facebook network, which includes organic and paid on Facebook and Instagram, plus any placements on Facebook’s Audience Network and Messenger. Google’s attribution solution is now built right into Google Analytics so you can build your attribution model right in there. 

The other way to look at multi-touch modeling is to be consistent with the way you model and track your social ads. This can be a huge component of the marketing journey for some brands, so it’s important to get these settings right. 

Specifically, you’ll want to look into the attribution windows for your ads, and you can do this right in the ads managers for all the social networks. 

Generally-speaking, there are three types of attribution windows for these ads: engagement windows, click windows and view windows. This means that if you were to set, say, a 7-day click attribution window, then the ad would take credit for the conversion for anyone who converted within seven days after clicking the ad.

There are a lot of different ways to set up these windows. Pinterest alone has 24 different options for you. The key is that you want to be comparing apples to apples so that you can easily compare the effectiveness of each channel.

One of the best places to start is with a 7-day click attribution window. This can be the same across all your social channels. You can start here and then tweak and adjust the window over time once you start seeing the results. 

Of course, it goes without saying: In order to get value from attribution, it’s important to know what your social media goals are.

Since attribution is based on the events and behaviors that you want to drive … then you need to know what those events and behaviors are!

We’ve seen a ton of great examples of the different ways that brands are measuring their social media impact. When you have revenue and attribution modeling in place, you can find some really cool insights. 

Here are just a few stories that eConsultancy shared in a recent blog post:  

KLM looked at sales generated from customers who visited their site directly from social media and found that these customers contributed 25 million euros in sales.

MADE.COM compared the average order value of people who went to their site from social and their site average. Their social media fans spend, on average, 4 percent more per order.

Incontact trained half of their sales reps on social selling and found that these sales rep had a 160 percent bigger sales pipeline and achieved 215 percent more revenue than those without.

It’s important to remember that when you use social media as an engagement and brand-building channel, you might not generate many leads or sales directly from social media. But you would indirectly.

We’re hopeful that these attribution ideas might give you a sense of how well social media impacts those indirect leads and sales and that setting up attribution can help you know your channels better.

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

Heather-Mae on Twitter

Dave on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

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