Author: Franz Malten Buemann

  • Karamba Casino – A Customer Experience Case Study

    Karamba Casino is among the oldest sites in the iGaming sector, having been around since 2005. The casino offers both casino games and sports betting, catering to the needs of different players on one website.  That said, it is a fully licensed operator, with the Malta Gaming Authority and the United Kingdom Gambling Commission regulating…
    The post Karamba Casino – A Customer Experience Case Study appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

  • A Comprehensive Guide to LinkedIn Sponsored Updates

    When it comes to growing your brand and boosting your revenue, social media matters.
    Here’s why: More than three billion people worldwide now have social media accounts, and 54% of those users leverage social media to research products.
    The biggest challenge? Finding the right platform for your social media posts where you can connect with your ideal audience.
    While many businesses leverage sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to promote their content and increase conversion rates, there’s also a case to be made for more business-focused frameworks like LinkedIn.
    In this comprehensive guide to LinkedIn sponsored updates we’ll tackle the big questions — what are LinkedIn sponsored updates, how do they work and how much do they cost?
    We’ll also offer a list of sponsored updates best practices to help your brand make the most of this social content solution.

    What are LinkedIn Sponsored Updates?
    Let’s start at the beginning: What exactly are LinkedIn sponsored updates?
    Also called sponsored content, the official LinkedIn help page says a sponsored update is, “a LinkedIn Page update that is sponsored as an advertisement and is delivered to the LinkedIn feed of members beyond those who follow your company.”
    In practice, LinkedIn sponsored updates are advertisements created by your company or marketing team which are then served to LinkedIn users who either follow your page or follow pages in a similar content space.
    These ads are served as part of the native LinkedIn feed and typically include a combination of relevant text and contextual images or videos, in turn helping them blend in with similar user content rather than stand out as paid-for advertisements.
    When designed and deployed well, LinkedIn sponsored updates can help drive organic interest in your brand from both current followers and a wider audience of LinkedIn members. Worth noting? While these posts are designed to follow the format of familiar user updates, they’re always labeled as “sponsored content” to ensure there’s no misleading users or confusion.
    What Types of Sponsored Updates are Available?
    Brands can create four types of direct sponsored updates:
    Single Image Ads
    Single image ads include one image and text that are displayed directly in targeted member LinkedIn feeds.
    Carousel Image Ads
    Carousel ads contain multiple images in succession that users can scroll through to get a better sense of your products or services.
    Video Ads
    Video ads offer a way to include multimedia marketing with in-feed videos that users can watch on-demand.
    Single Job Ads
    If you’re looking to expand your team, you can create single job ads for your targeted audience. They must promote a single job opportunity and be linked to an active job post on LinkedIn.
    You can also create what’s known as “direct sponsored content”. These ads won’t display on your LinkedIn Page or Showcase Page before being served as advertisements.
    As a result, they’re often used by companies to test several marketing approaches and see which one produces the best results and use it as the basis for more robust sponsored content updates.
    How much do LinkedIn sponsored updates cost?
    The short answer is that more resource-intensive ads — such as videos or carousels — will cost more than their single-image counterparts.
    The long answer is slightly more complicated. First, it’s important to understand that LinkedIn uses a bidding model for sponsored ads; you select and create your ad type and then specify how much you’re willing to pay — a minimum price exists to ensure advertisers are fairly paid, but you’ll never be charged more than your maximum upper limit. Differing ad providers then bid on the service and the lowest price wins.
    Ad price is also determined by your target audience and relevance score. If your target audience is in high demand, you’ll be charged more because there’s greater competition to capture user interest. You can also lower your ad costs by creating relevant ads. The more relevant and content-rich your ad, the less you’ll pay — because there’s a better chance of engaging LinkedIn users.
    It’s also worth considering the best cost model for your ad: Cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM). CPC means you only pay when users click on your ad and visit your site, while CPM means you pay for every 1,000 views or “impressions” of your ad.
    If your goal is generating brand awareness, opt for CPM. If you have an established audience and are looking to drive click-throughs and conversions, choose CPC.
    LinkedIn Sponsored Updates Best Practices
    Want to get the most from your LinkedIn sponsored updates? Keep these best practices in mind:
    1. Follow LinkedIn sponsored update specs.
    Each type of sponsored content comes with its own specifications.
    Single image ads: Up to 255 characters for the ad name, 150 characters of intro text to avoid truncation, URLs with “http://” or “https://” and JPG, GIF or PNG files that are 5MB or smaller.
    Carousel ads: Use a minimum of two cards and a maximum of ten. Each card has a maximum file size of 10MB and dimensions of 6012 x 6012px. Supported formats include JPG, PNG and non-animated GIFs.
    Video ads: Video ads must be three to 30 seconds in length, between 75KB and 200MB and in MP4 format. They must also be less than 30 frames per second (FPS).
    Single job ads: Single job ads should be concise, relevant, and clear and follow the same image guidelines as single image ads. They must also link to an active job posting on LinkedIn.
    Failure to follow these guidelines may result in ads being rejected. If ads contain misleading or inappropriate content, LinkedIn may choose to remove the ads or terminate your LinkedIn account.
    The service also makes it clear that “spam” posts are not permitted: According to their Best Practices for Sponsored Content page, “Businesses that post updates excessively are subject to review by LinkedIn and could risk having their LinkedIn Page deleted.”
    2. Don’t overshare.
    While targeted, relevant content can help drive user interest, too many ads too quickly can result in over-saturation.
    LinkedIn recommends regularly tweaking your content strategy to deliver analysis rather than simply news, include curated content (with credit) from other sources, and repurpose older content where applicable.
    3. Test, test, test.
    As noted above, direct sponsored content is a great way to try out new advertising efforts and see what sticks.
    With the social media market continually evolving, it’s worth evaluating ad performance every few weeks to see what’s working, what isn’t, and where specific changes can help.
    4. Spend wisely.
    Sponsored updates can get expensive as you incorporate new advertisements and use multiple ad types.
    Here, it’s worth tracking your ad spend and switching from CPC to CPM models once click-through rates start to rise. If ads begin losing steam, consider moving back to CPM to generate increased awareness.
    5. Find new markets.
    While engaging your target market is critical, diversify ad objectives is also important to expand your overall impact. LinkedIn recommends using tools such as Lead Gen Forms to find better leads, assess ROI and manage your advertisements at scale.
    LinkedIn’s sponsored update model offers a streamlined solution to help brands reach their target market, expand brand awareness, and boost ROI. Best bet? Start with direct sponsored content to see what sticks, then choose the cost model that makes the most sense — CPC or CPM — and adjust as needed to reach the largest LinkedIn audience.

  • What is Customer Perception of Service?

    Customer perception of service is a key component of customer perception.
    How well you service and support your customers will distinctly impact how your customers feel about your brand, product, or service.
    How to Improve Customer Perception of Your Brand
    That said, it’s important to know the difference between customer perception of service, general customer perceptions, and customer satisfaction.
    Customer Perception of Service vs. Customer Perceptions
    How customers perceive your business is not necessarily the same as how they perceive your service. Customers may perceive you to have a good product but poor service.
    Most consumers agree that the service you provide them is as important as the product you make — and it’s become increasingly critical.
    Customer Satisfaction vs. Customer Perception of Service
    While connected, customer satisfaction and customer perception of service are not the same things. How customers perceive your service will affect their satisfaction with your whole brand.
    You can often turn around a poor product experience with excellent customer service. Replacing or refunding the item and doing what you can to right the situation as quickly as possible can save. The impact of customer perception of service on satisfaction is so powerful, it can create your most loyal customers and evangelists.

    You can often turn around a poor product experience with excellent customer service. Doing it right can even create your greatest evangelists. #cx #custserv Click To Tweet

    It’s also important to note that customers can also be ‘satisfied’ and still perceive your customer service as low quality.
    You will most often see this with budget companies: people are willing to accept poor service if they get a significant discount. That also demonstrates how important a factor service is in your pricing.
    What determines customer perception of service?
    Many things will determine how customers perceive your service, not least their own experiences and personality. You can only do so much to manage customer perceptions, so it’s important to know your levers.
    Customer Expectations
    Customer expectations are key. You can help to set customer expectations through clear communication and transparency about your product’s capabilities and your ability to deliver service.
    How to Measure Customer Perception of Your Brand
    Customers will set their own expectations depending on their previous experiences in life. This might mean what their parents told them, other products they’ve bought like yours, and a vast multitude of individual reasons.
    Product Offering
    Your product offering will also impact how customers perceive your service. Usually, most people don’t expect you to provide a premium service if you make a budget product.

    Your product offering and branding will impact customer expectations of your service. Most people don’t expect a premium service for a budget product. #cx #custserv Click To Tweet

    That isn’t an excuse for providing no service at all. If your product is broken, you should still replace it. But people are more understanding if it takes a little longer to get a refund.
    Service Delivery
    Customer expectations are key to customer perception of service, but your service delivery is the defining factor. And it’s also the factor that you have the most control over, and the missing half of the marketing funnel.
    It is understood that the service you deliver to your customers will significantly impact your success as a business. The better you treat your customers, the more they’ll trust and support you.
    Four Factors that Influence Customer Perception of Service
    How customers perceive the quality of your service is determined by five main factors:
    1. Reliability
    Reliability is how consistently you can serve your customers. To be ‘reliable’, you must commit to a certain standard of service and consistently meet it.
    2. Responsiveness
    This is your willingness to help your customers and provide a timely service. Whether customers perceive you as responsive will depend on the channel they’re communicating through, how long you keep them waiting, and their issue. Do your best to make customers aware of your service and response times — and don’t keep them waiting too long on the phone.
    3. Assurance
    Your employee’s product knowledge and courtesy will affect confident — or assured — customers in your ability to provide service. Your agents’ ability to inspire trust and confidence — and get results — is determined by how empowered and accountable they are.
    How Can Employees Affect Customer Perception?
    Train your team well and empower them to do their jobs, and your customers will be assured of your services.
    4. Empathy
    Real empathy is ever-more essential, as we found in our contact center trends report. But a company doesn’t just ‘have’ compassion. Empathy for your customers is something you must demonstrate every day.
    It’s something you must nurture. It starts with your values and goes all the way down to how you train your employees and who you hire.
    Customer Perception of Service is Key to Customer Satisfaction
    How customers perceive your service will determine how satisfied they are with your service. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in reverse. Previous customer satisfaction may buy you some goodwill in future interactions. But if customers think you’ve maintained that good service, they won’t stay satisfied longThe post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

  • The tumblehome

    Chestnut brand canoes dominated the Canadian wilderness for years. One reason is that they were shaped with a tumblehome. If you leaned the boat over, the boat leaned back, providing stability. The more you leaned, the harder the boat worked to stay upright.
    This is the resilience that leads to stability, not brittleness. It is the hallmark of a system that is aware of the forces on it and responds with just enough to keep things steady over time.
    Tumblehome provides support, but it also requires ongoing effort, care and focus to keep a system functioning. The tumblehome doesn’t take care of itself.
    Every existing system persists because it has a sort of tumblehome. And if you want to understand a system, it helps to see where the tumblehome lies.

  • 6 Things Every Email Marketer Should Be Doing This Year

    There’s nothing obvious about great email marketing. Sure, we all know the basic formula for success — reaching the right people with the right content. But, how you narrow down who those people are and what kinds of content will track with them is a process that takes a lot of skill, not to mention…
    The post 6 Things Every Email Marketer Should Be Doing This Year appeared first on Benchmarkemail.

  • Steps To Marginally Maximize Profit In Water Bottling Plant

    Steps To Marginally Maximize Profit In Water Bottling Plant ​ Marginal Profit is the profit generated from the sale on one product in a business. Maximizing the Marginal Profit is essential in the sustainability of water bottling plants. If you intend to maximize Marginal Profit for your plant, I have addressed the steps in this article. https://ibottling.com/steps-to-marginally-maximize-profit-in-water-bottling-plant/ #bottledwaterplan #businessplan #bottledwaterplant #bottledwaterbusiness #bottlewaterbusiness #waterbusiness
    submitted by /u/stepleadpactek [link] [comments]

  • Any experience with Gartner?

    Just joined a company as a CX analyst. Pretty stoked to get in and make headway on a lot of launches. Anyone have experience with being a client of Gartner? Assuming there are probably Gartner AEs in this sub. Looking for anecdotal third party opinion if anyone is willing to share.
    submitted by /u/firenance [link] [comments]

  • Welcoming Maria Thomas as Buffer’s Chief Product Officer

    In July, we shared that we were looking for a product leader to help us take Buffer forward in our next phase. After speaking to an incredible group of talented folks in product, I’m happy to share that Maria Thomas has joined us as our new Chief Product Officer.
    We’re now a 10-year old company, and in the past year, I’ve done a lot of reflection on the purpose of the company and how we can set ourselves up to reach our potential and have the most impact. Buffer’s mission is to provide essential tools to help small businesses get off the ground and grow.
    Maria brings with her a breadth of experience working in SaaS and working with small businesses. Her most recent roles have been as the VP of Product at Bitly for the past two years and Insightly for the prior three and a half years. These are both SaaS companies that served small businesses and navigated the ups and downs of all that comes with that segment, including having a large free user base. Maria also spent seven years building products for SMBs at Intuit.
    The opportunity to bring on an executive is rare, especially at a company like Buffer, where we have some very loyal and long-tenured people and are striving to create a decades-long sustainable company. There’s much we can learn, however, from someone with experience of where we’re trying to go, and with Maria we have found a great blend of significant experience and expertise we can learn from and an excitement for the unique type of company we are. In particular, Maria and I connected and had great conversations around the freedom and creativity that can come with being unconstrained by VC investment and how that can help us have a more pure focus on the customer, and ultimately more compounding long-term success.
    In Maria’s own words:
    I am inspired and humbled to join Buffer. You have quite a following in the product management community. Several of my peers revealed that they’d had a long ‘crush on Buffer’ once they learned that I joined you as your CPO. I am thrilled to join a product-led company focused on helping SMBs, a profitable, transparent, sustainable SaaS business, and a majority female executive team.
    We’re lucky to benefit from all of Maria’s great experience in product as well as her many years as an executive of similarly sized companies. Maria joined us late last year and has already had a significant impact, helping us to shape our goals and strategy for 2021. I’m confident that within the next few months, customers will start to see the positive and tangible results of her contributions.

  • UJET CCaaS Cloud Contact Center Now Available on Oracle Cloud Marketplace

    Ultra-Modern Contact Center Unifies Enterprise Customer Data with Oracle Cloud CX Service for a Single Source of Truth and more Intelligent Customer Experience
    SAN FRANCISCO, CA – January 06, 2021 09:00 AM Eastern Standard Time – UJET Inc.
    The world’s first and only CCaaS 3.0 cloud contact center, and a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced its integration with Oracle Cloud CX Service and its availability on Oracle Cloud Marketplace. Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a centralized repository of enterprise applications offered by Oracle and Oracle partners.
    With UJET’s next-generation capabilities connected through the Oracle Cloud CX Service, businesses can modernize customer and user experiences through:

    Unified CCaaS and CRM data that blends historical records with real-time insights and contextual awareness. With a unified data set, agents can deliver more natural, personalized interactions and experiences.
    Embeddable in-app and mobile support that leverages smartphone biometrics, user authentication, and real-time multimedia sharing that creates a more cohesive customer journey. With access to rich visual and contextual information, agents can better facilitate more intelligent and personalized interactions with customers.
    Significantly reduced handle times and post-call work for agents through real-time data exchanges that enable automatic CRM record updates.
    Eliminating the redundant storage of customer PII, call records, and more, while maintaining an enterprise-grade security posture that can help solve for complex compliance regulations and data residency issues.

    Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a one-stop-shop for Oracle customers seeking trusted business applications offering unique business solutions, including ones that extend Oracle Cloud Applications. Oracle Cloud is an enterprise cloud that delivers massive, non-variable performance and next-generation security across a comprehensive portfolio of services including SaaS, application development, application hosting, and business analytics. Customers get access to leading compute, storage, data management, security, integration, HPC, artificial intelligence (AI), and Blockchain services to augment and modernize their critical workloads. Oracle Cloud runs Oracle Autonomous Database, the industry’s first and only self-driving database.
    “Customer experience has become the cornerstone of enterprise digital transformation strategies. But the single greatest barrier to delivering modern, intelligent experiences across marketing, sales, and support is achieving a holistic, unified view of your customer data,” said Vasili Triant, Chief Operating Officer, UJET. “Our platform was purpose-built to solve this problem, in concert with the existing enterprise system of record. UJET’s participation in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace further extends our commitment to the Oracle community and enables customers to easily reap the benefits of our ultra-modern cloud contact center solution. We look forward to leveraging the power of the Oracle Cloud to help us achieve our business goals.”
    To learn more about UJET’s integration with Oracle Cloud CX Service and to request a personalized demo, please visit: https://ujet.co/request-a-demo/
    About UJET
    UJET is the world’s first and only cloud contact center platform for smartphone era CX. By modernizing digital and in-app experiences, UJET unifies the enterprise brand experience across sales, marketing, and support, eliminating the frustration of channel switching between voice, digital, and self-service for consumers. Offering unsurpassed resiliency and the flexibility to deploy across leading public cloud infrastructures, UJET powers the world’s largest elastic CCaaS tenant at up to 22,000 agents globally, and is trusted by innovative, customer-centric enterprises like Instacart, Turo, Wag!, and Atom Tickets to intelligently orchestrate predictive, contextual, conversational customer experiences.
    Learn more at www.ujet.cx.
    About Oracle PartnerNetwork
    Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) is Oracle’s partner program designed to enable partners accelerate the transition to the cloud and drive superior business performance outcomes. The OPN program allows partners to engage with Oracle through track(s) aligned to how they go to market: Cloud Build for partners that provide their products or services built on or integration with Oracle Cloud; Cloud Sell for partners that resell Oracle Cloud technology; Cloud Service for partners that implement, deploy, and manage Oracle Cloud Services; and License & Hardware for partners that build, service, or sell Oracle software licenses or hardware products. Customers can expedite their business objectives with OPN partners who have achieved Expertise in a product family or cloud service. To learn more visit: http://www.oracle.com/partnernetwork
    Media ContactsHolly Barkerholly@ujet.co
    Chad TorbinSpeakeasy Strategiesujet@speakeasystrategies.com
    The post UJET CCaaS Cloud Contact Center Now Available on Oracle Cloud Marketplace appeared first on UJET.

  • How to Take Your Marketing to the Next Level with Pardot’s Latest Advancements

    Salesforce’s physical offices may have been closed in 2020, but Pardot’s product team didn’t stop working. If anything, our product innovation accelerated last year! Pardot became easier to use with deeper analytics, more built-in artificial intelligence (AI), and new features to help your scale your marketing.
    Here are five of Pardot’s most exciting 2020 product advancements that will help you take your marketing to the next level in 2021:
    1. B2B MARKETING ANALYTICS PLUS
    Using B2B Marketing Analytics Plus is like adding a data scientist to your marketing team. Powered by the most advanced AI capabilities, not only can you better understand the performance of past campaigns — you can also receive suggestions on what to do next to maximize your return on investment (ROI) at every stage of the funnel. For instance: predict how much engagement you’ll gain with planned campaigns. The new connectors allow marketers to pull in data from external systems, like Google Analytics.

    2. ENGAGEMENT HISTORY DASHBOARDS
    Get the relevant analytics and insights you need directly on account, lead, contact, opportunity, and campaign records. With Engagement History Dashboards, you can embed dashboards on these records that visualize marketing engagement and surface key insights.
    Marketing users need to understand that their efforts are creating engagement, while sales needs to understand who’s engaging, identify strong leads, and build targeted account plans. These dashboards allow all users – marketing and sales alike – to see the same data and use that data to inform decisions. You’ll be able to understand trends and patterns in campaign engagement and gather details on the who, what, when, where, why, and how behind the engagement.

    3. EINSTEIN ATTRIBUTION
    Don’t calculate marketing attribution the way your grandmother did. Use a customized model created by Einstein learning to more accurately identify the most effective campaigns in your customer journeys. Einstein Attribution leaves rules-based influence models in the rearview mirror. It uses AI to develop a data-driven model that attributes revenue share based on your actual customers, their engagement, and your successes.

    4. NEW PARDOT EMAIL EXPERIENCE
    Pardot marketers now have a more streamlined and user-friendly end-to-end email experience that uses the power of the Lightning Platform. The redesigned email experience includes enhanced email design capabilities, preview and test options, and a configurable send experience. Marketers can build email content from templates and add images, HTML, plain text, and HML merge fields to customize them. You can save email content for reuse and view reports on content performance. Pardot’s new email experience also allows users to take advantage of Salesforce CMS.

    5. DEVELOPER SANDBOXES FOR PARDOT
    Testing, auditing, and configuring Pardot is now easier than ever. Admins and developers can use sandboxes to safely test Pardot in an isolated training environment before going to live production. This provides the staging ground developers need to make configuration or asset changes and ensure all IT governance needs are met.
    Want to learn more? Join us Jan. 20 for a webinar to learn how marketers are leveraging Pardot’s latest and greatest capabilities to transform their marketing.