The News

On September 7, 2017 Helpshift announced the appointment of a new CEO in a blog post. Salesforce veteran Linda Crawford, with a tenure in the CRM arena that stretches back to 1996, took over the role, being the successor of co-founder Abinash Tripathy. Before, she held various positions at Salesforce, Rivermine, and Siebel. Most recently she held the position of a Chief Customer Officer at Optimizely. This track record certainly qualifies her to have a go at growing an interesting company to the next level. Helpshift itself is the company that created the mobile in app support market back in 2011 and, so far, has a keen focus on this area under the leadership of Abinash. Investors include Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, and Salesforce. Both, Microsoft and Salesforce, have been lead investors of the Series B financing round in June 2016.

The Bigger Picture

The customer service center market is extremely crowded and contested. Helpshift itself has a strong product and a good customer base, originating from the gaming industry but also running the customer service technology behind Microsoft Outlook Mobile. The company is targeting bigger accounts and is already amongst the ranks of Salesforce partners, having a deep integration. However, the overall market is turning into a platform play, which will be dominated by two or three business platforms for bigger companies, and maybe a handful more that cover SMBs. The platform companies are also providing strong business applications, including customer service, even in-app service. And then there are companies that build multi channel customer service solutions on these platforms, too. Are they as good as Helpshift? Likely not. But they cover more use cases. Helpshift, as a niche player, needs to find the right balance between the platforms and to extend the niche to make it more defensible.

MyPoV and Advice

A new CEO effectively could have come only from Microsoft or Salesforce. Both companies are heavily invested and could need an improved offering. With the very strong focus on mobile in app support Helpshift is in my eyes betting on the right horse. The company is well placed to play a major role in what I see as the upcoming battleground of customer service: Ambient computing. The challenge facing the company is in my eyes two-fold:

• There is only a minimal amount of AI and machine learning in the system. This prevents the system from scaling to the next level. Companies like AI have an advantage here, although they seem to have far less traction.
• The strong focus on mobile in-app support for time being serves as a disadvantage. Although more and more people are turning to their mobile devices and mobile apps the web is not dead – far from it. This means that many customers need two customer service solutions. And this makes companies like Salesforce, Zendesk, Freshworks, and others, a threat.

Especially the first one needs to get tackled along with lighthouse solutions in the world of ambient computing, starting e.g. by showcasing service that is driven by voice instead of typing. Cisco might have interesting use cases here. Secondly, Helpshift could visually ‘hide’ the FAQ behind a chat interface. That would make the service solution easily attractive for web sites as well, reducing the threat by other companies. With this the company would stay a ‘mobile native’ but safeguard an open flank. Thirdly, with the ties to Microsoft that are already there, it should be helpful to integrate into Microsoft Dynamics 365. This would increase their reach drastically. The world is moving more and more into a platform play. Helpshift, as I see it right now, will not supply the platform, so the company needs to play with and on the strong contenders’ platforms – at least two of them. Additionally, the company was not too strong on the marketing frontier. This improved since the beginning of the year and I’d expect this now getting a real push. Having said all that: Abinash and Helpshift have done a great job so far. This is definitely a company to look at when it comes to building a customer service element into an app. It will be very interesting to continue observing Linda, Abinash, and their team.

A short while ago Craig Rentzke from Helpshift pointed me to a particular episode of CXOTalk, featuring Kevin Henrikson of Microsoft and professor Anindya Ghose from NYU. Henrikson is responsible for Microsoft’s Outlook for Mobile, a personal information manager (PIM) app, whereas prof. Ghose comes more from a B2C angle, with B2C being more concerned with convenience. This interesting episode deals with the future of mobile computing and given that, apparently about how mobile apps will (have to) look like and what it is that vendors should do and what they should not do with the apps.

The Now

Naturally, the discussion immediately zeroed in on two topics

• the purpose of the app
• and data

The purpose of the app mainly determines two things, which are first the way that users are presented with information and are engaging with the app and second the data that gets collected and used in order to (positively) influence the user experience while considering their privacy. The data that gets collected needs to be used to provide the users with timely and relevant information, which does not only benefit the vendor but also, and chiefly, the user. That the data collection ‘behaviors’ of especially B2C apps are not hitting that objective is probably the industry’s worst kept secret. The apps collect more than necessary and use it for a very wide range of purposes, mostly wider than the users are aware of. They basically strip the user of their personal data. This realization was also what led a friend of mine and me found Epikonic, with the clear intention of giving users a choice who they interact with instead of ‘being chosen’ by companies (sorry for this shameless plug, actually, well, not so). On the productivity app side the picture is far better. Users need to be able to do their job efficiently and easily. In the case of a PIM app this means that users are checking it frequently and need to be able to find and do what they need with minimal time spent, including getting support. Being a user of Outlook for Mobile I can say that the team of Microsoft and Helpshift are succeeding here. The app collects telemetry data and can suggest appropriate attachments and certainly provides very relevant information to the service center in case of a call for support. The proof is more than 100 million installations that are getting served only on Android. However!

The Then

I do think that both discussion partners did not look far enough into the future of what mobile apps will be. They remained on grounds within the current paradigm, which is a mobile app that serves a specific purpose and that resides on a mobile device- aka smartphone, competing for real estate on the phone’s main screen. Yes, that paradigm covers more use cases than currently deployed, including food and drink ordering from the airline app to the flight attendants without reaching out for the button on the ceiling or using the built-in screens – if they are there at all. And this describes only one possible user initiated use case in one particular industry. Still, this paradigm is challenged already now.

• It is hard to make users use an app for a longer time, think of (re-) engagement campaigns
• Mobile devices are powerful enough to not require specific - very limited - app functionalities that serve one purpose. Think of apps become multi-purpose again
• The single 2D screen itself becomes less important, think of smart watches, wearable sensors, AR, VR, and holograms
• Scalability becoming a main theme. Think automation and bots
• Interaction metaphors, other than those limited to a 2d screen are emerging – think of voice, conversations, eye tracking
• Apps are becoming intelligent. Think of artificial intelligence, in particular deep learning
• And then there is the Internet of Things.

There is a short-term future and a long-term vision. Helpshift is perfectly positioned for the former. Knowing CEO Abinash Tripathy, he also has a good idea for the long-term play.

The Next Level

Which goes beyond the smartphone. The app will be mobile – more so than now. The smartphone will no more be THE frontend that it is now. It will stay the switchboard of our lives that it has become, but it will move into the background, like the PC and laptop did. It will become more of a personal server. With lots of little personal devices that serve specific purposes, and other personal servers, situationally connected to it to support the user’s wishes in the here and now. This will lead to more intelligence at all levels, the personal device, the personal server, and the (interconnected) back ends. And all these little devices will have different UI’s and interaction metaphors, like VR, AR using eytracking, holograms that can be manipulated, etc. But most of all with speech becoming more and more important. I am looking forward to Helpshift participating in shaping this future. Be prepared.

One of the eternal problems in a call center is getting an enquiry routed to the right agent. This is doubly true in a mobile world that demands conversational support in near real time. Add to this the fact that most customers seeking support already failed to find an answer to their inquiry using an FAQ, a community, or other self-services. In this situation customers expect an answer within few minutes, if not seconds. On top of this, the ability to make engagements with the company easy, efficient, and ideally joyful, is becoming more and more a distinguishing factor for companies. Customer experience is the result of engagements, and for humans the experience gained from the most recent engagement tends to have a higher influence than older ones. Consequently, a positive customer experience matters, not only during marketing- and sales, but even more so in situations that require active help of the company that sold the product or service. So, getting a solution to an issue must be as easy and as human as possible. The challenge is that every support organization needs to live and work with limited resources – human as well as technical ones.

It is Like a Good Game of Soccer

11 players and a ball. There is a goal keeper, are defenders, midfielders and attackers who play as a team against their opposition, trained by their coach and guided by the captain. There is a core team, and some players may be assigned to different roles, even within one game. Depending on the opposition team, the coach and the captain change player assignments, tactics and roles. Together they play the ball with the objective of scoring. Like a soccer team call center agents are organized around their strengths and like soccer players the agents are – or should be – carefully trained and assigned to roles on their field: the queues with which incidents are managed. Like the soccer players, agents can be assigned to different positions on the field: different queues. The incident is the ball and the scoring is resolving the incident. With all its intrinsics, soccer is a simple game. It has a few rules that dictate the do’s and don’ts. Following these rules, considering available players and their strengths, is the table stakes. Yet, this doesn’t make for a game that the spectators may find exciting – nor might it lead to scoring. There is an art to it, the art of how and to which player to move the ball in any given situation. This is the same in a call center environment. Yet, in some call centers, when receiving the incident, the team stops and asks the spectator where to start. The user is asked to qualify it and to route it into the right queue. This is a task (s)he is obviously ill prepared for. Doing so would lead to a heavily disrupted game that no one would like to watch, not even talking of enjoying. Scores would be rare and far in between. In a call center environment, this leads to unnecessary load. Load that is caused by re-routing the incident, delays in handovers and resolution, and ultimately frustration on both ends: The end user and the service agent. In brief, it is causing a poor customer experience, following another poor experience. There must be a better way. And there is. Back to our in-app support world. Why not using the incident itself to automatically identifying the right queue and smartly routing it there? This is like the soccer players using the ball’s momentum and the given situation to proceed to score. There are two basic possibilities to achieve this smart routing. One I would name the classic approach, the other one the text mining approach.

The Classic Approach

Automatic routing to the right queue can easily be achieved by using metadata that is provided by the app as part of the incident report. Incidents are tagged based on this metadata. The tags are used to route the incident to an appropriate queue or agent. A configurable automation does both, tagging and routing, without explicit intervention of the app user, who is already in distress enough as there is an issue that he or she couldn’t resolve. This is a proven approach that requires an elaborate design of metadata and its collection within the app and the ability to build rule sets on top of this metadata in the service back end. With sufficient data and advanced analytics tools this approach can also be used to offer pre-emptive support, which further improves the customer experience by avoiding the negative experience in the first instance. This approach, however, finds its limits in the ability of instrumenting an app so that enough situations can be identified from the metadata for appropriate tagging. Not in the least because instrumenting has an adverse effect on the app.

The Text Mining Approach

With more and more service center software running in the cloud, massive improvements in AI, Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and machine learning technologies, additional information can be used: The description that gets submitted by the user as part of the incident report. Albeit the users do not always provide accurate information, this is regularly enough to augment and improve the tagging, therefore getting a better routing and ultimately faster resolution. Given that in many systems the first line service agents can resolve incidents by themselves consulting a knowledge base the AI might be able to resolve the issue before escalating it to an agent.

Smart Routing is the Future

This paves the way. Currently leading systems smartly queue and route incidents based upon an elaborate architecture of metadata and tags that are automatically given based upon the metadata. This already tremendously helps companies in providing good service. The next step is including the descriptions given by the users into the mix and to use it to suggest solutions to agents until confidence is high enough to have the software independently suggest solutions to the users or to route the incidents. NLU in combination with machine learning / deep learning are nearly at this stage. In either case, smart routing is reducing the friction in the support process and therefore improving customer- and service agent experience. The result of this concentration on positive experience is a measurable benefit for the business – because of adding value for the customer.  

The leading in-app support company Helpshift just released a seamless integration with the Salesforce Service Cloud. This integration is now available on AppExchange. Here a copy of the press release for your convenience, followed by my analysis:     Helpshift Announces New Integration Capabilities for Its Customers on the Salesforce AppExchange, the World's Leading Enterprise Apps Marketplace SAN FRANCISCO – (BUSINESS WIRE) – MAY 25, 2017 – Helpshift today announced an integration with new capabilities available on the Salesforce AppExchange. This integration is meant to improve the mobile user experience by enabling service agents to deliver support to app users directly from within their Salesforce Service Cloud Dashboard - In-app! When a customer contacts support from inside the Helpshift-enabled app, a Salesforce case is created that the agent responds to, creating an in-app conversation. Customers get notified via banners, notifications and badges, enabling them to continue at their pace. "Organizations are seeing an explosion in demand for mobile solutions from their customers," said Esteban Kolsky, president of thinkJar, a customer strategies advisory firm, "and they quickly realize they can't offer outdated and incomplete solutions without real time data. Direct integration with systems of record are at the core of their strategies to support this trend." Built on the Salesforce Platform, the Helpshift integration is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange. Enterprises can benefit in the following ways: In-app Messaging: Helpshift’s new integration capabilities allow existing Salesforce customers to provide support to mobile customers, which extends their ability to reach mobile customers where it matters: Directly in the app, and supported by the smartphones’ powerful notification mechanisms. Enhanced Knowledge Capabilities: Helpshift’s FAQs optimized for the native mobile app experience are combined with the Salesforce Knowledge Base. They appear inside the Salesforce Knowledge Base through a one-time mapping and can be maintained directly in Salesforce. Automatic synchronization ensures that the FAQs are always up-to-date in the mobile app. Agent Management: Support for mobile customers can be delivered from inside the Salesforce Dashboard. Cases are directly created in the Salesforce Service Cloud when a Helpshift customer initiates a conversation. There is no need to switch to Helpshift. No tab change, no context switch, no training is required; the process remains unchanged for the agents, ensuring zero disruption and high efficiency. Data Management: Customer data and metadata from Helpshift is available to Salesforce agents as part of the case in the Salesforce Service Cloud. “As mobile becomes the primary medium customers use to connect with brands, the ability to provide customer support through all touch points is vital to creating deeper engagement and brand loyalty,” said Abinash Tripathy, Founder and CEO at Helpshift. “The enterprise no longer has to choose between uprooting their entire customer support structure and meeting customers where they spend most of their time - on mobile devices. Now the enterprise can provide a support experience for mobile customers and support agents can meet their needs quickly while continuing to do what they were doing within the Salesforce Platform. Everyone wins.” “Everyone and everything is getting smarter and more connected than ever before, and companies are looking to transform the way they connect with customers, partners and employees,” said Kori O’Brien, SVP, ISV Sales, Salesforce. “By leveraging the power of the Salesforce Platform, Helpshift provides customers with an exciting new way to receive support experience across mobile touch points.” Salesforce, AppExchange and others are among the trademarks of Salesforce.com, inc. About Salesforce AppExchange Salesforce AppExchange is the world’s leading enterprise apps marketplace that empowers companies to sell, service, market and engage in entirely new ways. With 3,500 partner apps and more than 4 million customer installs, it is the most comprehensive source of cloud, mobile, social, IoT, analytics and artificial intelligence technologies for businesses. About Helpshift: Helpshift bridges the disconnect between conventional customer service channels like email and phone support, and a growing consumer base that lives in a mobile-first world. As consumers do more on their mobile phones and have a strong preference for messaging as their primary mode of communication, Helpshift’s customer service platform provides instant answers and messaging right within the mobile app. The Helpshift SDK also easily integrates with third party tools and allows for highly-personalized support and user segmentation. Through this highly-streamlined support system, companies can resolve issues more efficiently, boosting customer satisfaction in the process. Companies such as Viacom, Virgin Media, Microsoft, Western Union, Flipboard, WordPress, and thousands of other industry-leading brands, startups, and developers use the Helpshift platform to provide in-app support. Helpshift is installed on 2 Billion devices worldwide, and serves 400+ million mobile customers monthly. To date, Helpshift has raised more than $38.2 Million and is backed by Cisco Investments, Intel Capital, Microsoft Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, True Ventures, and Visionnaire Ventures. To learn more about Helpshift, visit https://www.helpshift.com/and follow @helpshift on Twitter.   The integration enables Salesforce Service Cloud customers who run Helpshift to power their mobile in-app support to leverage the capabilities of Helpshift right from the Salesforce dashboard. The Helpshift FAQs get mapped to and managed from the Salesforce knowledge base and are deployed to the mobile devices, including changes that happen over time. Conversely, a Salesforce case is created for a mobile user who initiates a chat from within the Helpshift powered mobile app. This case contains all relevant data and meta data from the end user’s phone for efficient processing by the service agent through a configurable mapping between Helpshift data and the fields of the Salesforce case object. The service agents work on this case as they would on any other case, using the Salesforce screens and workflows they are used to. No additional training to deal with another system is required; nor is it necessary to do a context switch between the two service back ends. Replies sent from the Salesforce Service Cloud appear in the in-app chat, thus contributing to a high user experience.

My Take

This is an important step out of CustServ Hell towards CustServ Heaven. Beyond all hype and rave of bots the conversational UI, messaging, is the single most important development in current interaction design. This is especially true for mobile users who exhibit little patience with apps that do not work and then do not let them find help immediately. Mobile users, too, do not want to change from their application to the phone (application) in order to get support. They want to be able to efficiently search an FAQ – even without connectivity – and contact support from within the app if they do not get the answer they need from there. They want it now – and then at their pace. This is nothing short of a paradigm shift as it flips the support model from company defined to customer defined. The next step will be voice, in combination with speech-to-text capabilities, in addition to text. Not many companies can address this paradigm shift at the moment. For both, Salesforce and Helpshift the benefits are immediately visible. The Salesforce eco-system gets the solution to an issue that needs resolution. Helpshift is an early, if not the first, provider of this solution within the thriving eco-system of the leader. For both, Helpshift- and Salesforce customers this is very good news, as this integration allows them to run their customer engagement centers more efficiently by avoiding a second, independent, back end with its own user interface and own set of customer master data. Instead there is a seamless integration that allows for great and non-disruptive user experience as the service agents do not need to change their workflows nor are they forced to change from one application to another. This tremendously benefits joint Helpshift- and Salesforce customers, too. Additionally, these companies enjoy the security of their investments staying protected while they have their feet in the doorway to where future leads us: A mobile first world. Those who talk of AI-first are looking inside out instead of outside in. To me, combining best-of-breed capabilities like those of a leading provider of in-app support, that Helpshift is, with the undisputed leader of Customer Engagement Center solutions proverbially fits like peanut butter and jelly (or like bread and butter, as we Germans would say). What I am waiting for now, is getting this solution integrated into other leading customer service solutions, starting with Microsoft Dynamics, SAP CEC, Pegasystems, Oracle, but also looking at SugarCRM and Zoho, and possibly further competitors in the tier 1 and tier 2 race of solutions. As this is an API-based integration, I am confident, that this will happen, very confident actually.

In a mobile world, where the smartphone has become the command center of our lives support needs to be offered from directly inside the app, using in-app messaging. This way the advantages of being able to send relevant contextual information about the state of the app to the service agent and the ability to engage in a service conversation via a conversational UI can get brought to full advantage. The user is identified, relevant information has been gathered, which the service agent can use right away. This leads to capabilities that a genuine mobile in-app support system needs to have on top of generic help center functionality:

1. In-App FAQ that gets pushed out to the phone and is available in an offline scenario
2. Collation of meta data about the phone, user and the incident that created the support call, along with the ability to send that to the customer service center
3. In-App messaging/conversational UI in combination with push notifications
4. Automation to properly route incoming issues and to increase the issue resolution efficiency
5. An ability to integrate into CRM- or other systems
6. An ability to selectively and proactively engage with users, to e.g. support onboarding or push notifications about special situations to relevant parts of the user community.

It is possible to find vendors that deliver parts or all of this in order to deliver a mobile service experience. Platforms like G2Crowd, but also traditional analyst companies like Forrester and Gartner give some leads. Gartner lists Salesforce, Pegasystems, Oracle, Microsoft, Zendesk as leaders in customer engagement centers, with SAP being the only Challenger and Lithium the only Visionary. None of these companies gets high marks for in-app support, though. So, we are apparently looking for specialist vendors. Concentrating on the bigger medium and enterprise end of the market I’ll briefly look over the following companies, which offer parts or all of the desired solution.

• Apptentive
• Freshdesk/Hotline
• Helpshift
• Intercom
• LivePerson
• Salesforce Service Cloud and com
• Zendesk

Salesforce and Zendesk are part of this list as in-app service specialists see them in sales opportunities as competitors.

Vendors

Apptentive

Apptentive focuses on mobile customer engagement to foster a better way to communicate. The solution offers in-app messaging, rating prompts, notifications and surveys. There are no FAQ’s, though. The company got founded in 2011. The solution integrates into Zendesk, Uservoice, and Desk.com, which can be used to build a more complete in-app customer service solution in combination with Apptentive. Further integrations should be possible using the company’s API. Apptentive gathers meta-data from the mobile apps and presents it via its reporting solution. This data then can be exported as CSV and imported into a CRM system to enrich it and to provide for segmentation. However, there does not seem to be a campaigning functionality inside Apptentive itself.

Freshdesk/Hotline

Hotline.io, the former Konotor, is the mobile in-app support platform of Freshdesk. Konotor got founded in 2012 and was acquired by Freshdesk in November 2015. It is a native in-app support platform that fully caters for the criteria mentioned above. Hotline positions itself more like an engagement platform than a customer service platform. Being a part of the Freshdesk group their focus is more on the upper end of the SMB arena. Their clients mainly consist of startups and bigger corporations (as the smaller ones often do not have mobile apps, according to Srikrishnan Ganesan who heads up Hotline). Freshdesk itself seems to be sales-driven (which is not a bad thing). The company recently won the 2017 CRM Watchlist award, which is an impact award given by Paul Greenberg, which gives high visibility. Hotline has built-in integrations e.g. with Zendesk, and Slack and, of course, with Freshdesk itself. Using APIs it is possible to integrate with other CRM- and customer service systems. With the help of the Freshdesk platform it turns into a multi channel support system. The campaign module that is built into the back end allows segmenting customers based upon meta-data, app usage, and other criteria and allows for simple campaign automation.

Helpshift

Helpshift seems to be the leading mobile in-app support platform with a base of about 1.3 billion installations. The company got founded in 2011 and pioneered the idea of in-app support, providing a native platform that fully caters for the criteria above. The company positions itself as revolutionizing the customer support experience on mobile – with a strong focus on customer service. The target of Helpshift is enterprises and bigger call centers, and their number of installations proves that they are up to it. In 2014 Helpshift won the CRM Idol competition and the company is probably a bit of a hidden gem, which may partly be attributed to their enterprise focus. Helpshift has a deep integration into the Salesforce Service Cloud and I personally expect integration into MS Dynamics looming, as Microsoft Outlook Mobile is a key customer and Microsoft itself a leading investor into the company. Being API-driven integrations into other CRM systems are easily possible. The backend itself is multi-channel capable. The Helpshift campaign module is geared for service rather than marketing and leverages meta-data for segmentation, easily allowing for the facilitation of onboarding or recovering abandoned baskets, and getting over the early retention barrier.

Intercom

Intercom positions itself as a platform with support for live chat, marketing and support, with all part solutions being seamlessly integrated via their platform. The company has a strong mobile focus. A lot of their customer base seems to deploy the solution as a customer service solution. As Helpshift, the company was founded in 2011. Their solutions cover the criteria above, with the exception seeming to be the in-app FAQ. FAQ’s seem to be published through the web, instead. Their analytics offer the nice feature of identifying candidates for improved or new knowledge base articles, based upon searches. The solution offers multi-channel support and integrates into a good number of communications channels, and into Salesforce, to have a strong support system. They have deliberate support for onboarding processes, helping customers to get over the early retention barrier. Using data collected from the devices a segmentation and hence a targeted communication with users is possible, for example the onboarding support.

LivePerson

LivePerson offers a mobile in-app support solution through its LiveEngage platform. The company sets out to drive conversations and loyalty through the platform, and does not position it as a support- but an engagement system. LiveEngage is an ‘upgrade’ from the company’s earlier LivePerson solution, which seems to have caused some grief for customers. This ‘upgrade’ seems to resemble a pivot into the mobile in-app business. They are targeting enterprises although they also have startup customers. LivePerson is in the chat business for around 20 years. Focusing on messaging they do offer a chat platform that can be integrated into apps and web sites. They do not offer knowledge base support of customers but rely on custom integrations into CRM systems. Their key asset is their long standing history along with a platform that can turn chat into action, albeit more with a focus on cross-selling. Their current challenge is their need to manage their pivot and some customers that lost functionality that was important for them.

Salesforce

Salesforce offers two customer service solutions, the Salesforce Service Cloud and Desk.com, addressing different customer sizes. Desk.com is geared towards smaller organizations where the Service Cloud is enterprise scale. Both solutions offer multi channel support capabilities. Gartner Group, in their 2016 Magic Quadrant for Customer Engagement Centers states that “mobile chat” (their term for in-app messaging) is best handled by partner solutions that are available via the AppExchange market place.

Desk.com

Desk.com is Salesforces “Out-of-the-Box helpdesk for small businesses”. Being a member of the Salesforce family the solution has considerable grunt and exposure behind it. Desk.com is not a native mobile in-app support platform but a general support platform that allows for embedding support functionality inside mobile apps via an SDK. The SDK allows for the creation of tickets from within the mobile app and for knowledge base search with the knowledge base not being inside the app itself. In contrast to other providers Desk.com does not cater for conversational in-app support. The main support experience is provided outside the app. Being a member of the Salesforce family integration into other family members is a given, since they share the same platform. This includes a connection to the Sales Cloud that facilitates the conversion of support cases to sales opportunities. But at its root Desk.com is a helpdesk solution that got extended to cover mobile apps.

Service Cloud

The Service Cloud is the Salesforce customer service offering for enterprises. As such it offers a full fledged service solution that also extends into mobile devices via e.g. ticketing live chat, knowledge bases and support of communities. All this takes advantage of the powerful Salesforce platform. There, however, is no direct in-app support, which makes a good case for the integration of Helpshift.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a leading cloud based customer service platform, offering multi channel support. Zendesk features as a leader in the Gartner 2016 Magic Quadrant for Customer Engagement Centers. Zendesk is not a mobile native. Their chat widget integrates into web pages and the company does not offer in-app chat. Instead the company offers solutions that hook into existing messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp. They offer knowledge bases, support of communities, and portals. Zendesk has integrations into many other systems, including MS Dynamics and Salesforce. The support for messaging apps, besides Zendesk being competitively met by mobile in-app vendors, is the main reason for them appearing here.

What It Means

The in-app service market is a specialist market. If a strong support for mobile apps using a conversational interface and an in-app experience are required, not many players with the strength to support larger enterprises are left. This can be seen in the table below, which covers above solutions and is enriched by some generic help center functionality. Mobile In-App Support Provider Overview Zendesk and Salesforce both offer partner solutions to fulfill in-app service requirements. By themselves they are not in-app support players. Apptentive focuses on rating systems and surveys and is not a full-fledged player as well.. Intercom positions itself more as an engagement platform although customers seem to deploy it as a support platform, too. Without an own knowledge base capability it, however, misses an important capability. This leaves us with three vendors: Freshdesk, Helpshift, and LivePerson, with LviePerson currently pivoting from being a web based chat provider to an in-app service solution provider, which seems to cause existing customers some grief. The solution is also missing an in-app FAQ. Helpshift and Freshdesk as the front-runners are running very different strategies. For Freshdesk in-app support is one of their capabilities that they acquired over time and made part of their solution set. Helpshift totally focuses on in-app support, believing that mobile will be, if not already is, the dominant channel, which needs specialized support functionality to offer maximum service and experience.

2016 has been predicted to be the year of conversational commerce, and I’d say that this prediction largely held true. Conversational interfaces have become more and more mainstream, and their support by AI and bots has become all the rage. While people more and more turn to their smartphones and Google to find service and get answers to their questions, companies are increasingly looking at bot support to increase the efficiency of their call centers. But where is reality? In their 2016 hype cycle on emerging technologies Gartner places

• Conversational UIs in the innovation trigger phase with a predicted time of 5 – 10 years to mainstream adoptions
• Machine Learning on the peak of inflated expectations with a period of 2 – 5 years to mainstream adoption

Forrester Research in their recent AI tech radar places virtual agents and machine learning into their growth phases of their respective life cycles, giving them 5 – 10 years to mainstream, while acknowledging a successful trajectory. So, clearly, AI and conversational systems are strategic. At the same time Abinash Tripathy, CEO of helpshift, a leading helpdesk company providing users with instant, proactive, and personalized in-app support, feels that “we are closer to IoT than to having really helpful bots”. Some bots are actually harming the customer experience. And he is right. Why? Several reasons. Essentially artificial intelligence, driven by machine learning or deep learning, is not yet intelligent enough. Too many bots are still driven by decision trees, which severely limit the possible conversations that the bot can serve. Second, bots’ ability to understand natural language is still lacking, albeit improving, and probably improving fast. At the same time a handover to a human agent, or another bot – think bot-swarm – is often poor or non-existent, leaving the customer with an unresolved question and in limbo. This leads to a poor customer experience. Additionally, the bot’s, as well as the overall help system’s, integration into a knowledge base is crucial, but often underdeveloped. A customer query needs to be translated into a meaningful query to the knowledge base and/or additional information. Think “What is the status of my recent order?” or: “I cannot receive calls but can dial out?”. This needs deep integration into a corporate knowledge base as well as transactional systems. While a human agent can cover the lack of systems integration, a bot cannot achieve this. A bot is depending on the intelligent, and continuous indexing of corporate knowledge. Again, poor customer experience. In summary, Abinash maintains that “the need most bots are filling should not require an artificially intelligent conversation. If they are, they’re probably not doing it very well (yet). Rather, the best chatbots allow users to interact with their surroundings (like the baseball game example), act as refined search engines, or provide real-time updates”. At the moment “Chatbots are best used to relay simple updates”. But, wait! On one hand AI and bots are part of the future and then they are not really useful but harm the customer experience. Isn’t that a contradiction in itself? No, it is not. Merely a question of Thinking Big while Acting Small and doing first things first. As I have written before an important part of providing good service is being available to help the customers on their preferred channels, at the time of their choosing, and at their pace. And one of the main channels is the smartphone, the second is chat. Additionally, people are starting with search before going for direct support. So, the way to help customers is an integrated, intelligent, efficient service offering that helps them getting to the information that they want with minimal effort on their side. The keywords here are: Mobile, app, search, and chat. Combining this we arrive at an offering that offers customer service directly in app, with an integrated, local knowledgebase, integrated and embedded chat, as well as the easy ability to turn the conversation into a voice (phone) conversation. Due to being embedded into the app, this offering also helps the agents by delivering contextually relevant information that shortens time to resolution. The same works for embedding this offering into a web site. Add a back end that efficiently supports the agents with automation, workflow, collaboration tools, a clean user interface, and that integrates well with community systems, knowledge bases, other OLTPs including CRM systems, and the enterprise- and web content management systems and there is a strong foundation for improving even further. Once this foundation is in place, AI and bots can be deployed in a useful manner, first starting in a learning-only mode, then more and more engaging in customer initiated as well as company initiated interactions. These bots can ensure quick reaction; they gather missing relevant information can already offer solutions for the simpler problems. Minimally they keep the customer engaged and do a seamless handover to a human agent. This does not only help the customer, but the agent, too, as she is prepared and can dig right into the problem at hand. As the chatbots continue to be supported by a learning system they ‘learn’ from ongoing conversations and therefore the problems they solve can become increasingly complex. This fact, plus their ability to support the agent via continuously suggesting good solutions based upon the conversation flow and the knowledge base further increase the efficiency of the supporting agents who can increasingly support on more challenging problems instead of being in the need to ask repeatedly for the same information and answer the same ole questions over and over.