To demonstrate the value proposition for Artificial Intelligence(AI) and Machine Learning (ML), we recommend concentrating on unlocking insights from vast amounts of unstructured data to help augment human intelligence, create process efficiencies and lower operational costs. We have also found that the best results tend to come from a business-led/IT supported model.
Four key questions are central to scoping out an initial minimal viable product (MVP) for a valid use case.
Which persona are you trying to assist – external or internal? The answer is not a value judgement, but rather a focus that impacts some of the design considerations and decisions. As an example, in a contact center, the focus for the customer service rep is productivity – quickly giving the rep as much information as possible. This usually means fewer prompts, fewer stops, one- or two-word questions, and fewer and more dense answers. Contrast that with the external customer, where we tend to focus on a warm and engaging experience that incrementally guides the customer to the answers they need. This typically means more prompts, more questions, a wider variety of natural language to ask the questions, and more and shorter (more digestible) answers.
How are you are trying to helpthat persona? This aspect typically helps us hone in on part of an initial business process to understand how we are going transform — whether by adding more data for consideration, augmenting analysis, and/or automating the execution of steps.
Where does the data come from to support this initiative? This is often the most challenging aspect for several reasons: There may be more questions than current answers, the current answers may be inconsistent or conflicting, or the current answers exist, but may not easily understood or comprehensible. All of these situations tend to require focus on curating, modifying, and/or creating content in order to get the right answers.
What is the value? Value can be determined most successfully when we can be as specific as possible. Very often, benefits can be described in terms of metrics. From a best practice perspective, having specific metrics-based objectives makes it clearer for business and IT to determine the value. Examples include: a) higher customer satisfaction, measured by Net Promotor Scores or revenue increases, b) lower costs, shown by reduced handling times or increased processing volumes with the same staff and c) better employee engagement, indicated by reduced attrition and training time.
To further the dialogue as you consider progressing towards transforming your business by leveraging artificial intelligence, here are some additional questions to guide your thinking:
Are you focused on transformation and innovation?
For what initiatives are you considering AI/ML support?
What business outcomes are you driving?
What is your current level of experience with AI and ML?
Have you identified any use cases or do you need some assistance in defining them?
The key to evolving your approach from MVPs to multiple initiatives developed and deployed in production at scale, is to effectively balance faster time-to-value and major transformation outcomes. This balance demonstrates business results in smaller time increments and sets the foundation for flexible and continuous transformation and innovation.
“Software is eating the world.” That was the bold proclamation renowned innovator and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen expressed in an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal. More and more businesses are being run by software, he argued, or are differentiating themselves and disrupting their competitors and industries using the same. Today, that article is regarded as one of the seminal works in shaping how people think about digital transformation—or using digital technologies to bring about great change in the way individuals and organizations think, operate, communicate or collaborate.
Often, at the heart of many digital transformation efforts is the desire to enable the organization to be more agile or responsive to change. This requires looking for ways to dramatically reduce the time needed to develop and deploy software, and simplify and optimize the processes around the maintenance of software so it can be deployed quickly and with greater efficiency.
Another key outcome that is part of many digital transformation efforts is enabling the organization to be more innovative — finding ways to transform how the organization operates and realize dramatic improvements in efficiency or effectiveness; or creating new value by either delivering new products and services or creating new business models.
For organizations using conventional approaches to developing software, this can be a tall order. Developing new applications can take too long or require very specialized and expensive skills that are in short supply or hard to retain. Maintaining existing programs can be daunting as well, as they struggle with increasing complexity and the weight of mounting technical debt.
Enter “low-code” or “no-code” application development platforms. This emerging category of software provides organizations with an easier to understand — often visual — declarative style of software deployment, augmented by a simpler maintenance and deployment model.
Essentially these tools allow developers, or even non-developers, to build applications quickly, easily, and rapidly on an on-going basis. Unlike Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools of the past, they are often offered-as-a-service and accessed via the cloud, with ready integrations to various data sources and other applications (often via RESTful APIs) available out of the box. They also come with integrated tools for application lifecycle management, such as versioning, testing, and deployment.
With these new platforms, organizations can realize three things:
1. Faster time to value
The more intuitive nature of these platforms allows organizations to quickly get started and create functional prototypes without having to code from scratch. Pre-built and reusable templates of common application patterns are often provided, allowing developers to create new applications in hours or days, rather than weeks or months. When coupled with agile development approaches, these platforms allow developers to move though the process of ideating , prototyping, testing, releasing and refining more quickly than they would otherwise do with conventional application development approaches.
2. Greater efficiency at scale
Low-code/no-code application development platforms allow developers to focus on building the unique or differentiating functionality of their applications and not worry about basic underlying services/functionality such as authentication, user management, data retrieval and manipulation, integration, reporting, device-specific optimization, and others.
These platforms also provide tools for developers to easily manage the user interface, data model, business rules and definitions, making on-going management easy and straightforward. So easy in fact that even less experienced developers can do it themselves, lessening the need for costly or hard-to-find expert developers. These tools also insulate the need for the developer and operations folks to keep updating the frameworks, infrastructure and other underlying technology behind the application, as the platform provider manages these themselves.
3. Innovative Thinking
Software development is a highly creative and iterative process. Using low-code or no-code development platforms, in combination with user-centric approaches such as design thinking, organizations can rapidly bring an idea to pilot in order to get early user feedback or market validation without spending too much time and effort (so-called “Minimum Viable product” as coined by Eric Ries in his book “The Lean Startup”).
Not only that, because these platforms make it easy to get started, even non-professional developers or “citizen developers,” who more likely than not have a deeper or more intimate understanding of the business and end user or customer needs, can develop the MVP themselves. This allows the organization to translate ideas to action much faster and innovate on a wider scale.
While offering a lot of benefits, low-code/no-code application development platforms are certainly not a wholesale replacement to conventional application development methods (at least not yet). There are still situations where full control of the technology stack can benefit the organization—especially if it’s the anchor or foundation of the business, the source of differentiation, or source of competitive advantage. However, in most cases organizations will benefit from having these types of platforms as part of their toolbox, especially as they embark on any digital transformation journey.
For businesses to be agile and respond quickly to changing market conditions, they need to provide business users with real-time and near-time operational data. That means harnessing data from devices and tackling the latency challenge. In 2020, we will see more organisations shift their design thinking from services and systems for people to services and systems for machines. The move to machine-to-machine (M2M) systems also means processing is moving to the network edge, where the data is.
Action at the edge
Organisations are experimenting with extending data clusters to the edge to reduce latency, gain operational efficiencies and improve products and services. Fast food company Chick-fil-A is running Kubernetes on 6,000 kitchen devices in all 2,000 of its restaurants. This is part of the chain’s internet of things (IoT) strategy to collect and analyze more data to improve throughput, operational efficiency and, most of all, customer service.
The move to M2M dovetails with the notion of catering to local markets using local data. This will foster new design architectures that take into account privacy, security and regulatory concerns regarding the “frame of reference” of data — i.e., the notion of localised data being more valuable than global data in terms of its usability and mining. When organisations consider modernizing their IT operations and changing the way microservices are deployed — especially large multinationals with a wide global reach — it becomes critical for them to consider the advantages of targeting a geography locally, and realizing that there are new tools and ways of doing this.
Another facet driving the change in design thinking is the need to make maximum use of computing resources. Whereas the decision frequency of a person ranges between 1-15 hertz, which means that people can decipher information and make a decision in about ½-1 second, today’s microprocessors can operate at gigahertz and process information in nanoseconds. If these processors are not operating as fast as they can, they are just space eaters. Organisations want to keep their processors as busy as possible, which means designing for billions of decisions or operations per second. Otherwise, they may end up paying for unused capacity.
Signs of M2M
Two examples of M2M architecture are SAP Leonardo and KubeEdge. Through SAP Leonardo intelligent technologies and capabilities, SAP is integrating its ERP applications with IoT platforms, combining traditional IT services with M2M capabilities. Importantly, SAP can address broader markets than niche IoT platforms.
KubeEdge, built on Kubernetes, is an open source platform for building edge computing solutions that extend to the cloud. The platform supports network, application deployment and metadata synchronization between the cloud and edge. It extends the Kubernetes ecosystem from cloud to edge and provides benefits such as lower latency, low resource consumption and applications at the edge that can run in offline mode.
The road ahead
We are starting to observe a shift in IT design from IT for humans to IT for machines. These design patterns deliver richer experiences because they enable substantially more processing in the same experience time. Design shifts will lead to changes in batch processing and stream processing architectures, which are constantly being updated and reimagined with better M2M capabilities. Data and analytics will continue moving to the edge where the machines are, to analyze the massive influx of IoT data and provide maximum throughput with minimum latency. Rapid deployments of these transformational architectures may not be immediate, but over time these new architectures will be a forcing function for IT modernization.
Developing high-performing teams will be the focus of many enterprises in 2020. Companies will confront the fallacy that pace is what unlocks the company’s full potential and recognize that how the company organizes its people and information flow is what determines performance.
Organizing for a dynamic and complex environment requires a much different structure than the traditional command-and-control pyramid. Talent acquisition and development strategies must be built on a team-of-teams approach consisting of multidimensional individuals, rather than traditional siloed teams consisting of single subject matter experts. Put differently, the focus shifts from developing so-called 10x individuals to developing 20x teams.
Lessons from the battlefield
The transformation of the battlefield and the U.S. military’s adaptation offers an excellent case study, specifically the experience in Ramadi, Iraq. The unpredictability and dynamic conditions of the battlefield are similar to the current business environment: combating insurgents who utilize asymmetrical tactics and are well equipped with the latest technology, while having to maintain and grow the customer base (citizenry).
The “clear, hold and build” strategy that worked in Ramadi revealed that capabilities such as raids had been elevated to the level of strategy. Modern business has done something similar by elevating the increase in pace, agile and DevOps capabilities to strategy. However, merely holding meetings more frequently and in a different manner falls short of desired results. What companies need, as the military learned, is more flexible joint power from multidimensional teams that provide multiple options in the face of volatility, rather than the limited options of a traditional pyramid of teams.
As retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal explains in Team of Teams, the military in Iraq needed to be not only efficient but also adaptable. It became a priority to focus on reconfiguring to be able to deal with volatility quickly. Simply deploying more resources and putting more people to work, to become more efficient in the current operating model, was not enough. As McChrystal points out, the traditional pyramid constrains team productivity due to choke points, ineffective communication channels, stifled creativity and inadequate response time.
So the military created linkages between teams, put people from different service branches and agencies on the same team, and shared information widely so everyone understood the larger mission and could make decisions accordingly. McChrystal understood that “technology had changed in such a way that management had become a limfac [limiting factor].”
The same is true in today’s business environment, where an explosion of technological progress — improved capabilities to track, measure and predict via big data and advanced analytics; moonshot projects; and unconventional business models — has created a more interdependent, fast-paced and complex business environment. In this environment, companies need interconnected multidimensional teams that can adapt and scale.
The new teams
The new interconnected teams have diverse skills that capitalize on the team’s collective intelligence and increase a team’s productivity. The shared sense of purpose and mentoring that occurs within the team not only strengthens the relationships and performance but also mitigates knowledge gaps between senior and junior employees.
Populate these teams with double-deep personnel and now you have the ability to scale across the company, purposefully cross training your people to fill gaps. This creates a natural talent pipeline. Rotating people through different teams means employees advance through project-based promotions and team assignments rather than the traditional subjective requirements.
In order to be effective and maximize the potential of these multifaceted teams, they need to be empowered to make decisions. This does not mean they operate totally on their own, but they “have implicit trust that their senior leaders will back their decisions,” as Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin point out in Extreme Ownership. With proper decentralized command, teams that are closest to the situation can execute in a manner that supports the overarching goal without having to ask for permission.
In 2020 leaders will determine how to, in the words of McChrystal, “scale the fluidity of teams across entire organizations” amidst the chaos of ongoing business transformation. Ultimately, building better teams will build better individuals and enterprises. The ability to develop and lead a network of high-performing teams will be key to business success in the post-digital age.
A single-page application (SPA) is a website designing approach where the content of every new page is aided not from loading new HTML pages but is produced dynamically through JavaScript’s capability to manipulate the DOM elements on the preexisting page itself. A single-page application approach enables the user to continue interacting and consuming with the page while new elements are being fetched or updated, and can lead to much faster interactions and content reloading. Besides, the HTML5 History API enables us to change the page’s URL without reloading the page, letting us create separate URLs for different views. Once inside of the SPA, the application can dynamically get the content from the server through AJAX requests or WebSockets. This enables the browser to keep the current page open while requesting the server in the background to get additional content or new “pages” altogether. If you’ve ever initiated a search query and had halfway results appear below the input form as you were typing, then you have observed dynamic queries taking place in the background that updated those DOM elements. As a matter of fact, the server queries can fetch any sort of data, time and again, taking the form of JSON strings, payloads, or even HTML elements that are already prepared for rendering.
Advantages of a Single-Page Application:
SPA is quick, as most resources (CSS + HTML + Scripts) are only loaded once during the entire lifespan of the application. Only data is transferred back and forth. In the case of single-page applications, only the necessary part of content gets updated rather than updating the whole page. This increases the speed of the website considerably. Throughout the entire lifespan of the application, most of the resources like CSS or scripts or HTML are loaded just once. It is only data that gets moved here and there. Now, this can be considered as a great benefit if the web page takes higher than 200 milliseconds to load as this signifies that it can affect the business and its sales significantly.
SPAs can be effortlessly debugged with Chrome, as you can monitor network operations, investigate page elements and data associated with it. Compared to Multi-page Applications, here, the debugging is easier as single-page applications come with their very own Chrome developer tools. By using SPAs, you get to monitor the network operations, investigate the page elements, and check the data which is associated with the pages
The development is streamlined and simplified. There is absolutely no need to write code to provide pages on the server. It is much easier, to begin with as you can usually kick off development from a file, without using any server at all.
Users get to relish a simple linear experience through single-page applications. Just like the web apps, these applications, too, come with a transparent starting, middle layer, and end. Many of the web apps like Trello, Slack, and Spotify offer an outstanding interactive experience to the user by utilizing parallax scrolling, amazing transitions, and effects to depict the customer journey completely. With SPAs, you need not click on endless links, and here scrolling is convenient and uninterrupted. The single-page applications come with a scroll, which makes them the best choice for mobile users who are accustomed to working with scrolling on their apps.
A SPA can cache and efficiently use local data. A SPA stockpiles all the data that it gets after it sends a request to a server. It can also work offline by using this data. The server can get synchronized with local data when a secure connection is available in case the user currently has poor connectivity.
When is it better to use the SPA?
When should you think about using a single-page application? First, if you’d like a fruitful interaction between the customer and your application, an SPA is almost a requisite. Applications like Google Maps make broad use of this approach to provide live view changes as you scroll from a place to another or click on place markers to view pictures of a particular place. Secondly, if you want to provide live updates on the page, you’ll most certainly need to make use of this approach; data streaming, notifications, and real-time charts require the utilization of such an approach. The server-side rendering method discussed above can mend the situation for load-times, as well as provide some essential readability for users without JavaScript enabled. We recommend at least having base functionality for your content visible for users that don’t have JavaScript enabled so that they’ll have the chance to decide to allow javascript based on what they’ve seen from the initial page load.
Why Choose Anteelo?
We’ll migrate your conventional multi-page site to a single page site
We’ll make your single-page app SEO-friendly, to avoid issues and ensure your website will be successfully crawled and indexed by search engines
To ensure your app’s security, we’ll select a web host that offers dependable security measures
Our developers are experts in developing single-page applications of both types and will gladly help you choose the kind of single-page app that suits your business best
Our dedicated QA team will ensure that your app works flawlessly on all modern devices
Just a few years ago, Single Page Applications were a game-changing technology. Now, they are becoming increasingly popular. To understand their massive impact on web development, it is enough to have a look at the examples which represent best practices of a single page application.
Gmail — when you click on a button or a link, the page doesn’t change. JS code rewrites the information and brings forward the message or folder you requested.
Google Docs — All changes are real-time. The chances of progress loss are zero thanks to a consistent auto-saving feature.
Twitter — You can do necessary activities (tweet, retweet, follow, upload a picture, etc.) without having to leave the page.
A growing number of businesses, including companies in the Retail and eCommerce, Entertainment, Media, eLearning, and Travel industries, depend on their online presence. As a JavaScript software development company, Anteelo provides application development services to support your online marketing, CRM and loyalty programs with up-to-date technology solutions that deliver tangible business value by encouraging users to follow the smart marketing journey you design for them.
The future of work is bringing new challenges for Human Capital Management (HCM) practitioners, especially as the skills shortage becomes a day-to-day reality. In the near future, the people responsible for people in your organization — from CHROs to payroll specialists, will need more time to strategize, analyze, and innovate. With truly innovative HCM technology, not only will employees have more time, employee productivity and engagement will increase.
Workday Payroll is designed to help employees increase efficiencies, eliminate errors, and anticipate changes, particularly around compliance or tax related items—a competitive advantage in a fast-changing regulatory environment. Plus, Workday Payroll not only saves employees time, but perhaps most critically, reduces questions to the payroll department and increases insight around the complex process of compensation.
Workday Payroll best practices
Our Workday experts at Anteelo recommend starting with the following simple steps to drive user engagement and adoption to get the most out of Workday Payroll dashboards:
Share—and share often.
For employees involved in the day-to-day work of payroll (or any HCM work), new technology requires that management does their due diligence in communicating the change. But we’re all bombarded with hundreds of messages every day; so this requires creating messaging that has meaning:
Empathize with the difficulties of change (even positive change is stressful!).
Make it personal: Share how Workday Payroll dashboards will benefit both employees and administrators in day-to-day work. For example, teach employees how to easily compare pay periods and make updates, such as tax elections, from one place.
Show payroll partners and administrators how the dashboard gives them instant visibility into the status of each payroll, retro differences to be paid, and employees affected by regulatory changes (such as tax rates).
Follow-up with non-users.
It’s simple: Ask employees who aren’t using Workday Payroll dashboards why they aren’t. Engage employees by providing more training, enabling one-on-ones with power users, giving employees extra time to learn about the dashboards, and/or scheduling frequent check-ins to answer questions and provide encouragement.
Invite existing users to share why they love Workday Payroll dashboards.
Ask employees who are using Workday Payroll dashboards what they love about it. And then ask them to share this with their peers. Happy users are the best advocates for new technology. Product evangelists—your employees who love payroll dashboards—can greatly influence others to get on board.
Make sure updates go smoothly.
Build a repeatable test plan for updates and always communicate any upcoming changes to Workday Payroll dashboards far in advance. If you need help, our experts can help you develop a solid testing plan that is both repeatable and not overly taxing on resources.
Plan ahead—and communicate frequently—about big events, such as audits.
One of the advantages of Workday Payroll dashboards is that they enable users to start the audit process early. Help employees understand that auditing early and often, using the tools in payroll dashboards, can make the end of the year far less stressful—and even reduce the need for overtime around the holidays.
Creating a positive, engaging user experience is the first step to getting the most out of Workday Payroll.
It’s imperative that employees doing the day-to-day payroll work need to know how Workday Payroll dashboards help them personally do their jobs better. Organizations can drive greater adoption and engagement by actively sharing the employee-centric benefits of payroll dashboards, encouraging existing users to advocate for the technology, and making it easier for non-users to become engaged users.
Whether dealing with the current coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis or anticipating a future natural disaster, organizations need to prepare for emergencies that require employees to suddenly switch from a corporate environment to a home office. Even once the crisis arrives, organizations might have to drastically adjust their plans to address the scale required. Continuity plans must encompass not only the technology required to keep the business up and running but also the human aspect — making sure employees are well-trained and prepared to work remotely. As the size of the remote workforce suddenly increases, here is a checklist for IT leaders to consider when tackling the technology piece of the puzzle:
Network capacity planning: Conduct a capacity analysis to determine whether internet bandwidth is sufficient to handle the increased WAN traffic that occurs when large numbers of employees access the network. Additional items on the capacity planning checklist include firewalls, VPNs, and other remote access-related technologies that might be overwhelmed by the increased volume of traffic coming from outside of corporate headquarters.
Security monitoring: Intensify activities designed to detect and prevent attacks. Hackers are likely to take this opportunity to increase malicious activities. “Secure the Human” training can be delivered remotely to ensure that employees remember the organization’s security practices.
Identity and access management: Beef up identity and access management for remote workers through methods such as multifactor authentication.
Data protection: Ensure that security is extended and corporate data is encrypted to prevent the unintentional or malicious exposure of sensitive data.
VPNs: Make sure that VPN agents are installed on every device that connects to the corporate network to provide secure remote access.
Devices: Prepare for a shortage of devices to support the growing number of remote workers. Have a contingency purchase plan as well as a template for quickly configuring the device and loading the appropriate software.
Bring your own device (BYOD): Consider BYOD as supply chains are strained and the ability to get the needed hardware to employees becomes increasingly difficult. Using a cloud-based portal, employees can self-register their devices and download VPNs and other security tools, with the ability to segregate corporate data from personal information.
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI): Consider deploying a thin client architecture for remote workers as another option. However, upfront planning is required to make sure the thin clients are available and that the back-end server infrastructure is in place to support the thin client model.
Collaboration: Provide strong communication and collaboration capabilities to help keep employees productive and engaged. Organizations may want to look at videoconferencing tools to compensate for the lack of face time to help employees feel more connected. Collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Office 365 with Teams activated and G Suite, as well as videoconferencing services such as Zoom, are providing new ways of working, connecting and collaborating. Training employees on how to conduct work in these virtual spaces is critical.
Omnichannel support: Be prepared for a significant volume increase for IT support. Some employees may have been abruptly moved to a remote access environment, while others may now find themselves with new devices, software or tools they have never used before. And as a remote working model typically provides increases in flexibility, spikes in support needs may not follow the traditional patterns of regular business hours. The IT department needs to be prepared to offer omnichannel and remote support, including video options for face-to-face communications. Of course, service desk employees may themselves be working remotely, so pay special attention to make sure they have the capacity and the tools to respond to service desk issues from their home offices. Proactive and predictive analytics tools, combined with an easy-to-use support portal, can drastically reduce the calls to a strained service desk for rudimentary problems.
As we all know, even the best-laid plans don’t always work perfectly. In the midst of a global crisis, organizations might find that their business continuity plans haven’t accounted for an unprecedented level of scale, urgency, capacity and employee needs. In these instances, organizations should stay in close contact with their preferred vendors. There is no need to go it alone when expert help and support are available.
Unexpected challenges can cause maximum disruption to people’s lives and to business. The way in which we mitigate risks to ease the strain on businesses and their employees will ensure an organization’s ability to continue into the future.
In a time when the internet is filled with bits of advice telling entrepreneurs to opt for a mobile-first approach, can you really afford the source of your future business empire to have a bad reputation online?
The challenges that a mobile app startup face is already a lot to ignore and left unseen. And when you add the issue of bad app reputation in the mix, the whole app journey becomes a lot more haywire, instantly.
Answering how to protect your brand’s reputation in the dog eat dog world can be an act lot easier said than done. In a time when there is a constant race to win and then rule the already crowded space, it can get really difficult for you to maintain that nothing bad is said about your offering. Especially when a lot rides on it – Uninstall Rates, Abandonment, Decline in Downloads, etc. (Talking about downloads, know how to get million downloads on your app)
Every single day past the day when you launch your application act as a landmine. While you can be overly careful to never step on them, chances are that when you do, it would take a lot to recover from the damage.
In this article, we are going to give you the secrets of how you can manage your brand’s reputation, both on the app and in terms of your empire online.
Refraining from spilling out the secrets from any single POV, we are going to look at three different stages – Prevention. Manage. Secure – of mobile app reputation management.
Without further delay, let us get to it, straight-away.
Set up Listening Tools
Much before you even approach the submit app button, you should set up the subscriptions for app monitoring tools – the first step to How to Monitor Your App’s Reputation.
The idea of these software is that they fetch everything that is being mentioned about your application online and at the same time, they update you of new reviews on the Play Store or App Store.
There are a number of application reputation management platforms you can opt for in the quest to be one step ahead of combating negative reviews about your brand – Rankur, Brandeye, Social Mention, amongst others.
Set a Team to Reply in Real-Time
Before your app hits the market, you need a team in place who would be responsible for answering all the app reviews in real time in the play store and app store. For one of the biggest way of how apps influence brand reputation is by not replying to the users.
Doing this will ensure that no bad mention goes unaddressed. Because an unaddressed review is in many ways equal to being a catalyst to a tarnished reputation.
Bring Troubleshooting Tips to Website
One of the root causes of genuine bad reviews and mentions of any brand is users not getting a solution to their problem. So, when you give them a platform full of troubleshooting solutions that they can apply and get a redressal, the chances of them passing a bad review will automatically be nullified.
So, we recommend is that you hire online experienced online mobile app reputation manager and brainstorm all the different scenarios that the users can face which can frustrate them and then work on troubleshooting guide to solve it for them in one place.
Being prepared for the somewhat inevitable time of negative feedback and mentions can be one of the most sound decisions that you can take in the app journey.
And now that we have looked at the precautionary tales, let us now get into the ways you can combat bad reviews on your app in real-time – whether they are in the stores or on the social media. Here are the tips for app reputation management when you are in the second stage.
Reply in Real Time
This pointer here, to reply in real time, has to be the mantra of your mobile app reputation management. You will have to ensure that a team is always ready to reply on the negative feedback with a solution or an apologetic message.
No matter what technicality the problem’s solution calls for, your mobile reputation management strategy should ensure that the first level of message always goes through in real-time. None of your users should ever feel abandoned, for it would only leave room for more frustration and thus the bad word of mouth marketing.
Do Not Be Defensive
A very important thing to understand when tackling bad reviews is that the users who are making them are frustrated. Now, no matter how small you believe the problem is and how invalid the users’ responses are to it, make sure your reply is always on a defensive note. No matter what word the users make use of, your reply always have to be on the softer side.
Keep the Reply Very Short
The number one formula in every guide to increase the prestige of mobile apps is to never use the comment section of the stores or any social media platforms as your way to reply paragraph-sized solutions or justifications to the complaining user.
Try to keep your comment very short and precise, for example, you can take 3 lines as your standard response size.
Take the Commentator on a Private Channel
Refrain from justifying or clarifying the miscommunication on a social platform which is open for everyone to see. After all, if you pass a negative message online as a brand, the user out of ego will only take it forward and beyond, in place of understanding the situation.
So, simply mention your email id in the comment and ask the users to contact there – thus taking them away from the platform where there is space for the good reviews to grow.
Reply When the Issue is Resolved
Make it a mandatory process to reply to your customers when the issue is resolved in a timely manner. Even if it takes a week on end, make sure you come back to the comment and drop in a line saying that the issue is resolved now and that you are sorry that it caused inconvenience in the first place and that you value the association that they have with your brand.
Now that we have looked at the ways to combat and get your negative reputation in control while it is happening, it is now time for the last segment – Repair Damage. The part we look at mobile app reputation management solutions for after the plans are retouched and users are now content.
Experience Before Ratings
One of the most annoying things which only aggravates the frustration of a bad experience offering mobile app is when the app asks for reviews at every possible occasion.
While it is important to ask for reviews, it can backfire when you have not timed it right. So, let the users arrive at a particular app stage before you pop up the message to leave a rating.
Also, instead of directing them straight to the store, first give them the option to share what they are feeling in the app – this way you will be able to create a gap between negative feedbacks and the stores.
Influencer Marketing
If there is anything that marketing has taught us, it is the fact that when you attach a reliable face to a product, the trust sentiment automatically flows between the face and the product.
Following the same formula, it would help if you introduce an influencer into your mobile app promotion strategy.
After all is said and done, the one compressed secret to managing and reimaging your app’s image in the market and to achieve the fruits of your online app reputation management labor is to be present at all times in a non-defensive mode.
Are you facing a time of bad app reputation? Let us help you get to the root of it.
“There are two big opportunities in the future financial industry. One is online banking, where all the financial institutions go online; the other is internet finance, which is purely led by outsiders.” – Jack Ma
The Finance and banking economy across the whole globe is facing a new level influx of changes coming its way since the past many years. And the changes are in no way showing a picture of stoppage – giving no breather to the finance sector to hold and react.
First from a traditional banking system to digital then from fiat currency to digital currency, and now while the Finance world was still getting habitual to all this modernism, a new trend entered the domain, introducing itself as the future finance and banking ecosystem.
This latest trend in banking technology that is soon making an entry in the world is TechFin. But what is TechFin? And what impact would it carry?
This latest trend in banking technology that is soon making an entry in the world is TechFin. But what is TechFin? And what impact would it carry?
While closely resembling the concept that we have already seen and warmed up to, FinTech, the idea in itself is very different. Something that is now slowly causing the rise in search engine queries and queries that financial software development agencies are receiving: FinTech vs TechFin: Is there a difference? And if there is, then where the future of Finance and Banking lies between TechFin and FinTech?
Let us try to look at the answer of both in this piece.
The beginning of modern financial software development began roughly 10 years ago during the global financial crisis, which convinced the incumbents that they were fighting for survival. This provided a great deal of room for innovators to build businesses, and this is when Square got started, which was a seminal moment.
And as the economy got stable, so did the hold of players who entered with the support of financial application development companies to take some of the banking work away from banks. Ever since Square and PayPal, the innovations in Finance industry saw no stopping. One after another new offerings kept coming in the domain, promising to set newer standards in user experience.
And the movement that started then has today come to a point which was difficult to imagine years ago – the stage where tech and finance merge.
While FinTech had already created a pivotal position in the users’ life, TechFin – a.k.a the movement – is something that will bring a monumental shift in not just the use of financial institutions but also the reason for their existence.
Before we move on to the phases of how FinTech came into existing and where the future of FinTech is headed – TechFin, let me answer the glaring question first – FinTech vs TechFin: What is the difference. For the article will only dissect the other in much detail from here on.
Difference Between FinTech vs TechFin
Putting it simply, FinTech is the concept where the Finance industry starts using technology to offer better customer experience. TechFin solutions are where the Technology Domain enters the Finance sector to change how users interact with the industry.
The examples of TechFin organizations include Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple (GAFA) in the U.S. and Baidu, Alibaba & Tencent (BAT) in China.
Now that we have looked at what differentiates both the concept, let us talk about the different phases that the Finance sector has seen and identify the space where TechFin entered.
The Evolution of Finance and Technology
The rate at which the Finance and technology industry is evolving is one that is in many ways bringing a stark transformation in the domain. What was Finance decades before is not what it is now and won’t be the same next decade. Let us track the steps of Finance and Technology’s unison movement.
Stage 1: Exclusion
The first step of fintech or techfin evolution is the era when there was no technology in the picture. Financial consumers had to wait in long lines in banks to perform any and all types of money related work.
Stage 2: Mobile Payments
The next phase was when payments – a small fragment of the banking sector came on mobile banking services. Users now standing in queues were making payments of bills, electricity, and water on mobile through apps that came majorly from non-banking institutions.
Stage 3: Mobile Basic Banking – The Now
Seeing the ease that this digital revolution in finance was offering to the millions of their user base, a number of banking institutions also entered the space by developing a financial application for their bank.
Meanwhile, the non-banking technology companies too expanded their offerings and entered services like lending, credit facility etc. This stage, right here is where the Finance industry entered into a competition with technology firms to emerge as the best service provider – the stage which was known in the fintech app development world as online banking.
Stage 4: Full-Service Mobile Banking – The Future of Banking Technology 2020
The stage where the Finance and technology combination is headed on to next, is one where the competition that started in stage four only becomes much cut-throat. The time to come is set to move from FinTech to TechFin. The technology based companies who made an entry in the banking services will only make their presence stronger and the Financial institutions will start involving technology at a greater level in their processes.
Since we have looked into both – what differentiated FinTech from TechFin and the evolution of Finance, it is time to give an in-depth share of attention to what is TechFin and what are TechFin benefits, at the outlook of the basis on which it operates and where does the future of financial services industry lies.
The Basis of TechFin Ecosystem
A. Customer Base That is Willing to Experiment
The biggest perk that operates in the favour of TechFin is the fact that the user base that a technology firm is able to attract. A number that almost always is much greater than the number of users a finance firm is able to acquire.
One of the reasons why technical companies are able to attract more users through their finance app development effort is also because of the subconscious image. When someone uses a banking app, there is a subconscious fear of something going wrong, while the same is not there when the app offering the same service comes from a non-banking parent company.
Lastly, the consumer base that is present in the case of TechFin apps is a lot more diverse as compared to the restricted FinTech user group.
Lastly, the consumer base that is present in case of TechFin apps is a lot more diverse as compared to the restricted FinTech user group.
B. A Strong Technical Infrastructure
The reason why technological firms have an upper hand when it comes to boasting their infrastructure excellence is very obvious. When a technology firm enters the finance domain, it is already armored to handle the user flow of millions in real-time.
After all, even in the race of coming out as the ultimate finance sector leaders, the finance companies take help of technical firms to help develop their infrastructure. This partnership is a key enabler of the future of the financial industry.
C. Better Mechanisms of Data Management
The whole data related cycle in case of TechFin firms is a lot better than that of FinTech agencies. The difference in how well the data flows in TechFin vs FinTech can be seen in the simple fact how users are a lot more comfortable sharing their data with Technological firms as compared to Financial.
While on the one hand, one of the biggest challenges of banking software development is to get quality data out of the users, the technological firms, on the other hand, simply have to give the users a form and they themselves send it back, all filled.
In addition to this, the system and algorithms needed to manage data are in themselves a lot more readily available to a technological company than their financial counterparts.
D. Similar Regulation Set
Unlike normally assumed, the level of regulation levied on technological firms that enter the finance domain are the same as the financial institution’s who involve technology in their offerings. So, there is hardly any legality that is standing in front of TechFin as a roadblock.
The TechFin segment of the Finance sector, as we just read, is paving the grounds to enter and transform the segment. But does it mean the end of traditional banking as we know it?
The answer of where is the future of finance, lies with the finance economy itself. The truth is, the time will come when TechFin and FinTech companies will merge and their offerings will become similar if not competitive.
And when the time does come, the true benefit will lie in FinTech collaborating with TechFin and becoming one with the latter. For, individually, both domains, no matter how far and big they grow, will have some spaces left to be filled. Plus, the mix of subconscious carefulness and easy flowing user experience will only be achieved upon the transformation of FinTech into TechFin. Now, whether the merger happens or not, one thing is certain – the Banking industry is destined to change and Fintech transformation is bound to happen. It is not going to be the ecosystem that Generation X operated in.
Gone is the time when education ecosystem was restricted to brick and mortar schools. And even the time when people, because of lack of funds had to keep their dreams on hold. The present now belongs to MOOC apps like Coursera and the supporting questions that surround the question – What is the cost of Coursera like app development?
When we talk about mLearning, there are few names that come on top of our head almost instantly – Coursera, Udemy, Lynda by LinkedIn, etc.
All these names that hit our thoughts belong to the sub-category called MOOCs.
Massive Open Online Courses officially came out to play a significant role in the transition from brick and mortar classes to digital.
All the benefits that the category now offered, not just made it a sub-category that students and instructors from around the globe were accepting from open hearts but made it one of the most quickly flourishing industries in a very short time-period.
Let us look a little into the whole MOOC market – the present and expected state, the fundings that the sector has been able to avail and the top players, before we look at what concerns the entrepreneurs most – Cost of coursera like app development.
Present and Estimated Future of the MOOC Market
Recent Funding in the Field of mLearning and MOOCs
The market scenario that you just saw is one that has not just attracted market players, as we will see in the next section, but have also warmed up the investment world.
The ease that these MOOC platforms offer to the world full of learners and instructors both in terms of convenience and cost saving is something that has not gotten unnoticed by the investors community. Time and again a number of funding rounds have been happening in the edutech platform, keeping the momentum of Coursera clone app builders high.
Let us look at some of the recent ones –
A. Emeritus, a U.S-Indian company that partners with universities to offer digital courses, landed a $40 million Series C round led by Sequoia India.
B. DataTrained, raised a second round of funding of Rs12Cr from a pool of 3 investors for a stake of 20% in the company in 2018.
C. MasterClass, platform for online video courses on topics from film directing to tennis taught by iconic figures in each field (like Martin Scorsese and Serena Williams) launched in 2015 and has raised $136M from top VC firms like IVP, NEA, and Atomico.
D. In July 2018, Edutech start-up Unacademy announced the closing of a $21 million Series C funding round from SAIF Partners, Sequoia India, and Nexus Venture Partners.
These funding rounds are simply a peek into how big the MOOC sector is and how mobile apps are changing the future of the education sector, especially from the point of view of educational institutions that are witnessing a change.
Now, before we move on to looking at the feature, tech stack info you will need to enter the flourishing market and to answer the question of how much does Coursera like eLearning app development cost, let us look into top market players, you will soon be competing with.
Top Players of the MOOC Domain
The market which is majorly known through the name of Coursera has a number of other names working on constant innovation to eventually become an associated word for MOOCs.
With all of them aiming to earn their own share of the market and revenue pie that the industry has to offer. Let us look at the some of the other established names of the MOOC domain besides Coursera –
The names that we just saw to be ruling the edutech and MOOC domain are not restricted. The list is ever-growing and more and more brands are now entering the segment to try their luck in the flourishing sector.
Now, irrespective of what the headcount of players are today and what is the estimate of its growth are, the one thing which is constant remains – The list of features.
There is a set of features, which is common among all the top players of MOOC sector that have turned out to become the standard or must-have features.
Today, we will be giving you a cost estimate on the basis of these exact features for the additional costs only gets added on the base features. Thus, read our answer to What is the cost of Coursera like app development, as the MVP costs, something that will grow in the direction you would want it to grow.
Without further delay, let us get straight to it.
Must-Have Features of MOOC Apps like Coursera
Here is the list of must have features set shared by our team of mLearning app development experts that will add on to the answer of how much coursera like app development cost. And would also give a clear picture when making eLearning applications.
A. Search, Filtration, and Recommendation
It is the first and most important part of the whole eLearning software building process. All the eLearning platforms – website and application, showcases a whole catalogue of courses, which requires a properly outlayed search and filtering mechanism. There should be multiple ways users can arrive at the course that they are looking for –
By entering the keyword in the search bar
According to primary and secondary categories
Filters and sorting
Recommendations
B. Stakeholder Profiles
Usually, you will have to accomodate three profiles inside your application, as the top mobile app developers would tell you – Student, Teacher, and Admin when answering how to create Udemy clone app. Let us look at what features the three should individually entail –
Users Profile –
Personal and payment information
List of present and completed courses
Information about the earned credits or points or certificate
History of purchases
Wishlist
Profile settings
Contact admin option
Rating and Review facility
Teacher Profile
Personal and payment information
Create and Submit courses
Dashboard with details of interest shown in their course
Contact admin option
Admin Profile
Modify blacklist users
Modify courses
Get statistics reports
Assign roles to the users
Help with change in subscription plan
Manage newsletter and notification
C. Course Creation
There should be a tool integrated within the application that would enable the teachers to develop a course, prepare quizzes, questionnaires, etc. The platform should allow multiple things – design a course structure, write scripts, and add – slides, videos, text, coding exercises, quiz, PDFs, audio files, etc.
D. Dashboard
The instructors should be given the facility of a dashboard where they can track several activities and gain useful insights.
Usually, a dashboard consists information on –
Detail of courses
Monitoring of students counts, conversion, and revenue earned
Insights into what the students are looking for.
E. Course Detail Page
Every course should be given a dedicated page where all types of features can be feeded in. The page should have details like –
Description of the course
Information about the creator
The instructions of usage
Material required to study the course
Duration of the course
Rating and review
While this was about the course detail page, the course in itself should have – videos that have been pre-recorded, subtitles, quizzes, assignments, discussion forum, and maybe even gamification element to increase user engagement.
F. Payments Integration
Since, offering paid courses or taking payment for certification are the two most common source of revenue models present in a MOOC application like Coursera, you will have to have a complete know-how of the process of payment gateway integration for estimating your cost to develop eLearning website like Udemy. There can be multiple payment modes that can be added in the application – Debit/Credit, UPI based, and integration of P2P Payment systems like PayPal, Venmo, etc.
G. Notifications
Notifications, as we have discussed on multiple instances before, is one of those important mobile app design tips that improve conversions. You should integrate the notification mechanism in the app in a way that the users are always updated about the topics they are interested in.
H. Business Side of the App
Although this is a feature that must be added at a much later stage, the option enables companies to give learning material to their employees. With the help of an API, you can send in the details of the employee’s learning progress to the partnered company.
Now that we have looked at the different features that must be present in you application to bring it to a point where it contributes into the flourishing market, it is time to look into a factor that according to all the for dummies mobile app development guide deem important – Technology Stack.
Technology Stack for Coursera and Udemy like Applications
Here is the technology stack that apps like Coursera and Udemy are usually based on.
Language – JavaScript, Scala, php, Python
Web Server – Nginx
Storage – Amazon S3
Database – Amazon’s Relational Database Service, MySQL
Search – Amazon CloudSearch, Elastic Search
After seeing all the technical and market side of the coursera like app development, we have finally arrived at the section which will have a direct impact on your dreams to enter the edutech domain – How much does it cost to make a Coursera like application.
Cost of Coursera Like Mobile App Development
Now, while the answer to the question depends entirely on what you wish to add in the application, in case you are looking to go with the features we mentioned above and are planning to keep the technology stack same as well, the cost range will come down to something like this – USD 76,500 to USD 1,03,000.
However, what we would like to specify here is that while this is just a basic level cost, it does not necessarily mean that it would also be YOUR eLearning app development expenses. The more the features you plan on adding in the application, the greater would be the ultimate cost of the application.
Revenue Model
Now that we have looked at a number of different elements surrounding the development of MOOC apps like Coursera or Udemy, along with the answer of how much it would cost you to develop a coursera like application, it is time to look at the ways you earn money. Ways that we help our clients with in our role as the top education app development company of the nation.
So, as a parting note let us see how get back and grow the money you had put into the development of your MOOC application.
A. Paid Certificate
Course certificate is the one element which majorly attract students to the eLearning MOOC platforms like Udemy or Coursera. The fact that students will have to pay an amount which is a lot less than what a full-time college would cost is something that makes them pay for certificates very willingly.
B. Subscriptions
A common mode of earning money within the MOOC platform which quickly covers up the cost of coursera like app development is subscription. The students in this revenue model are asked to enroll in the app for free for a fixed period of time before they are asked to pay to complete the course.
C. Affiliate Marketing
Platforms both new in the market and old can earn good amounts through affiliate marketing. By simply following a process where they add an Amazon link in the course and then directing people to that Amazon link from where the users purchase the book, brands can earn good amount in name of affiliate marketing.
D. Corporate Learning
While this is the step that will only show results once your app has established itself in the market, you can in fact keep corporate learning as a part of your future business objective. For, it is estimated that the role of corporate learning mobile apps will be on a high in 2019. Coursera and Udemy already have a separate corporate learning packages in place, which makes it possible for them to charge on user group basis.
With this, you now have the answer to not just how much Coursera like app development costs but also to everything that you need to get started and then even earn money from. Well, there is just one thing left to do now – Get in touch with our educational app developers.
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