Media-Insert Communications

Going beyond SD-WANs in 2023: Rethinking Wide Area Networks

For a number of years, the discussion has been about digital transformation, increasing automation, SD-WANs, data protection, security, and every type of cloud. In 2023, these are still likely to play an important role in organisations and in data centres and now multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are driving changes in data centre networks. This is to better manage new security rollouts, introduce new levels of automation and to also help push forward evolving net-ops strategies.

Find out why organisations should go beyond SD-WANs in 2023, and rethink Wide Area Networks (WANs), by reading the complete article. Also available on the following publications: SDC Channel Insights, and Digitalisation World. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bridgeworks Ltd. Author/journalist: Graham Jarvis.

Why Organizations Need to Love their Data

Picture source: Bridgeworks Ltd - The WAN Acceleration Champions

On St. Valentine’s Day, minds and hearts will turn toward loved ones. All that love also creates data and e-commerce and retail store revenue. In the UK, Finder.com reports that £1.37 billion was spent on Valentine’s Day in 2022. Author Reemul Balla reckoned that 76 percent of Brits (40 million) celebrated the occasion. Over in the US, the National Retail Federation, described as the world’s largest retail trade association, has an annual survey done by Prosper Insights & Analytics.

Find out why your organisation should love its data, and that of its customers, by reading the complete article.

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bridgeworks Ltd. Author/journalist: Graham Jarvis. Published on 14th February 2023. 

Black Friday: Why WAN Acceleration Could Make A Difference

Data is very much behind the success of Black Friday – particularly for e-commerce operations. So it’s no surprise that new research from Oxylabs, in collaboration with CensusWide, reveals that 85% of ecommerce organisations have chosen to make more significant use of data to attract customers. In response to their survey of over 1,000 UK and US-based senior decision makers, including CTOs, VPs of Engineering, Chief Data Officers, Heads of Business Intelligence and Heads of Data & Analytics, they comment that this “…highlights how businesses are using newer, more advanced forms of technology, such as web scraping, to get ahead of the competition.”

Read the complete article on Digitalisation World, or on Bridgeworks' website. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications. Published by Digitalisation World. Bylined to David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks Ltd. Approximate date: 22nd November 2022

Overcoming latency: Witch WAN for data acceleration?

The witches have used WAN Optimization in the past, but they have found that it doesn’t live up to their expectations.

Halloween is here again, and the witches are hard at work. Yet, their Wide Area Networks are suffering from jitter and packet loss caused by the specter of latency. It’s more trick than treat – even when working remotely, operations are hindered by slow WANs. Backing up and restoring data takes ages to complete, making disaster recovery and service continuity hard to achieve.

The three witches have decided to meet again, but their autonomous brooms have also been hit by technical errors. They rely very much on being able to access the Internet, virtual private networks (VPNs), edge computing and cloud networks. The war in Ukraine is adding an additional challenge, so the witches need to discuss how to implement Secure Access Service Edge (SASE).

Read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications. Published by Data Center Dynamics, and bylined to David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks.

Changing payments: Growing mobile - Commerce Opportunities Post-pandemic

During the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, e-commerce has accelerated right across the globe - to the extent that Econsultancy.com believes it’s a trend that’s hard to ignore. This is particularly since consumers shopped with increased frequency online out of necessity. Subsequently, lockdowns and stay-at-home orders also forced brands to rapidly change their strategies. Companies that hadn’t paid much attention to e-commerce and to m-commerce, or were only just beginning to embrace digital transformation, now found themselves having to transform their operations to both stay afloat and compete with rivals. Growing mobile commerce also spurred on the growth of mobile payments.

Strongest trends in 2021

According to Econsultancy.com’s ‘Stats roundup: the impact of Covid-19 on ecommerce’, “App Annie’s State of Mobile 2021 report has revealed that the total time spent by Android users in shopping apps globally came to more than 100 billion hours in 2021. This is up from just under 85 billion in 2020. This means that the amount of time spent in shopping apps globally has more than doubled since 2018, when Android users spent 48.7 billion hours using retail apps.

Grow your mobile commerce opportunities, read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bango Plc. Author: Graham Jarvis. Published by Digitalisation World in June/July 2022. 

Why App Developers, Merchants and Payments Providers Need to Converge to Grow and Thrive

From the outset the Covid-19 pandemic offered new digital and commercial opportunities to physical businesses to become e-commerce enterprises, to boost or maintain their sales during the world’s various lockdowns. Work from home orders required a dramatic and seismic shift in thinking, with many organisations achieving the ability to continue to operate through apps and e-commerce websites. Revenues for established big e-commerce brands, such as Amazon, also increased significantly.

Statista says the UK is one of the most advanced e-commerce markets in Europe. Before the crisis, the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) reported the country’s e-commerce revenue equated to £693bn (USD)

With Stay-At-Home and Work-from-Home orders, due to the various lockdowns, e-commerce accelerated in March 2020, as online shopping behaviours changed. Statista researcher, D. Tighe, found in his report, ‘Changes in online buying among UK consumers since COVID-19 2020-2021’ that 40% of shoppers said they had shopped more online, compared to before the pandemic. “By February 2021, however, this percentage had grown to approximately 75 percent. Similarly, offline shopping has decreased over the analysed period,” he writes...

Discover how app developers, merchants and payments providers can grow and thrive, read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bango Plc. Published by Digitalisation World in June/July 2022. 

How to Power Mobile Commerce with Unique Data-driven Insights

The Covid-19 pandemic created a seismic shift in shopping habits in favour of e-commerce and m-commerce – buying retail goods and services online to the tune of more than $4.9 trillion USD worldwide. Daniela Coppola writes in her ‘E-commerce worldwide - statistics & facts’ report for Statista of 23rd February 2022 that e-commerce has therefore “become an indispensable part of the global retail framework.”

Retail has seen a significant industrial transformation since the mid-1990s with the advent of the internet, and since then the industry has continued become increasingly digitalised in line with modern life, whereby most worldwide consumer transactions are completed either online or by using digital forms of payments at the expense of cash.

Coppola reveals: “The number of digital buyers keeps climbing every year. In 2020, over two billion people purchased goods or services online, and during the same year, e-retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide.” This upward trend is expected to continue unabated, with e-commerce forecast to reach 24.5% market share of total global retail sales by 2025.

Bango (AIM: BGO, OTCQX: BGOPF) – a company that is listed on the London Stock Exchange, and a provider of unique purchase behaviour technology – says the market is growing at a rate of at least 15% per year, and so the overall macro trend is that people are spending more money online. From a market perspective, many sectors have seen market growth. A key area is the packaging of content in the form of subscriptions, such as gaming. “Where people might have once bought games on a case by case basis, they are now paying for subscriptions e.g. Xbox Game Pass,” says Anil Malhotra, CMO and Co-Founder of Bango.

Power mobile commerce insights, read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bango Plc. Author: Graham Jarvis. Published in June 2022. 

 

Changing Payments: Growing Mobile Commerce Opportunities Post-pandemic

During the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, ecommerce has accelerated right across the globe – to the extent that Econsultancy.com believes it’s a trend that’s hard to ignore. This is particularly since consumers shopped with increased frequency online out of necessity, writes Graham Jarvis.

Read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bango Plc. Published by Telemedia Online on 27th June 2022. 

How to overcome the Insurance Industry’s main challenges

Spixii examines how to address the main challenges for insurance businesses to deliver better customer experiences, increased customer loyalty, greater process and operational efficiency, and greater profitability to gain a competitive advantage with Conversational Self-Serve Technology.

To become competitive, to attract and retain customers, insurance businesses have to do more to address customer pain points. With conversational self-serve technology insurers can address them in sales, customer service, and claims.

From a business intelligence perspective, they are primarily about the sharing of information with the insurer via, for example, email. Customers are also frustrated by long waiting times, and by the quality or speed of an insurer’s response to their queries. As customer calls, or messages increase, customer waiting, and insurer response times can often get worse – leading to a poor customer experience.

One answer is to use technology to implement a SaaS platform for insurance that enables self-serve and CPA. It is also important to ensure that not too many questions are asked of the customer, and to make sure that the processes aren’t too long, complex, and arduous. Insurers need to, for example, offer a quote in a way that informs each customer according to their needs to enable them to make the right decision and this necessitates showing the right information to each customer. This approach is aligned with the Financial Conduct Authority's guidelines.

Providing the right information can often be complex because filling in forms can be confusing. For example, a customer may not understand a term. “So, it’s important to have additional support available to enable the customer or prospect to ask questions and to chat with a human being,” advises Million - – CEO and Co-Founder of Spixii.

Filling in forms can create a fractured experience when it leads to a customer making a phone call, or to starting a conversation in a web live chat, and then to that customer being stuck on the phone or waiting for a live chat for clarification. He therefore suggests that the ability to self-serve, “using a chatbot, can help to educate the customer and to make the decision to buy a product, or resolve a query immediately, in a seamless experience and with confidence.”

Overcome the insurance industry's main challenges, read the complete blog on Spixii's website. 

Client: Spixii. Pubished circa June/July 2022. 

How to unlock self-serve through Conversational Process Automation

To avoid any loss, automation needs to better serve the insurance customer and not become a barrier to communication with the insurance provider or broker. Done well, automation can be utilised to channel customers to the right place. Done badly, as can happen with Interactive Voice Response (IVR), customers can wait 20 or more minutes to then be connected with someone who’s not the expert they need to speak with, and so they end up being transferred to another person. Being pushed from pillar to post and having to wait on the phone for too long creates a bad experience.

To prevent this from happening it’s vital to set the level of expectations by asking customers the right questions, and make sure their waiting times are significantly reduced. They want to gain a quick resolution to their issues, whether that be through buying an insurance product or talking to someone to resolve a problem with their insurance policy. Customers want to be able to quickly and immediately access claims updates, and they want to find the answers to their questions.

Renaud Million - CEO and Founder of Spixii - says they will use other channels if their experience through one particular channel, such as IVR or even a chatbot is not good. At worst, they will jump ship to buy a competitor’s insurance products. To ensure this doesn’t happen, and to keep each customer happy, expectations have to be set appropriately.

At the end of the conversation, to ensure customer satisfaction is maintained and to allow for continuing improvements, the conversation should end with the question: “How likely are you to recommend us to others?” By setting expectations, and by connecting, even the approach behind IVR can be empowered to do what the end user wants to do.

Unlock 'self-serve' through Conversational Process Automation, read the complete blog on Spixii's website. 

Client: Spixii. Published circa: June/July 2022.