Customer Service - The True Face of Your Company

Have you ever thought who the face of your company is? Marketers think that they are the face of the company; support team thinks the same, Human Resource team, why not the founder of the company? It may turn out that every member of the company situates oneself to be the most important chain who establishes the face of the company.

On the other hand it may happen so that the founder of your company is a "guru" at business but not so good at being social. Or support team may deliver a great customer service without considering being the face of the company. After all, who is the real face, does it depend on the position of the employee, his dressing, good public speaking ability or anything else?

Employees are “internal customers”

From my understanding the face of the company cannot be a person or a team, but the company as a whole. Every member of the company should be involved in customer service and consider oneself being the face of the company to produce the best results. As every employee may once be delivering customer service which can be crucial for the company.

Being the face of the company is not enough

Now when we clarified the importance of every member of the company, let’s speak about one’s being such, as just being the “face” is not enough, one should be the “true” and “positive” face of the company.

That is why it’s difficult for the Human Resource along with management team to make a decision – one may be a pro in his work, but have poor speaking or relationship building abilities. Imagine, it’s so difficult to be “all in one” personality. There are cases when great relationship building ability is overdesired than the professionalism. Not to deal with the problem, today’s generation is being brought up in the proper way – psychology plus professionalism – here what we need. Yes, one of the most critical features every company should have.

Keep in mind - no matter how great your product is, if a customer feels bad experience with the company representative, he will look to competitors for a better experience.

July Deals

As promised in the beginning of 2014, I bring to your attention the most important technology mergers and acquisitions for every month passing. In July we saw different deals starting from social, music, mobile to cloud.  All top social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter had new achievements. As in previous months the mentions of technology giants Google and Microsoft became regularly repeating ones. How far are they planning to go?

July 1 - Google Acquires Songza

Google announced to acquire the much-loved music service Songza in a bid to ramp up its Play Music offering. Songza is a unique player in the streaming music space. Rather than providing users with a la carte access to songs and albums, it offers up expert-curated playlists around mood, time of day and general theme. The service is available on the web, for iOS and Android, and even on Chromecast. For now, nothing will change for Songza users however, in the coming months, Google will "explore ways to bring what you love about Songza to Google Play Music.

July 2 - Microsoft acquires SyntaxTree, creator of UnityVS plugin for Visual Studio

Microsoft announced acquiring SyntaxTree, the developers of the UnityVS plugin for Visual Studio. UnityVS enables Unity developers to take advantage of the productivity of Visual Studio to author, browse and debug the code for their Unity applications.

July 2 - Facebook Acquires LiveRail

Facebook has just bought video ad tech startup LiveRail, which connects marketers to publishers on web and mobile to target 7 billion video ads to visitors per month. A source tells us Facebook paid between $400 - $500 million for LiveRail, but Facebook refused to comment on the terms. The acquisition of the 170-person company could help Facebook own a bigger chunk of video advertising, the fasting growing Internet ad medium.

July 9 - ServiceNow acquires Neebula Systems for $100million

The enterprise cloud management platform ServiceNow announced it has agreed to acquire the Israeli startup Neebula Systems in a $100 million cash deal.  Neebula's flagship product, ServiceWatch, automates the discovery, mapping, and monitoring of IT-enabled enterprise services. Put simply, it allows a company to discover what kinds of systems and software are running in their IT environment, a preemptive step toward streamlining business processes. 

July 11 - Microsoft Buys Business-Focused Cloud Provider InMage

Microsoft acquired InMage, a startup that focuses on cloud-connectivity and data recovery for businesses. It’s working to integrate InMage's Scout technology into its Azure site-recovery service. The Scout product already works with Azure for data migration, and InMage will bring more business capabilities to the Microsoft service.

July 11 - Yahoo Acquires Video Streaming Platform RayV

Yahoo  acquired the video broadcasting platform RayV, built in 2005 as something of a Joost competitor, it is specialty lies in delivering high-quality video streams to a lot of people.

Jul 14 - LinkedIn Buys Newsle

LinkedIn is buying Newsle, a web app for surfacing news about people in your network. Newsle was founded three years ago and had about two million users at the time of the acquisition. The startup, which had raised more than $2 million in funding, uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to highlight news about your connections on Facebook and LinkedIn.

July 14 – Salesforce acquisition of RelateIQ a CRM game-changer

Salesforce acquires RelateIQ - a Palo Alto, Calif.-based intelligent computing startup for $390 million. It automatically captures data from email, calendars and smartphone calls to provide data-science-driven insights in real time, according to Salesforce's8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

July 17 – Twitter Acquires CardSpring To Power In-Tweet Commerce And Offers

Twitter announced it has acquired CardSpring to enable “in-the-moment commerce experiences.” CardSpring is an application platform that lets developers build card-linked offers electronic coupons, loyalty cards, and virtual currencies that work with credit cards and other types of payments. Twitter will keep the service open.

July 21 - Yahoo Buys Flurry to Jump-Start Mobile Business

Yahoo announced its buying the mobile ad exchange Flurry, a move that could augment Yahoo’s still-waning position in the mobile advertising market. Flurry is one of the biggest mobile ad firms in operation with a reach so vast it tracks more mobile phones than Google or Facebook. Such an acquisition would boost Yahoo’s ambitions to be a “mobile first” company, after it has struggled to match the growth of mobile ad revenues at rivals Facebook and Google.

July 23 - Google Acquires DrawElements

Google struck a small deal on Wednesday, agreeing to acquire a 3-D graphics company called drawElements. Based in Helsinki, Finland, drawElements produces a graphics test that helps companies make their software compatible with Google’s Android operating system. Google will fold the team into the suite of services that developers use to optimize their products for Android.

July 31 - Oracle Buys TOA Technologies

Oracle announced that it signed an agreement to acquire TOA Technologies - the leading provider of cloud-based field service solutions that optimize the last mile of customer service for enterprises by coordinating and managing activities between dispatchers, mobile employees and their customers.