Summer Slow-Down Ahead

We’re approaching summer at a steady pace (although you could easily get fooled by the weather in Denmark right now…), and it shows in the activity level among the customers.

I've held a lot of demo, sales and onboarding meetings the past few weeks, and more and more prospects are postponing decisions or onboarding until “after the summer” (which probably means sometime mid-August).

This year, I have a summer holiday in weeks 29 and 34. It's not optimal, I know, but that’s how it plays out this year.

That also means that now that the customers are starting to go into vacation mode, I’m facing 3-5 weeks of opportunity to deep-dive into the product!

UI / UX upgrade

The first thing is a UI / UX overhaul of the Herodesk product. It’s not that I am dissatisfied with the current design, but there’s room for improvement.

Herodesk is – to some extent – competing with international world-class players who have spent years working on their products and designs. The competition is fierce and there’s simply no room for “close enough”. You gotta play in the Premier League to compete.

For this upgrade, I am planning on:

• Moving the top menu to the side to make more vertical room on smaller screens
• Make some of the menus collapsable to make more room for conversation on smaller screens
• Simplify the colour scheme and update some of the colors to make it more “calm” to look at and work with
• Fine-tune and adjust all margins, paddings, line heights, and all those small details that just give you that “ahhhh” feeling when looking at it.

The other day, I received a video from a friend who spent 45 minutes recording himself and his screen as he self-onboarded in Herodesk. Wauw, what an eye-opening experience. Things I thought were clear as day turned out to be super confusing. So, at the same time, I’ll look into improving that!

All in all, improvements focus on giving a better “look and feel” when using Herodesk.

2024-H2 marketing campaigns

The team and I (we’re up to three freelancers + Mindmill on the marketing team at this point) have planned and started executing the 2024-H2 marketing plans:

• Updated outreach lead list. We’ll warm them up on LinkedIn over the next 4-5 weeks and then start calling a few hundred super interesting Danish companies that I’d love to work with
• Search Engine Optimizations. The website has gotten an overhaul, and we’ve created some great articles to give insight into how Herodesk can help our customers with their customer service. The first three have already been released, and the next will be released in the following weeks.
• Paid advertisement update. We’ve created 80 pieces of new graphics that have been put live and whose performance will be tested over the next 4-5 weeks. There are 4 campaign tracks (Helpdesk, Live chat, E-commerce, and Testimonials), 2 ads in each, 2 languages for each, and 5 dimensions for each. I’m pretty excited to see how this performs!

Finally, I’ve restarted the partner-focus, but this time, I'm working with agencies instead of software providers. I’ve had two meetings so far, and they've responded well. They really see the idea of adding Herodesk as part of their e-commerce offering to their customers, which is great!

All in all, a lot of things have been started, and we will work over the summer with the expectation of harvesting the fruits of these efforts in mid-August, September, and October.

Level-1 Artificial Intelligence integration

And finally, I plan to implement the first features based on Artificial Intelligence in Herodesk over the next 4-5 weeks.

My approach is to look at it on different “levels”, depending on the complexity of the usage.

Level 1: Context independent

Level 1 is the implementation of AI in places where it doesn’t need to know the full context to do its job. That could be things like:

Translation of incoming and outgoing messages to/from different languages

If a customer writes to you in Italian, it’ll translate the message to English. When you reply in English, your message will be translated into Italian with the same tone of voice as the customer's.

Summarize long conversations

Create a summary of a long conversation to get an overview of the case quickly.

Text analysis

Add AI-based text analysis to our Rules engine, so you can create new Rules in Herodesk based on fx if a customer is happy/angry, if it’s written in a specific language, if they are requesting a specific service, etc.

Text modification

We are adding AI-based text modification functions to our text editor to enable you to make your texts longer, shorter, happier, more professional, more/less elaborate, etc…

All of the above can be done with the click of a button.

Level-2: Context-dependent tasks

Level 2 is where things start to get tricky, as the AI will now perform tasks on behalf of you. This could be things like:

Suggested replies

When you open a conversation with a customer, AI has already drafted a suggested reply that you can send to the customer.

Chatbot

Add chatbot functionality to our existing live chat. The intent is for customers to self-serve on your website and only request to speak to a human if the bot cannot answer their question.

Now, the thing about level 2 is that AI will now have to compose answers to customers' questions based on the context of your business. It cannot just go rogue and reply based on whatever it can find online or make up some silly answers (it has a bad habit of doing this unless specifically told not to).

So, the AI will, in this case, have to be trained on your data before it can do its job. This could be things like crawling your website, reading your ToC, FAQ’s etc., read other replies that you’ve sent in other conversations, etc., to ensure that the answers it gives are correct in the context of your business. Otherwise, it’s useless.

This is a way more complex (but also exciting!) usage of AI.

The benefits are obvious: AI can help improve the efficiency of your customer service and hopefully result in happier customers.

I’ll start with the Level-1 functions and we’ll take it from there.

--

Since things have played out in a way this year that doesn’t give a lot of summer vacation, I might as well spend the time preparing for H2. With a lot of existing things on the to-do: Let’s go! 🤘