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How Cloud Communications Help Create a Holistic Customer Experience

By 2020, customer experience will matter more than price and product in determining consumer purchases. A strong and sobering fact for most companies. Thanks to the rise of the digital world, customers now have more choices when it comes to brand selection. Following a bad experience with a company, consumers are able to go online and spread the word about their poor experience. And this experience soon leads the way in which other consumers will make their purchase decisions. Because of this, many forward-thinking businesses are focused on cultivating an environment leading to positive customer experiences.

Deciding to pay more attention to improving customer service, many contact center decision makers are embracing the fact that customer experience needs a holistic approach. Customers no longer tolerate companies living and acting in silos. In fact, an omni-channel customer experience stands out as one of the top trends affecting how customers perceive their interactions with a specific company.

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The App That Won Spring Race I

Today we have a guest post written by the first winners of the Spring Races online hackathons. Enjoy!

Hi. We are Adriana and Paul, the team that won 4PSA’s first Spring Race.

Cloud for a better life, the motto said. We haven’t clouded so much, but we did try to improve someone’s life. We started by thinking about the spring of all bright ideas – education (high-school, in particular).

Our application, EduSoft, is designed to bring the 21st century into our country’s education management. The software offers its target users (students and teachers) a collection of integrated apps designed to fulfill specific needs. These functionalities are incrementally described below.

Winner App of Spring Race I

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Spring Race II Data Mining

Time for Spring Race II, a new chance to win another US $1000 prize!

The same terms and conditions apply, so we’ll spare you the how-to-enter-the-race details. What’s even more important than meeting the May 12th, 24:00 deadline is that you submit an original solution, designed and implemented for this competition. This is a mandatory condition to enter the race, so please keep it in mind. And of course, register your team first using this form.

Relevant People Data Mining

LinkedIn is used by millions of professionals in order to find potential business partners, new customers or talents for recruiting. While technically it is easy to search LinkedIn, even humans have trouble identifying the profiles that better match a set of criteria. For example, people with the longest LinkedIn profiles are not necessarily the best matches.

You must create an app that is able to identify and assign a score to the LinkedIn profiles based on input information. This input must be provided by the user, therefore the app must ask as many details as possible about the desired profile in order to find the best match. The app must mine LinkedIn and present a list of potential candidates ordered by a match score.

Enter the Spring Races

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Spring Race I – And The Winners Are…

Spring Race I reached its finish line on April 30 at midnight. We want to congratulate all the competitors and to invite them to join Spring Race II next week.

There have been a lot of teams that registered, but unfortunately not all of them submitted a solution. While this is normal in a race, even if there is only one winner, we want everyone to reach the finishing line 🙂 So, please go ahead and let us know in a comment to this article your thoughts on the chosen subject, how well it was described, and the difficulty level. Your feedback will be considered for the next race.

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How to Win SMBs Over to Cloud Communications

A recent IDC article stated that “There’s a $100B cloud in our future.” On paper, this looks like a huge opportunity and it’s backed up by big trends such as the distributed enterprise, the proliferation of devices needing to access enterprise networks, IT assets being managed remotely and big data and apps to mention just a few. While these opportunities are obviously real, when service providers try to sell to SMBs, the situation is not that clear-cut.

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The 4PSA Padawan Adventure

We are students, we may not fight with lightsabers, but we definitely had an internship. A great internship, we might add. 🙂

We’re writing this from the orange open space office, where we worked with the 4PSA team and… we became part of it. Here, we had a great summer, we made friends and learned a lot of cool things. But, more importantly, we felt like we belonged to this large family.

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How To Become A Champion In 4PSA Community

Back in August 2012, when we rolled out the 4PSA Community, we knew this project implied a great deal of responsibility.

Our community brings together people who team up on answers, solutions, and ideas about the products and services they use. Every community member is invited to have his/her say on our products, describing issues they have encountered as accurately as possible, offering guidance, sharing experience and know-how with their peers, tempering conflicts and promoting a collaborative attitude.

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Cycling Is Fun

We may be Clouders, but we don’t exactly walk with our heads in the cloud. We only ride our bicycles that way. 😛 Well, jokes aside, it’s quite the opposite. If you haven’t figured it out already, we are cycling enthusiasts. We commute by bike, we travel by bike, and some of us even get into bike competitions.

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Cool Summer Internship 2013 Problem Five

Time for drifter Johnny to finally go home and for you to relax, as this is our last problem in the 2013 Cool Summer Internship race. Thank you for sending us your solutions, it was surprising to see so many good ones we received!

We expect your proposals here by Thursday, May 2nd, 10:00 AM GMT. Do not forget about the rules.

Johnny Wants To Go Home

Johnny is drunk homesick. After having spent the past years on the Island of Despair, he has suddenly decided to sail home. For this, he managed to build a boat. During his sailing, he discovered that the boat is small and cannot withstand a storm. As if it wasn’t enough, Johnny drank too much rum and is afraid of getting lost. Definitely, not a good day for sailing.

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