Exclusive interview with Huanxin CEO Liu Junyan: Challenger in the “Customer Service +” era

Instant messaging technology, referred to as IM, is the basic platform technology for mobile social networking. Currently, well-known IM applications include Tencent QQ, WeChat, Aliwangwang, MiChat, Momo, etc. With the popularization of smart phones, IM, as a basic capability of mobile phones, has brought greater explosive power and innovation space to the mobile Internet. In the context of the "Internet +" era, the golden opportunities and commercial value of IM technology are emerging.

[[147841]]

Gartner predicts that by the end of 2016, more than 70% of customer service requests will come from mobile devices, and IM is the cornerstone of mobile customer service technology.

On July 28, HuanXin, which owns the industry's leading mobile instant messaging cloud technology, officially announced that it had received $12.5 million in Series B financing, led by Sequoia, followed by Matrix Partners and SIG, and launched its core product "HuanXin Mobile Customer Service 3.0". In his keynote speech, HuanXin CEO Liu Junyan announced that HuanXin will open up a trillion-level enterprise service market with the vision of "connecting people and businesses".

At the press conference, Xiong Fei, Vice President of Matrix Partners China, stated two important reasons for investing in Huanxin: First, Huanxin has an absolute advantage in the field of IM technology and has a down-to-earth, pragmatic, and product technology-oriented team; second, Huanxin's mobile customer service products are aimed at a market with urgent needs and high growth potential. Xiong Fei said: "Like '58 Home', 'ChuChu Street', 'Gome Online', these very well-known and fastest-growing first-tier O2O and e-commerce companies, they choose to use Huanxin's mobile customer service technology. The reason behind this is that the companies are very urgent. In the social economy, companies really want to use such technology to improve user experience and user satisfaction. If they do it themselves, the cost is huge, and the time investment is even more huge. The competition in the mobile Internet is a life-and-death competition, and the outcome is decided in one or two months."

Huanxin's mobile customer service product was launched in April 2015, and has signed 40,000 paid customer service seats. Typical users include Gome Online, 58 Home, Chuchu Street 9.9 and hundreds of other Internet giants. At the press conference, Huanxin also expressed its confidence in entering the traditional customer service field. After the conference, the media "Customer World" conducted an exclusive interview with Huanxin CEO Liu Junyan.

1. Opportunities in emerging Internet markets

HuanXin was founded in April 2013. Its first generation product is HuanXin Instant Messaging Cloud. It only takes one day for an APP to integrate HuanXin SDK to obtain complete instant messaging functions similar to WeChat, such as single chat, group chat, voice, picture, text, etc. As of the first half of 2015, HuanXin Instant Messaging Cloud has more than 20,000 registered APPs, HuanXin SDK covers 251 million users, and HuanXin platform sends more than 100 million messages per day. As the earliest and largest instant messaging cloud platform in China, HuanXin Instant Messaging Cloud ranks first in the instant messaging industry in terms of market share, monthly active users, brand awareness, user satisfaction and total financing in one year.

At the same time, Huanxin observed that the development trend of the customer service market was rapidly shifting towards mobility and socialization. After being exposed to the needs of a large number of companies to develop APP customer service, Huanxin seized the opportunity and launched a new generation of products in a timely manner - "Huanxin Mobile Customer Service".

Customer Service 3.0".

Liu Junyan said: "We are a newcomer in customer service software and have only been doing it for a year, but we have never lost a single order in the bidding field for mobile customer service software. The key is that we have IM technology. Many of our users have millions to tens of millions of APP calls per day. For these companies, if the server technology is not up to standard and cannot support such a huge number of users, resulting in lost messages and orders, the losses caused to the companies are immeasurable. If it weren't for HuanXin Instant Messaging Cloud, we wouldn't be able to make mobile customer service products." HuanXin's operator-level IM communication technology has laid a solid foundation for HuanXin to enter the mobile customer service industry.

2. Difficulties in the transformation of traditional customer service centers

At present, customer service has entered the era of "customer service +", that is, the era of "smart customer service". According to the reporter's understanding, some large traditional customer service centers have adopted a new generation of customer service technology, shifting the service focus from traditional channels to mobile online channels, and providing convenient and efficient services to customers in different channels by providing a model of intelligent robots + manual customer service.

From a technical perspective, the core of building a new generation of customer service system lies in the construction of mobile customer service channels and intelligent robot customer service. In fact, the business transformation that occurs with the change of channels and the corresponding changes in organizational structure and management model are the real difficulties in the transformation of traditional call centers. How can those businesses with hotline brand advantages be successfully implemented in emerging channels? How to get rid of the experience constraints of hotline channels and explore and design new service processes and service skills? This requires operators to have a deep understanding and cognition of the rich value contained in emerging channels.

In the era of mobile online services, the way companies communicate with their customers has changed fundamentally. Rich media interactions based on instant messaging on mobile devices have brought rich innovation space to companies and employees. How to make customers feel more "happy" and "high" and experience more surprises has become the new goal of customer service. Liu Junyan said that it is this feature of the new channel that has changed the positioning of the customer service center, from the core of meeting consulting needs in the hotline era to the core of improving user satisfaction and giving users the greatest social experience.

3. The main value of applying new technologies to traditional customer service

During the interview, Liu Junyan talked about the main value of applying mobile customer service technology to the traditional customer service field.

First of all, mobile customer service technology not only brings new ways of communication to traditional enterprises, but also brings new marketing opportunities, which can transform the customer service center from a cost center to a marketing center. This transformation will enable traditional customer service departments to play an increasingly important role in enterprises.

Specifically, the IM long connection technology used by mobile customer service makes the APP a stable connection channel between the customer service server and the customer, allowing the customer service to find the customer at any time and actively initiate a conversation. In the era of mobile Internet, mobile phones have become the identity of everyone, and everyone's mobile phone is at hand 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In this case, as long as the customer does not uninstall your APP, regardless of whether the customer opens the APP or not, even if the customer's mobile phone is in the background lock screen state, the customer can receive the message sent by the customer service through the mobile APP. This special advantage given by mobile devices can completely allow enterprises to migrate their original outbound call business. For example, insurance telemarketing is increasingly restricted, and users are also very unacceptable to this sales method. The IM long connection technology of mobile customer service is actually an outbound call from the call center on a mobile device. Since this method disturbs users less, the user acceptance will be much higher.

Secondly, mobile customer service can significantly reduce operating costs. A mobile online customer service can support 30 to 50 users at the same time, while voice customer service can only support one. At the same time, mobile customer service mainly communicates through rich media messages such as text and asynchronous fragmented time. This feature also leads to the extensive use of intelligent chatbot technology, thereby further reducing operating costs.

Third, mobile customer service can improve service quality. Due to the one-to-many nature of mobile customer service, only a small number of people are needed to support enterprises in providing 7X24 services. At the same time, intelligent chatbot technology can be used extensively during non-working hours.

Fourth, support mobile office and improve employee satisfaction. Using the customer service terminal on the mobile phone, customer service staff can provide services to customers at any location.

Fifth, provide an indicator system with "mobile online customer service characteristics" to support the assessment and management of the customer service department.

4. Key points for choosing mobile customer service technology

Reporter: What are the key points that companies need to consider when choosing mobile customer service technology?

Liu Junyan said: "As mentioned earlier, mobile customer service using IM long connection technology makes outbound calls possible on mobile devices, so customer service centers with outbound call services must pay attention to choosing solutions based on IM long connection technology. Many mobile customer service solutions are now based on HTTP long polling, which is to move the previous online customer service technology of web pages directly to mobile phones. This technology receives messages in quasi-real time by continuously sending query requests to the server. It cannot receive messages in real time, consumes a lot of traffic and power, and is particularly fatal. The APP cannot receive messages when it is in the background, which makes it very easy to lose customers and orders."

In addition, he mentioned that intelligent customer service technology is also an aspect that needs to be considered. Liu Junyan introduced: "At present, robot technology in the field of customer service has developed to the second generation - intelligent robot technology based on deep machine learning. The first generation of technology is based on search, and questions and answers are matched by keyword matching. This solution has high maintenance costs and requires constant sorting and updating of knowledge base entries. It needs to be done manually and is very trivial; the second generation is based on deep machine learning and has self-learning capabilities. It can automatically learn the conversation process between artificial agents and customers and automatically update the knowledge base. For the second generation of robot technology, the biggest barrier is not technology, but the accumulation of knowledge. Robot technology is also a core advantage of Huanxin. Huanxin's cloud has nearly 200 million chat messages every day, which can train the knowledge base and make robots smarter."

5. Expectations for future customer service forms

Liu Junyan believes that, judging from the current technological progress and the trend of changes in people's lifestyles and living habits, most of people's interactive behaviors will gradually shift to mobile phones, so mobile services are the most important. Future customer service will also completely connect traditional call centers, web pages, mobile phones and emerging social platforms, so a unified customer service center with all media must be the future development trend.

Secondly, services will become more intelligent. Once companies put services on mobile phones, service requests are likely to grow exponentially, and customers expect companies to provide 24/7 uninterrupted services. Therefore, intelligent chatbot technology and intelligent knowledge base technology are important means to solve this problem. They are also key technologies to help call centers transform. Call centers will become more intelligent in the future.

Third, call centers will transform from cost centers to profit centers. By obtaining customer request and consumption data from mobile terminals, customer centers will not only solve user problems, but also track customers with the help of big data analysis technology to achieve precision marketing.

In addition, Liu Junyan talked about Huanxin's next-generation products, which will be connected to the customer service in the era of the Internet of Things. He said: In the era of the Internet of Things, any large hardware device will have a small chip embedded in it to be responsible for customer service. This is the product that Huanxin wants to make, the so-called "Huanxin Inside". Huanxin's customer service agreement will be placed inside, and it may be very cheap, only a dozen yuan. For example, after an IoT refrigerator breaks down, the user will definitely not call 400 again. The user only needs to directly click the customer service button embedded in the refrigerator to connect with one click. Not only can you get help from the customer service through video chat, but you can also send the relevant parameters of the refrigerator to the customer service to quickly solve the problem. This will be the future form of customer service, and small smart hardware devices will be equipped with corresponding APPs on mobile phones, and the APP also uses Huanxin's intelligent customer service system.

In the past two years, Huanxin has experienced explosive growth. According to the data of the "2015 China Mobile Customer Service Market Development Research Report" released on site by iiMedia Research, Huanxin has the largest market share in the emerging mobile customer service market and the largest number of APP customers. It is believed that Huanxin, which aims to "connect people and business" and compete with the world's top companies, will replicate its successful experience from emerging markets to traditional service fields and become a strong challenger in the traditional software market in a very short time.

About Liu Junyan, CEO of Huanxin:

Graduated from King's College London with a Master's degree in Computer Science. 17 years of R&D experience, worked for IONA and RedHat. A heavy open source software participant, committer of open source projects such as JBOSS ESB, SOA-P, Apache CXF, JBOSS Drools, and jBPM. Focused on high-concurrency message middleware, real-time messaging systems, heterogeneous distributed enterprise system integration and application servers.