Hotels strive to provide a memorable stay for their guests, but the check-in process can often be a tedious task. The traditional method of checking in, which involves interacting with front desk staff, can take up to ten minutes. This not only wastes the guests' time but also puts a strain on the hotel's staffing resources. Furthermore, communication between the hotel and guests was primarily through voice calls or emails, which proved to be ineffective. Hong Kong-based software and robotics company, Blue Pin, identified these challenges and aimed to streamline the check-in process and improve communication channels.

Child Helpline International, a nonprofit consortium of 160 helplines across 140 countries, was facing a significant challenge. Despite receiving over 30 million calls annually, a staggering 30% of these calls went unanswered due to limited resources. The organization's technology was outdated and unable to effectively handle the volume of calls. Furthermore, the organization was unable to adopt new channels that children felt more comfortable using than voice, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS. The organization also lacked consistent data collection for advocacy purposes, which was crucial for understanding the challenges facing children and advocating for funding and policies to protect them. Lastly, the administrative tasks required of counselors were cumbersome and time-consuming, limiting the number of children they could reach.

Businesses of all sizes and types receive calls throughout the day, many of which involve answering the same types of questions repeatedly. This can be time-consuming and costly, diverting focus from day-to-day operations and customer service. The challenge was particularly pronounced for small and independently-run businesses like restaurants. The global pandemic exacerbated the situation as businesses had to shut down, necessitating an answering service that didn't require a human voice or employees to be present at the business location. Co-Graph, an IT venture company specializing in software development and data utilization services, sought to address this challenge with its Mayai automated call answering solution.

contactSPACE, a cloud-based contact centre software solution provider, faced a significant challenge when they acquired a customer based in New York. Their homegrown voice stack/API was not equipped to support this customer without investing in expensive additional infrastructure. The company, which was born inside AWS (Amazon Web Services) and is based in Australia, needed to provide the same high-quality service to their American customers as they did to their Australian ones. The challenge was to find a solution that could be deployed quickly and efficiently, without compromising on quality or requiring significant investment in infrastructure.

Dream11, a popular fantasy sports platform in India, faced the challenge of managing a rapidly growing user base, with over 5 million concurrent users often participating in multiple contests. The platform needed to send a large volume of notification emails, including transactional confirmations, match alerts, and promotional content. As the user base scaled, the company required an email provider that could handle the surge in email sends. Furthermore, Dream11 needed to ensure a positive user experience with email communication to build trust, especially since users were depositing and withdrawing money through the app. The company also wanted to target specific user cohorts with personalized emails to increase engagement rates.

Databricks, a company on a mission to simplify and democratize data and AI, was experiencing rapid growth and needed to scale its sales development organization. The company's success had led to an increased demand for its services from companies of all sizes and industries. However, Databricks was not interested in the typical 'spray-and-pray' approach to prospecting. They wanted to empower their Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) and Business Development Representatives (BDRs) to engage with prospects and customers in a more personalized and meaningful way. The challenge was to find a solution that would enable even new SDRs and BDRs to add value for the prospect and convert them into a customer, without resorting to high-volume, impersonal sales tactics.

Rapido, a fast-growing courier and parcel service provider, was facing challenges with its customer communications. The company's call center was inundated with calls from customers seeking clarification about their package delivery notifications. This was not only time-consuming for Rapido's employees but also resulted in a poor customer experience. The main issue was the limitations of using Cyrillic characters via SMS for shipping notifications, which were often unclear due to the need for abbreviations. Additionally, Rapido lacked on-demand real-time reporting, which made the process of monitoring delivery status and resolving customer complaints lengthy and inefficient. The company was in need of a new communication channel that would allow for better customer engagement and an easy transition between communication channels.

Uber, the world's leading ridesharing app, faced significant challenges as it expanded globally. The primary challenge was to maintain the same level of service quality and safety for all users worldwide. User safety was a top priority for Uber, and the company needed to protect both riders and drivers. This issue was gaining global attention, and Uber planned to address it by anonymizing over 90% of users' global calls. However, there were obstacles to achieving this in the UAE, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Furthermore, as a well-known brand, Uber had high customer expectations to meet when entering new markets. Any issues during the registration process could negatively impact users' first impressions, leading to low app adoption. Uber also needed to quickly inform drivers about peak demand times in new markets to avoid increased waiting times and costs for passengers.

Advania, a Nordic IT services provider, faced a significant challenge when a service provider’s network went down for several days. This outage affected INNA, an application used by 90% of the colleges in Iceland for managing tuition, attendance, fees, and document sharing. INNA also had a feature to send SMS alerts to students, which was crucial for notifying students about class cancellations. The SMS service, which had been set up around 20 years ago, was prone to occasional outages and message backlogs. However, the situation became critical when Vodafone’s SMS service, the texting provider, broke down for several days, crippling INNA’s ability to send messages. Advania needed to quickly find an alternative texting provider to incorporate into INNA.

Blind Designs, a leading manufacturer and distributor of window blinds for the southern African market, was facing a significant challenge in synchronizing its financial data. The company was using Sage Pastel accounting system and a line-of-business (LOB) application for handling quotes, invoices, and production orders. However, the company was struggling with data synchronization between these two systems. The issue was causing duplication problems and inaccuracies in the financial data, which was affecting the company's financial management. The company wanted to continue using Pastel but needed a solution to avoid these duplication problems with their custom in-house system.

Coricraft, a leading South African furniture manufacturer and retailer, faced a significant challenge following a recent acquisition. The company needed to integrate data between the acquired company's system and its own SYSPRO ERP system. The acquired company was generating between 500 and 1000 new product codes per week, necessitating an automated integration system. Additionally, Coricraft had to manage stock movement between its 70 warehouse and store locations, each with its own inventory. This was a labor-intensive manual operation that was time-consuming and inefficient.

Ungerboeck.com, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor specializing in online booking and venue management for over 900 venues, faced a significant business challenge. The company needed to integrate its third-generation online booking and venue management product with multiple external systems. This integration required addressing three technical challenges. Firstly, the integrations needed to be built by a specialized team outside of their core development team. Secondly, it was crucial to ensure that the amount of custom code was kept to a minimum. Lastly, the company needed to select an integration solution that didn’t require a significant infrastructure investment. CTO Rob Scott embarked on a research journey to find the most suitable integration options.

Global Micro Solutions, a leading cloud service provider in South Africa, faced a significant challenge in integrating its diverse cloud solutions with its professional services automation (PSA) software, ConnectWise, and Sage Evolution accounting software. The company, which provides IT solutions to over 4500 customers and supports 300,000 users, offers a wide range of services from email management to complex hybrid cloud solutions. However, these solutions were not integrated, posing a challenge for the company as its customers expected a seamless value chain. Furthermore, as a cloud service provider, Global Micro needed to accurately meter and bill for its services, which required the integration of data from its cloud solutions with ConnectWise and Sage Evolution.

Jeffrey Stein Sales, a leading supplier of toys and hobby products, was facing a significant challenge in providing real-time inventory data to its online retailer customers and regular retail customers via their website. The company operates in a highly competitive market where timely and accurate information is crucial. They were also struggling with the task of capturing supplier invoices, which often contained numerous line items, and processing customer purchase orders. The company was in dire need of a solution that could streamline these processes and improve the speed and accuracy of information delivery to its customers.

Maxidor, a provider of safety and security solutions, was facing a significant challenge with its order processing system. The company's franchise dealer sales representatives were having difficulty entering sales orders from the field due to compatibility issues between their mobile devices and the company's legacy premise order management system. This resulted in delayed customer order processing. As a temporary solution, Maxidor had to dedicate six employees to manually capture and enter order information into the system. However, this was inefficient and Maxidor was seeking a seamless, end-to-end system to streamline its order processing. The company switched accounting apps and began searching for a supplier to help integrate its mobile and premise systems. The goal was to establish fast and reliable mobile/premise system connectivity that would allow sales reps to enter order information on the go and initiate the manufacturing process immediately after leaving the customer's location.

SA Premix, a developer and manufacturer of nutritional additives for the agricultural and veterinary market, faced a significant challenge in integrating its e-commerce portal with its SYSPRO ERP software. The company had developed an online portal where orders could be entered, but needed a way to seamlessly integrate this system with its ERP software to generate sales orders and open production jobs in Work In Progress (WIP). The nature of SA Premix's business meant that many of the orders received were unique and involved complex formulations. These formulation requirements could be captured on the e-commerce portal, but then needed to be converted into jobs in SYSPRO WIP. Manual addition of these jobs was not feasible due to the volume and complexity of the orders.

Upat South Africa, a leading distributor of international building and allied construction brands, was facing a significant challenge in updating imported goods data into their SYSPRO ERP system. The company imports thousands of fixing and fixture products for the building industry, requiring a robust system for tracking the whereabouts and costs of these imported products. While Upat SA had developed such a system, they needed to integrate this data into their SYSPRO ERP system for sales and accounting purposes. The existing update process was manual and time-consuming, often taking over a week. It involved gathering data from consignments, including actual stock items and counts, and costs allocated against suppliers and other agents, and then inputting this data into SYSPRO.

Chipotle, a renowned food industry innovator, faced a significant challenge when it experienced a series of salmonella outbreaks linked to food sold in its branches. The company's reputation for safe, sustainably grown food was severely damaged, leading to a 35% reduction in share prices since the end of October and a 30% drop in December sales in some locations. The situation was further complicated by a civil lawsuit alleging that Chipotle failed to disclose that its quality controls were inadequate to safeguard consumer and employee health. The company's failure to implement necessary risk management measures to support its innovative approach to fast food was identified as a key factor in these issues.

Fama, a leading background screening company, was facing a significant challenge with its Datadog adoption. The company had recently modernized its observability stack and moved away from a self-hosted log management platform to Datadog. However, the costs associated with Datadog were much higher than projected, with Fama spending between 2-3x each month as much as the team had forecasted. This was due to two factors: Fama's growth and the size of their logs. The company had doubled its screening volume from 2020 to 2021, naturally creating more logs. Additionally, their logs were larger than anticipated, with what should have been single log events often being three or four events. Attempts to strategize ways to lower costs with Datadog either didn't make enough of a difference or created significant blindspots by filtering out logs. Fama needed a solution that would reduce the volume of data indexed into Datadog without sacrificing visibility.

Digitaleo, a local marketing collaborative solution provider, was faced with the challenge of making their clients' communication campaigns more engaging. The company, which offers an all-in-one marketing platform, was constantly on the lookout for new trends and channels to improve their clients' communication and results. Their clients, which include businesses in the auto industry, real estate, retail, and finance industries, began demanding the addition of rich media to their campaigns to create meaningful conversations with their customers. Digitaleo recognized the potential of Rich Communication Services (RCS) early on, as it offered a rich feature set and capabilities that could greatly improve two-way communication. However, they needed to find the right partner with the necessary experience and relationship with Google to support and consult them regarding RCS implementation and usage.

DPD, a leading provider of standard and express parcel services, faced a significant challenge with low message delivery rates, leading to unsatisfied customers and overwhelmed agents. The company used SMS messages to notify customers about package deliveries, but many of these messages never reached the intended recipients. This was often due to inaccurate delivery information, such as incorrect customer addresses or phone numbers. As a result, DPD spent considerable time and resources contacting customers to obtain updated information. This led to misdeliveries or no delivery at all, as customers who didn’t receive notifications weren’t present to accept their packages. The undelivered packages increased costs for DPD and overwhelmed their contact center with queries from unsatisfied customers. DPD recognized the need to improve its overall communication with customers by providing support over their preferred channels.

Eat’N’Go, a Nigeria-based quick service restaurant group and lead franchisee for three renowned US fast food brands, was facing a significant challenge in its customer communication strategy. The company, which had been experiencing continuous growth since its inception in 2012, primarily relied on SMS for direct marketing to its two million customers. However, they had limited information about individual customers and lacked insight into the delivery rate of their SMS messages. This lack of data resulted in a low conversion rate and increased costs, leading to a disappointing Return on Investment (ROI). The company recognized the need for a more effective communication platform to address these issues, which were negatively impacting its revenue and bottom line.

Gamigo, a leading online gaming group in Germany, faced a challenge in increasing player engagement. The company used to send email notifications to its global users about game updates and status changes. However, these messages were often missed as players did not check their inboxes frequently. This resulted in a delay in players' reaction time to the changes and updates happening in the game, leading to complaints to Gamigo’s support team. Gamigo was in need of a communication channel that would keep gamers consistently informed and engaged, even when they were offline.

GTBank, the largest banking group in Nigeria, faced a challenge in encouraging its customers to adopt digital banking channels. The bank's customers were accustomed to visiting the branch for all their needs and queries. GTBank aimed to reduce waiting times, optimize in-branch resources, and reduce queues by promoting the use of digital banking channels for most day-to-day account activities. Despite having a variety of innovative products and services, including a fully-fledged digital banking offering, the bank found it challenging to break old customer habits. Additionally, GTBank needed a comprehensive email marketing platform that would not only communicate with customers but also help them understand how customers were behaving after receiving these communications.

Hrvatski Telekom, the leading telecommunications company in Croatia, was seeking to upgrade its service offerings for key banking clients and introduce new services to increase value for its larger corporate clients. The company aimed to avoid large capital expenditures associated with launching and marketing new products and was keen to implement a viable solution within a relatively short period of time. A2P SMS messaging seemed like a good way for portfolio expansion, but it required an extensive set of tools, programs, and infrastructure to develop a viable business model around the growing A2P SMS potential.

Jiji Africa, an online marketplace operating in several pan-African countries, was facing a significant challenge with its transactional communication. The company needed a reliable solution to send out crucial transactional information to its vast user base, which includes between 12 million and 15 million active buyers and between 200,000 and 250,000 sellers. However, their previous SMS service provider was not delivering satisfactory results. Many transactional messages related to registrations on their platform and inquiries about advertised items were not reaching their customers, leading to a low delivery rate and hampering transactions.

Paytronix, a customer engagement platform for restaurants and small businesses, was facing a significant challenge in managing and deriving insights from its data. The company was dealing with data from multiple sources, running on various databases, and in disparate formats. The data ingestion tool they were using was unreliable and missed many transactions, leading to a lack of trust in the underlying data. Additionally, the company was using a mix of Scala and PySpark jobs for data transformation, which was custom code and handwritten. This toolset was unable to keep up with the growing demands of the business, and a lot of time was spent on maintenance and break-fix support. The company wanted to focus more on experimentation, but the existing system was not conducive to quick proof-of-concept testing and rapid iteration.

Hannover Life Reassurance Company of America (Hannover Re) was facing a significant challenge in onboarding new insurance clients due to the high volume and variety of data and file formats. The existing custom-coded solution was unable to efficiently ingest, transform, or normalize all the data for downstream consumption within the firm. This inability to handle the variety and volume of information slowed down data ingestion and transformation, subsequently delaying downstream analysis by other teams at Hannover Re. The company needed a solution that would not only improve data integration and management but also enable teams to access and use the information without the constant intervention of the IT department.

PredictX, a leading provider of predictive expense analytics, faced a challenge when a client required greater insight into their Employee Generated Spend (EGS). The client needed a solution that could provide a comprehensive view of various expenses, ranging from office equipment to meal delivery and entertainment. The challenge was not only to control costs but also to ensure good governance and accountability to shareholders. PredictX had a solution that could meet these needs, but it was not cloud-based. The client had a specific requirement for the solution to be deployed on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) due to its security and governance features. While PredictX had plans for a cloud-based offering in the future, they needed to expedite this process to meet the client's needs.

Vattenfall, a Swedish power company operating in multiple European countries, is committed to achieving fossil-free living within one generation. This goal requires the company to decarbonize electricity production and collaborate with partners in other industries, such as steel production. However, the company faced challenges due to the complexity of its operations across different energy sectors and countries. For instance, wind energy produced in the Netherlands could be used to produce hydrogen for Swedish steel, requiring constant communication and data sharing. However, siloed data within Vattenfall hampered this level of collaboration. Furthermore, day-to-day operations like equipment performance evaluation and maintenance planning required extensive data insights. Vattenfall also had to comply with regulations in multiple countries and the European Union, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), nuclear regulations, and other government reporting requirements. Failure to comply could result in fines in the millions of Euros. Vattenfall needed to improve its data governance to comply with these regulations and to facilitate enterprise-wide collaboration.