Categories
Grata

What’s New at Grata

Check out recent updates to Grata’s live chat software, including URL tracking, new WeChat follower greeting options, enhancements for Mini-Program chat, and real-time pageview tracking for web chat.
下面是对Grata的最新更新，包括URL跟踪、新的微信关注者问候语选项、小程序聊天功能增强以及网页版聊天的实时跟踪。

If you have any feedback on new features you want or just something that you’d like us to do better, please contact us at anytime by email info@grata.co or send us a message on WeChat @grata_co：
如果您对新功能有任何反馈，或者您是希望我们做得更好，请随时通过电子邮件info@grata与我们联系。或者用微信给我们留言@grata_co：

We❤️ feedback

URL Tracking Manager

If you use UTM parameters to track the sources of your web traffic and performance of campaigns, we’ve now made that a lot easier to manage for links shared from Grata. Easily setup parameters on your Grata backend and we will dynamically append each link card, Mini-Program card, URLs in your quick replies, and any URL of your domain an agent types into the console with parameters noting which channel, which agent, and what type of content was shared.

We have clients already tracking products recommended in a live chat conversation through to purchase and paying commissions to agents based on sales. Check out the relevant new fields on the Team, WeChat, and web chat pages, as well as a new Tracking page to manage default parameters by content source.

链接跟踪管理

如果您使用UTM参数来跟踪网络流量来源和广告系列的效果，我们现在可以更轻松地管理从Grata共享的链接。在Grata后端轻松设置参数，我们将动态地将每个链接卡，小程序消息，快速回答中的链接以及客服员类型的任何链接附加到控制台中，并附带参数，指出哪个渠道，哪个客服员以及哪种类型的内容被分享了。我们已经设置客户来跟踪在实时聊天对话中推荐的产品，以购买并向客服员支付佣金。

查看Grata后台团队,微信，和网页聊天页面上的相关新内容，以及新的跟踪页面，以按内容源管理默认参数。

 

WeChat New Follower Greetings

The basic WeChat backend only lets you save one greeting message, sent whenever someone follows your account. Articles and Mini-Program cards are not supported. Grata has updated our Greeting page to store up to five multilingual greetings, including any mix of text, images, articles, and Mini-Program cards. Are you a hotel with a booking MP? Retail brand running an MP campaign? This is an excellent opportunity to get visibility for your MP.

The new follower event is usually your peak engagement with a user and your best opportunity to introduce your value proposition, your call-to-action, and the services you provide. It’s a great time to tell them 1) they can contact your team on WeChat, 2) when you are online, and 3) some suggested use-cases with which your team can provide assistance. Check out the updated help center content for more detailed instructions.

微信新关注者问候语

微信新关注者问候微信后端只允许您保存一个问候消息。当有人关注您的公众号时也并不支持卡片文章和小程序。Grata已经更新了问候语页面，以存储多达五种多语言的问候语，包括文本、图片、文章和小程序的任何组合。

新关注者事件通常是您与用户的最高参与度，也是介绍您的价值主张、您的行动呼吁和您提供的服务的最佳机会。这是一个告诉他们当您在线时他们可以通过微信联系您的团队，以及您的团队可以提供帮助的一些建议用例。查看更新的帮助中心内容以获得更详细的说明。

 

Mini-Program Service Chats

We’ve rounded out our MP service chat features with support for users to share a screenshot of the current MP page when they start a chat. If you’ve already linked your MPs to Grata, you just need to add “show-message-card=’true'” to your start chat buttons to use the new feature. Whenever an MP user clicks your chat button, they’ll briefly be presented the option to share a screenshot of the page they were on to help agents understand the context.

It’s now easier than ever to add chat support to your WeChat Mini-Programs. Check out our help center content for instructions on how to get started. With Grata you can drag-and-drop links to your MPs from within any WeChat Official Account or MP Service Chat. You can also add links to your MPs in the menu editor or send featured MP cards when users follow your account.

小程序客服

我们通过一项新功能完善了手机服务聊天支持，以提示用户在开始聊天时共享当前微信小程序页面的屏幕截图。 如果您已将微信小程序与Grata相关联，则只需在开始聊天按钮中添加“show-message-card =’true’”即可使用新功能。 每当微信小程序用户点击您的聊天按钮时，都将简单地向他们展示共享所在页面的屏幕截图的选项，以帮助客服员了解上下文。

现在比以往更容易为微信小程序添加聊天支持。 查看我们的帮助中心内容，了解如何运用。 使用Grata，您可以将链接拖放到任何微信公众号或微信小程序服务聊天中去。 您还可以在菜单编辑器中添加指向微信小程序的链接，或者在用户关注您的公众号时发送精选的微信小程序。

 

Web chat pageview tracking

We’ve added a new tab in the console for web chat users to display their current page and browsing history on the site. The Tracker tab loads as the default tab when agents open a chat with a web chat user. Agents will see all browsing history since the user last cleared their cache/cookies, and the Tracker will update in real-time as the user navigates to new pages during the chat.

网页聊天用户浏览历史

我们在控制台中添加了一个新标签，用于网页版聊天用户在站点上显示当前页面和浏览历史页面。当客服员开启与网页版用户的聊天时，Tracker选项卡作为默认选项卡加载。客服员将看到自用户上次清除缓存/cookie以来的所有浏览历史记录，用户在聊天期间跳转到新页面时Tracker选项也将实时更新。
 

Other Updates & Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug that was causing some Reporting Subscriptions to fail. Manage your weekly and monthly reports from the Subscriptions tab on the Reporting page.
  • We’ve updated the Average Wait Time and Service Level metrics on your Grata dashboard to exclude chats that come from outside your business hours. （Calculations in Report exports have always excluded offline chats.）
  • Customer Satisfaction Surveys have been updated to get sent to users as one card to fit with new WeChat Platform policies.
  • We’ve updated Grata’s web chat files to be delivered by CDN for a slight performance boost. You can update the web chat code snippet on your site to load from cdn.grata.cn instead of www.grata.cn

其他更新和错误修复

  • 修复了导致某些报表订阅失败的错误。从报告页面上的订阅选项卡管理您的每周和每月报告。
  • 我们更新了信息中心的平均等待时间和服务水平指标，以排除来自营业时间之外的聊天。（导出的报告中的计算始终排除脱机聊天。）
  • 客户满意度调查已更新，以便作为图文消息发送给用户，以符合新的微信平台政策。
  • 我们更新了由CDN提供的Grata网络聊天文件，以提高性能。您可以更新您网站上的网络聊天代码段，以便从cdn.grata.cn而非www.grata.cn加载。

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Categories
WeCom

WeChat Work Gets Serious about CRM

WeChat Work’s latest updates show they are taking CRM very seriously now. The update to version 2.7.5 on March 13th added a business card scanning tool, broadcast messaging to Customers, new profile tagging features, and more. You can read the original posts in Chinese for updates to the user apps and admin backend. This latest update builds on the previous update that saw Tencent rebrand “external contacts” as simply Customers, a major part of their 2019 strategy.

 

WeChat Work CRM

The most exciting feature for your sales team is likely the addition of a group broadcast messaging assistant (群发助手) for employees to message some or all of their WeChat contacts from WCW. Open the WCW Contact Customers app, tap on Broadcast Messages in the Tools section, select all or a segmentation of your customers and then fire off a message.

Left: Select recipients, add text and images; Right: A group holiday greeting and image sent to Customers

Similarly, admin users can distribute a company service message (企业客户发送服务消息) for employees to forward to their customers. This option supports text plus a photo, web page, or even Mini-Program page. Company messages are currently limited to once per week per customer. From the Contact Customers app in WCW, the admin can choose “Company message to customers” from the Tools tab.

 

From there you can prepare a new message and view your past messages to track how many employees have chosen to forward the company message to their customers.

 

Employees receive a notification in their Customer app when a company service message has been assigned to them.

The employee can preview the post and then choose to forward the message on to their customer.

The recipient gets the forwarded company message in WeChat, in the one-to-one chat thread with the employee. There aren’t a lot of formatting options yet.

The WeChat Work QR code scanner now doubles as a business card scanner (扫描纸质名片). In our testing, it surprisingly worked only slightly better than 50% of the time. We assume Tencent will improve on this, as some of the WCW third-party CRM apps already have much better performing business card scanners. The third-party apps, however, aren’t able to connect you with the customer’s WeChat contact. This is a big deal.

If the business card owner has both WeChat and WCW users, then you have the option to connect with either or both accounts. The scanned card is saved to their profile and some profile data is imported from running optical character recognization on the scan.

Companies can now set custom company tags (企业客户标签) for employees to use on Customer profiles. Tags can then be used, for example, to segment recipients when sending out broadcast and company messages. If you are a WCW admin, go to the Settings tab in the WCW Customers app and select “Company customer tag”.

From there you can create new tag groups and populate them with tags. When employees edit a Customer profile in WCW they have the company tags as well as a section for their personal tags.

You can now designate group-level admin to manage Customers for different employee departments and segment reporting by department.

 

Group chats with a mix of WeChat and WCW users now support up to twenty members.

Friend requests received in WeChat now give recipients who are using WCW the option to add the user as an external contact in their WCW account instead of in WeChat.

WeChat Pay

Integration with WeChat Pay now supports connecting multiple company WeChat Pay accounts to a WCW Account, as well as the reverse, connecting multiple WCW accounts to a shared WeChat Pay account. And you can now apply for a WeChat Pay account directly from the WCW backend without having to re-submit all of your business documents again.

Other Updates

The Punch In/Out app ( 打卡) now supports managing work schedules by shifts from the WCW mobile app. You can use the desktop backend if you need bulk import/export of your schedules and reports.

 

The Approvals App (审批) gets more granular controls especially suited for larger enterprises. The company can now set custom approval levels depending on the employee. You can also set a maximum number of days for leave requests, and employees who belong to multiple departments can now designate the most appropriate department to submit their application.

Borrowing from WeChat, WCW now lets an employee set a personal name for a coworker, as well as make notes on employee profiles.

 

  • The Report app (汇报) now supports exports to PDF.
  • The group chat by department feature, to automatically add and remove employees to department-wide group chats as they are added or removed to departments, apparently works now. (The feature has been an option on the WCW backend since the beginning).
  • Video calls made from the WCW desktop app now support full screen viewing.
  • The bulk upload feature for adding employees to your WCW backend now supports uploading employees belonging to different companies.
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Categories
WeCom

WeChat Work adds Customers

The latest update to WeChat Work (WCW) brought several new updates that continue to enhance interoperability with WeChat. You can read the original posts in Chinese for updates to the user apps and admin backend.

With this latest round of updates, the ‘external contacts’ (外部联系人) functionality has been re-branded as simply ‘Customers‘ (客户). Tencent has clearly figured out that their consumer messaging monopoly in China via WeChat is a clear path to own enterprise messaging too. Their biggest enterprise competition is Alibaba’s Ding Talk (钉钉) messenger. Alibaba will never be interoperable with WeChat. Full stop. If your customers are all using WeChat, and enterprise messaging products are basically at feature parity, why would you choose anything other than WeChat Work?

WeChat Work continues to remove friction when adding WeChat contacts as customers

Tencent made the case at their developer conference in January that this is just the natural evolution of WCW as a connector (连接器). This is the discussed in the video below (all videos are Chinese-only, no sub-titles), framing it as an annual progression of connections:

  • 2016: Employees to Employees (v1.0)
  • 2017: Employees to office tools/apps (v2.0)
  • 2018: Employees to WeChat

Getting deeper into Tencent’s motivations, the Father of WeChat, Allen Zhang, spent a few minutes of his marathon four-hour sermon musing on the high-level concept of “People as a Service” (人就是服务). Over a couple examples, he notes that talking directly to a service provider is often what the customer really wants (跟一个人交互是比跟别的所有的都要更方便的). Beyond providing the consumer and business software that makes that connection technically possible, WeChat also plays a trust-keeper role by verifying the identity of service providers.

Finally, the third video gives some, admittedly vague, insight into how the team is executing on this mission; trying to answer the age-old question of how to scale service without sacrificing quality. Their answer is to think about people, service, and service tools as one product (你要把服务和人整合在一起…工具和人是一体的).

So what does that look like so far in the product? The WCW v2.7 update added a Contact Customers app in the Workspace. The app opens to a graph reporting how many customers you personally have added, and for admin users, how many your team has added in total.

Personal and team dashboard tracking customers added; customer list; sharing customer contacts with other employees

Several related features are accessible from the Customer app menu in Tools and Settings sections. There is a “Contact Me” (联系我）feature that allows you to generate personal or shared/team QR codes and Mini-Program contact buttons. From Allen Zhang’s example in the video, the pain point of saving many different contacts for dozens of couriers, MP developers could use this button feature to let customers in a Mini-Program contact their couriers using WeChat Work.

For Mini-Programs, after you generate the MP feature on the WCW backend, you can add it on your MP backend as a third-party plug-in or code the button yourself. When customers scan a shared code, the next employee in the rotation is selected as their contact.

Generate personal and shared QR codes and Mini-Program contact buttons

You can set a Welcome Message for your company that greets customers after they add an employee as a contact.

A simple but useful Quick Replies feature has been added to Customer chats for storing replies to frequently asked questions.

LEFT: Tap the + button when chatting with customers and select Quick Reply, RIGHT: Tap to load stored text to your chat

Customer profiles get a small upgrade with space for phone numbers and images — the perfect place for storing a shot of the customer’s business card.

 

Other updates

Tap the + button in an internal chat to reveal a new meeting invitation feature that lets you quickly share and track RSVPs.

Large enterprises with multiple business units can now more easily manage their workforce. Below, it’s now possible to easily switch between multiple verified entities when adding users or setting up their externally facing public profiles.

Select between multiple entities for employee public profiles.

And in a move likely being piloted before it appears in WeChat, WCW now lets you search your sticker collection.

Finally, external group chats get a few upgrades like the ability to search members by company name, the ability to transfer the group admin role, and the ability to enable/disable invite-only mode for the group. You can also search for group chats by listing multiple members’ names.

 

 

Categories
WeCom

What’s New in WeChat Work v2.6.1

WeChat at Work v2.6.1 went live earlier this week. You can read the original posts in Chinese for updates to the user apps and admin backend.

Interoperability with WeChat

For our non-China readers, a big update to note is that real name verification no longer requires a Chinese ID. You can now use a passport, drivers license or other national ID plus your mobile phone statement covering the last three months. Real name verification is required to add external WeChat users as contacts. As opposed to the Chinese process which is instant and done with facial recognition, non-Chinese citizens will need to wait up to three business days for documents to be approved. (At the time this article went to press, our user had been waiting two business days with no result yet.)

The previous 2.6.0 update introduced group chats with a mix of up to ten WeChat external contacts and Work WeChat employees.

Work business cards get a spiffy makeover. Check them out:

Internal Customer Service

There is a new feature on the backend to enable and manage internal customer service contacts (“Employee Services”) to your Work WeChat.

Once turned on, employees with visibility to the service will see a folder for Employee Services:

Inside the folder are all of the customer service contacts you create. You can create multiple contacts and assign multiple employees to each role.

Employees who are designated as internal customer service providers will see employee service chats show up in their service app.

An employee service chat:

Surveys

You can now create and share simple surveys from within a group chat.

The creator of the survey can export the data from the results page.

Chinese interface:

Other updates

The latest version of the desktop app now supports search across all chat history. Previous versions required you to search within a specific thread or group chat.

The Windows app gets the ability to give remote access to your desktop, eg. for IT support, allowing another employee to take over control of your computer.

For security purposes, all remote access events are logged on the Work WeChat admin backend with relevant metadata.

The do-not-disturb controls (“Take a Break” feature) get a small update so you can make exceptions for incoming voice or video calls.

There is an all-new help center with lots of updated FAQ content, but this is currently only available in Chinese.

Finally, you can now use your business online banking interface to charge your WeChat Work phone plan.

Connect Official Accounts to WeChat Work

Install Grata’s apps in your WeChat Work account to connect customers on your WeChat subscription and service apps to your mobile workforce for on-demand customer service and sales. More details at grata.cn or check out Grata’s comprehensive bilingual Guide to WeChat Work.

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WeChat and messaging

Categories
Messaging

Global Messaging Trends 2018

This was Grata’s third year to give the Global Messaging Trends keynote at the annual CHina CHat conference in Shanghai. We start by looking at why many of the major messaging stocks are struggling in the market. Tencent, for example, is down $200B so far this year (that’s almost an entire China Mobile or Oracle). We look at what WeChat is doing to grow outside of China and within China, in particular with Mini-Programs and WeChat Work, and then look for analogs abroad. We finish looking at one of the major frontiers of messaging: smart hardware. Enjoy!

You can also view and download a high-resolution PDF from SlideShare or Baidu Pan. There are links to several great articles that are worth checking out.

Global Messaging Trends 2018 from Andrew Schorr