Just like other sectors of the industry, technology is revolutionizing the healthcare sector too.

As we mentioned earlier, healthcare apps are revolutionizing the healthcare experience both for medical professionals and patients by offering the following benefits:

Before the advent of mobile app development, finding a good doctor meant relying heavily upon word of mouth or personal experience.

Thanks to healthcare apps, people can now look up doctors based on location, professional experience, and of course, patient reviews that help them make informed decisions.

You need not wait in line to speak to the hospital representative or customer care executive to book appointments.

Similarly, both doctors and patients can view the records of prescriptions, test results, etc.

But in recent years that slope has transmuted into a free fall.

Everything is or is being connected to the internet, hence IoT!

One such sector to benefit from this revolution is the healthcare industry touted to be a $117 Billion market by 2020.

Enterprises are going through a global digital transformation with IoT being at the center of it.

With smart devices recording various patterns of consumer behavior such as their interaction with AI, the conversion rate, consumer decision processes etc, this information coupled with machine learning, design thinking, the blockchain, and data intelligence, will be continuously churning out insights previously inconceivable.

Smart Homes: IoT at home

While you are in conversation with a prospective enterprise app development company, ask them these simple (yet Important) questions:

Questions that you must ask yourself:

Have you done a user dipstick?

As an entrepreneur looking to create an app around a concept can be blinding.

If you are an Enterprise, a user dipstick may not be enough, and you must back your app outreach strategy with deep market research that can often lead to invaluable data about competitors and precise figures about what worked and didn’t work for them and hence look into what may work for your app.

Simply a rehashing of what has already worked will not be tenable in the longer run.

So, ask yourself – is this unique? Is this being a Zero to One concept?

Questions that you should ask your enterprise app development company:

1. How heavy will the app be?

Depending on the markets in which you are launching your app you must factor, and be aware of, the size of your app. Say your focus is to launch in emerging markets and these typically have devices with lower me memory and storage caps of 8GB.

When this happens, users are mindful of the space your app takes up. A 100 Mb app will be the first to get deleted. Aim for an app with no more than 5 to 10 Mb and remember that the lower you can keep it the better it is. It significantly impacts user conversion and uptake when your app is light.

Will the app they make be data efficient?

You need to make sure that your app doesn’t consume excessive amounts of data on 3G or 4G. An app which does so is likely to be relegated to the Apps directory of a user’s Google Play store account until they one day realize that it drains the battery – and then it’ll be deleted.

Will the app they make be fast?

It’s 2018 now, and nobody likes slow apps anymore. Your app must be at the top of the list when it comes to speed, since in this fast-paced age, a difference of so much as a millisecond can be the difference between having or not having a user.

How will they use the Android platform to their advantage?

If you are making an app on the Android platform, there needs to be something in it that leverages core OS features to make the app better.

Without this little edge, it might as well be a generic app on a generic platform. Moreover, with constant updates coming out for Android, your app will have to continuously factor those in as well.

These are some small questions through which you can get a concrete understanding of which factors your android app developer or company will be considering while they make your app.

Always keep in mind that they may or may not be taking into account the factors discussed above – it’ll depend on the nature of your app and which purposes it’ll exist to serve.

Once you have a clear idea of what you want, and whether the company serves needs like stated above, you can be surer of the value they will add – and you can then focus on making the app tick, while they partner you to ensure it does.

We at Affle Enterprise have developed applications for enterprises, each built for a custom use case. Monitoring and witnessing the impact of their integration in real time.

For any queries regarding enterprise app development, drop us a line at [email protected].

On similar lines, because of the availability of sophisticated technology and a well-developed infrastructure for R, Singapore has emerged as one of Asia’s most advanced hubs for pharmaceutical research and manufacturing.

With a combined market capitalization of approximately $1.9 trillion, the wave of technology has even influenced the big threes of the market i.e Apple, Google and Amazon to invest heavily in the pharma and health sector today.

How Technology Saves Revenue for Pharma Companies

Here are the ways technology is enabling the pharma industry to reduce its expenditure while continuing to sustain their longevity.

Many pharmaceutical companies can now help patients directly with the availability of smartphones.Companies like Novartis have taken a similar initiative by introducing apps like Together in HF, a social network that connects the heart patient community and the doctors to provide useful medical content to the patients.

With devices like wearables in healthcare, a repository of customer data has become accessible to pharma companies.With the help of smartphones, it has become possible to access this data in an organized fashion, thereby becoming an instrument for offering efficient diagnostics and bespoke patient care.

• Companies like Proteus Digital Health have been able to explore the utility of technology to produce ingestible sensors to help physicians track and monitor patients on smartphones.
• End to Human Experimentation in future
  Technology in the pharmaceutical industry will also help to put end to ethical dilemmas of testing drugs on humans. Not only will this method save time and capital, but will also be more reliable.
• Real-time Technology for R&D
  Another advantage of teaming technology with the pharmaceutical industry is the improvement in research and development.Bringing real-time technology and clinical trials together, pharma companies can establish a stronger foothold in R&D. With high levels of productivity, inventory, and service, the drug production process can reach its maximum potential in less time.
• Availability of Analytics for Drug Development
  The pharmaceutical companies will be able to access authentic patient data which will assist these companies in understanding the after-effects of a drug.With the availability of constant monitoring of symptoms and signals, the drug development companies will be able to understand their products better and also provide relevant reporting to the FDA (Food and Drug Administration).
• Gamifying Health for Patients
  Motivation works better than commands. The usage of mobile apps for gamifying procedures, medical advice, and products for both physicians and patients will increase their adherence and prompt them to follow a healthier lifestyle.Replacing the traditional advertising and incentivization techniques with gamifying experiences will enable the customers to absorb the information about their options better and be better engaged.

Many reputed pharmaceutical companies have already started exploiting technology for the growth of their business. For example, Pharma giants, Sun Pharma launched a revolutionary mobile app for asthma patients called  RespiTrack, back in 2016.

The app helps the doctors to monitor patient’s progress and increase their medical compliance. Similarly, Abbott Healthcare introduced a heart and liver app called Knowledge Genie that helps physicians to access the patient’s medical information easily. Such innovations in apps from the pharma industry can become an inspiration for creating similar apps for monitoring patient’s health.

Emerging Pharma Trends in the Coming Years

• Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
  With the IoT healthcare market reaching an estimate of 136 billion USD by 2021, companies from the pharmaceutical sector are collaborating with tech companies to create devices that can track and monitor various chronic and lifestyle disorders using real-time data.
• 3D Bio-Printing
  Presently 3D Bioprinting or additive manufacturing is one of the leading innovations in the medicine production industry. It is still very novel in the pharmaceutical sector with the very first 3D printed prescription drug, Spritam being developed in 2016. 3D Bio-Printing can be widely used for printing drugs that have different release rates, printing live tissues and also for drug tablet printing with a personalized dosage.
• Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
  Through AI and machine learning, it has become possible for pharma companies to interpret patient data to understand the physiological patterns of humans. Solutions driven by AI have been able to help the pharma companies to even identify and predict results in a virtual patient.

With the rapidly changing world of technology, the medicine and healthcare industry is beginning to revolutionize. It’s time that pharma companies who aspire to become business leaders in the pharma world found new disruptive solutions to thrive and rise on the digital wave to save on colossal resources and time.

Affle enterprise provides enterprises with mobile application development /solutions to promote operational mobility and overall decision-making. Know more about how our digital transformation solutions are helping Pharmaceutical enterprises in enhancing their business processes. Drop us a note at [email protected]

In the past few years, the focus of businesses has shifted from profit maximization to customer satisfaction, and rightly so. With the rise of social media platforms, modern-day consumers have gotten a voice, or rather, a concrete platform to voice their opinions. Here is How Technology Can Enhance Customer Experiences: A Travel Chatbot

And surely, no business would want their customers to put out their negative experience with brands on social media platforms for everyone to see!

According to the New Voice Media data, almost 59% of customers aged between 25-35 readily share their negative experiences online.

For any business – whether it be a for-profit or a non-profit enterprise, or whether it be a public or private enterprise – customer satisfaction is one among the many pivotal key performance indicators (KPIs) that have to be considered, monitored, and measured.

As such, the customer satisfaction quotient indicates how well a business is serving its customers. Improving this singular factor can change the face of a business.

After all, a happy customer is a satisfied customer. It is a proven fact that happy and satisfied customers not only become loyal and repeat customers of a brand, but they also bring in new customers.

And as is true of everything in the business world today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have found their way into the domain of customer satisfaction.

The most excellent example of this being chatbots. From enhancing the entire process of customer support to transforming the process of customer surveys, chatbots are finding applications in various fields of business.

However, in this post, we’re going to focus on travel chatbots and how they are transforming the travel industry for the better.

Travel Chatbot and its Benefits

Software Powered by AI and NLP, a chatbot is designed to simulate human speech and interact with humans in their natural languages. Chatbots can be developed and customized to suit the specific needs of a business. Since these bots are now the hottest trend in the industry, travel companies have also joined the game through Travel Bots.

Expedia maintains that while planning a trip, a traveler visits as many as 38 websites on an average. Not to forget the endless series of calls and interactions with travel agents and booking agencies.

All of this makes the process of planning a trip both time-consuming and overwhelming. This is where travel chatbot solutions come in.

Travel chatbots personal assistant bearing both analytical and predictive capabilities. Furthermore, they are available 24×7, can interact in a plethora of human languages and can respond to traveler queries and requests in real-time.

So, if you have a travel-related query, you can just ask a travel bot and the bot will answer your questions accurately, scourge the Internet to get you the best deals – basically, it will help you with anything you need.

A travel chatbot can help save a user’s time, help organize the trip, suggest places to visit, list the best deals available (travel tickets, accommodation, etc.), and much more.

Being excellent profiling tools, chatbots can help personalize the user experience by gathering relevant user data such as purchase history, travel preferences, etc and tell how Technology can enhance customer experiences: A Travel Chatbot

Travel Chatbots – Success Stories

Travel chatbots are already being leveraged by big names in the travel and hospitality industry such as Expedia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Ryanair, and Marriott, to name a few.

For instance, Expedia’s Facebook Messenger bot allows users to perform a streamlined search for hotels. All one needs to do is to open Facebook Messenger and provide the bot details about the travel plan.

After the bot has all the necessary information, it will list the five most popular and top-rated hotels in the users’ preferred choice of location.

And once the users click on any one of the five options, they will be redirected to Expedia’s site where they can directly book the hotel.

Then again, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ travel bot can support 13 languages. It uses Facebook Messenger’s checkbox plugin feature on the checkout page to provide travelers with the option of choosing to receive all travel updates including booking confirmation, check-in notification, boarding pass, and flight status updates on Messenger itself.

Similarly, there’s another Facebook-based travel bot called Kayak that allows users to find the best hotel and flight deals via an instant messaging platform. Not just that, Kayak also offers beneficial travel advice to its users and updates them about their flight status.

Chatbot solutions help create a streamlined and smart communication channel between brands and users. Apart from this, they can automate the process of query/request handling, thereby allowing travel service providers to dedicate their human capital to other and more important tasks that need human interaction and effort.

Needless to mention, travel chatbots (just like any other chatbot) offer 24×7 customer support. So, customers no longer have to wait to get their travel issues and queries sorted.

This is just another example of how AI and chatbots are transforming the ways in which consumers are connecting and interacting with brands.

Thanks to AI, chatbot solutions are becoming increasingly smart and intelligent, so much so that they are becoming the trusted advisors of customers. And this is just the beginning, who knows what else chatbots will be able to do in the years to come!

Originally posted at Affle Enterprise.

Published by Shubham Sharma.

Artificial Intelligence takes a cue from an assortment of diverse fields such as Computer science, Psychology, Linguistics (sentence structure and tagmemics), Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Artificial psychology to name a few.

The gist of this concept is the ability of a device to discern a situation or a necessity to give the most conducive result with promptness.

Providing facilities that are not available in the home spaces of people is the actual essence of hotel marketing and hospitality.

Some of the predictions as well as exigent functions that AI can undertake in the hospitality business, if made mainstream, are as follows:

The proposition of dining recommendations and endeavors

Help create an extensive and all-inclusive itinerary for hotel guests with the adage of accurate recommendations for favorable in-destination activities based on previously compiled data.

1. Provision to personalize the guest experience by voice-activated AI devices to provide optimal room conditions.
2. Digital assistants can parlay a long array of objectives as follows:

• They can help consolidate a pre-screening test questionnaire for potential employees.
• They can help compile and provide accurate training material to rectify behavioral errors observed in employees.
• They can scrupulously predict the number of employees that would ensure optimum efficiency during specific timings and events organized.
• They can also set up surveys and extort guest feedback in a meticulously organized fashion.

     5. Chatbot for enterprises is another state of the art AI device that has multifarious functions to credit:

• Marketing endorsements on social media with the inclusion of handling compliments as well as complaints professionally
• Providing multiple payment options catering to customer convenience
• Offering recommendations and making reservations coupled with sharing information promptly.

     6. Chatbot for hotels helps in Equipping the guest rooms with next-gen technology like interactive walls and interactive mirror displays are bound to garner more than the positive response for guests.

Gaining brownie points for innovation and providing out of the box technology that will blow your mind is a strategy that can be brought to life with AI.

One application that is in use in the current case scenario is the diligent compilation of consumer feedback that is analyzed meticulously and the reforms are made based on the stored data. An expansive and all-inclusive survey of guest reviews collected from multifarious hotels and hotel chains gave the conclusion that the above application, when performed by a human being, lacks in efficiency.

There are hotels that currently use AI, which includes the Hilton, a Mclean property that has adopted a concierge or a caretaker robot that interacts with the guests to give them basic information on the hotel and its surroundings. Another example is the host service called Edward of the UK based Edwardian hotel that avails options like extra towels and advance check through text message interaction with the guests.

Guests have given a thumbs up to the use of AI Chatbot in Hospitality business with stats that 47% of consumers claiming an improvement and 26% claiming a revisit if the hotel proffers AI Chatbot services. Interactive displays grossed a total of 54% of the innovator’s vote. AI-based promotions on health and dietary needs are a major upside for 45% consumers with 28% claiming a more frequent visitor.

Affle has rich experience in working on solutions like Mobile App Development/Chatbot Development. Connect us for a quote, drop me a line at [email protected]

Originally published at Affle Enterprise

In a world that has now become increasingly mobilized, large and small-scale enterprises alike have started embracing internal applications for workforce automation to improve productivity.

Mobile app development can provide organizations with a number of options to optimize their businesses processes, thus improving their overall workflow:

Automation and Management of Processes

The automation provided by internal apps not only streamlines processes, but it drastically reduces the time employees have to spend in training to understand a particular operational framework.

These applications can also be integrated with the legacy ERP platforms like SAP, Oracle, etc.

Features like two-factor authentication help protect company data by authenticating employee information once through the workforce apps, and then through the authentication in the virtual system. 

Mobile app development companies to manage their data repositories better to ensure complete usability with protection.

How Workforce Automation Apps can Benefit Businesses

By incorporating mobile applications into their operational models, businesses can benefit not just in term of security and collaboration, but also through productivity and improved transparency:

Increased Employee Productivity

Internal applications not only automate repetitive tasks, but they also cut down the number of time employees spend on a certain process.

According to a report by Digital Strategy Consulting, “companies that use mobile technologies in their internal processes experience a 34% increase in their overall productivity. “

Mobile applications give teams a greater level of flexibility, which can make them optimize their work during peak time, thus improving overall performance.

Simplified Processes

Workforce automation apps simplify complicated business processes into a few taps and swipes while enabling easier information sharing among employees.

The simplification of processes enables employees to better manage their workflows while improving operational efficiency & effectiveness.

Improved Transparency

Mobile applications help enterprises to achieve more transparency across their processes. They provide teams with a single platform on which they can collaborate, and track progress through features like tasks and checklists.

Managers can use internal applications to track employee performance, results, and geolocation, among other operations. This provides them with increased transparency over the tasks that are lined up in the workflow.

Data Collection & Hierarchy Management

Mobile applications allow businesses to securely store, retrieve, and manage critical company data, and also allows them to track data across different workflows.

Businesses can utilize mobile apps for coordinating and collecting data through platforms such as Salesforce and AWS, through integration into their overall app design.

Internal mobile applications not only promise efficient collaboration and optimization, but it also provides enterprises with greater flexibility in their operational models.

While collecting the data and provide feature access the application takes care about the team hierarchy & reporting structures.

A survey conducted by Vodafone concluded that 83% of enterprises record improvements in productivity due to flexible operational models. The streamlining of processes achieved by internal mobile apps not only promises flexibility but also ensures improvement in productivity.

Affle provides enterprises with mobile application development/solutions to promote operational mobility and overall decision-making. Know more about how our mobile application solutions can automate and optimize your workforce by dropping us a note at [email protected].

Already valued at $1.2 trillion, the tourism and hospitality industry is poised to grow even further as the years’ pass.

Gone are the days when one had to physically approach a travel agent and wait till he made the bookings — now it all happens online, and at a very fast pace.

Remote Access Will Improve – We are already living in an era where we can open our hotel rooms from outside and can order room service without having to get out of bed.

This scenario will surely change to some extent if the Internet of Things (IoT) gets integrated with the internal circuitry of a room, among other things

So we may expect our room to be heated or cooled to just the perfect temperature at which we prefer them, even before we have entered it!

We might find that we get personalized messages from hotels we are likely to choose – offering us discount coupons as well! 

Although there are SAAS based chatbots which can be utilized however custom chatbots are the perfect fit for a hospitality enterprise considering the following benefits:

A custom chatbot can enhance customer experience using AI.

Since the custom chatbots are not hosted on a solution provider’s server, the generated customer data including name, profile picture, email ID and contact number of the guests remain secured with hosting providers e.g.

A custom chatbot allows enterprises to upgrade the existing features or add more features such as intent, dialogue or entities depending upon the business requirement.

For example, you can feed your chatbot with thousands of conversational logs as per your need, that will be used by the bots to respond to each query in a personalized manner.

From the hotel’s website to social media channels such as Facebook, chatbots can be integrated anywhere, walking the visitors through the process of hotel bookings.

Enhanced Room Service

The AI-based chatbots can eliminate the need for hotel guests to interact with hotel staff, instead, establishing a virtual interaction through devices like mobiles. AI-driven bots will make it easy for the guests to perform tasks like ordering meals, getting suggestions for special dishes available in the hotel’s kitchen, regulating room temperature and lighting, receiving recommendations on sightseeing and visits etc. This way hotels can cut down on time, capital and human labor considerably.

Upselling Opportunities

A custom chatbot can easily cross-sell and upsell hotel services like spa, cafe or a bar. The chatbots can send hyper-personalized messages through push notifications or SMS, drawing insights on customer journey using their machine learning algorithms. They can use these insights to offer additional services to the guests depending upon their requirements.

Keeping in Touch Even after Check out

The custom chatbots can also engage with the guests even after they have checked out. Conducting personalized surveys to rate the customer’s hotel experience and sending them tailored discounts and offers via email marketing can essentially build customer loyalty and brand recall for the hotels.

Some of the popular chains of hotels that are using AI technologies include:

• Wynn Las Vegas integrating Amazon Echo to all their hotel rooms to allow the guests to access various hotel room features using voice command.
• Edwardian Hotels offering virtual hosts for enabling the guests to interact with the AI chatbot digitally and allowing self-service.
• Accor Hotels with their digital concierge named Mercure Bot that converses with the guests and helps them to know the local destinations better

AI-driven chatbot for hotels can essentially perform iterative tasks without roping in the hotel staff. While chatbot takes care of the monotonous requests, the hotel staff can engage in more productive tasks. Providing efficient guest communication and exceptional customer service, utilizing less time, capital, and human resources have made custom chatbot for enterprises the smartest revenue-generating technology for the hospitality industry.

For hotel enterprises that are serious about skyrocketing their sales, developing a custom chatbot can be a bit of a challenge. However, with customized chatbot solution, you can move one step closer to realizing the perfect hotel experience for your customers.

We at Affle Enterprise have developed chatbot for hotels, each built for a custom use case. Monitoring and witnessing the impact of their integration in real time.

For any queries regarding Mobile app development/Chatbot development, drop us a line @ [email protected].

Originally published at Affle Enterprise