A customer service representative talk to customers on behalf of companies and businesses. They answer customer queries, resolve customer complaints, and address emergency issues. If a customer needs help placing an order or needs to change their order, the customer service representative walks them through the correct steps. Customer service representatives will also provide additional sales or products, or sell products or services directly.

What Customer Service Representatives do?

Customer service representatives typically do the following:

• Listen to customer’s questions and concerns, and provide answers or responses
• Provide information about products and services
• Take orders, calculate charges, and process billing or payments
• Review or make changes to customer accounts
• Handle returns or complaints
• Record details of customer contacts and actions taken
• Refer customers to supervisors or more experienced employees

The specific duties of customer service representatives vary by industry. For example, representatives who work in banks may answer customer’s questions about their accounts. Representatives who work for utility and telecommunication companies may help customers with service problems, such as outages. Those who work in retail stores often handle returns, process refunds, and help customers locate items. Some representatives make changes to customers' accounts, such as updating addresses or canceling orders. Although selling is not their main job, some representatives may help generate sales while providing information about a product or service.

How to define your Customer service project?

Your job description is the 1st touch point between your company and your new hire. With millions of people looking for jobs on so every month, an excellent description will assist you attract the most qualified candidates to your open position. To urge you started, here are some tips for making an efficient description.

A great job description starts with a compelling summary of the position and its role within your company. Your summary should provide an overview of your company and expectations for the position. Outline the types of activities and responsibilities required for the job so job seekers can determine if they are qualified, or if the job is a good fit.

Basic of customer service project description are as follow:

1. State a brief one to two sentence overview of the project objectives.
2. State this in one sentence so the professional understands how the work fits into the bigger picture.
3. Be specific with requirements, such as specific software knowledge, typing speed, and language fluency.
4. Enter a start and end date. Most independent contractor projects are project based and/or short-term. If you’re unsure of the end date, or if the work may be ongoing, you may need to consult your HR partner or other advisor to verify the worker’s classification.
5. Independent contractor work is often paid at a fixed price. When paying hourly, you may want to specify the maximum number of hours for the project if any.

Sample:

We need an experience agent for a ten month project, expected to require 25 hours/week of services, from [start date] to [end date]. We’re launching a multimedia campaign that’s expected to dramatically spike call volume. You’ll work from your own location to handle product calls, take orders, and process payments.

Skill Requirements:

• Knowledge of Zendesk and Salesforce software
• Expertise in providing customer service via phone and live chat
• Fluent in English and Spanish
• Handle 10-15 calls per hour
• Ability to upsell and cross-sell products on the phone
• Basic knowledge of Microsoft Excel

In every era, marketing has evolved based on what the customer is using. If you go back in history, you can see that at times when customers used Radio, it gave birth to radio advertising and marketing. Next, we got the boom of televisions, it is one of the widely used device globally, which allowed the companies to reach a mass audience with TV ads. Even today TV advertising is one of the most used advertising strategies for companies. Since the boom of the Internet, more customers started using the Internet, which gave birth to a new era of marketing originally called Internet marketing, which is now called Digital Marketing.

Now a days, we frequently hear the term Digital marketing we all think that we reasonably understand what actually it is. This thinking sometimes limits the scope and opportunity that the complete Digital marketing landscape will actually offer, which is why, when it involves nailing it down, we either turn dumbfounded or get stuck. To come out of such scenarios, it is important to know different types of Digital marketing opportunities that are available to your business. According to Salesforce, 75th of Total marketing Budget will head to Digital marketing.

Digital marketing depends upon the kinds of audience interactions. It revolves around managing and harnessing of various types of Digital marketing Channels and many varieties of Digital marketing services.

Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels like search engines, social media, email, and their websites to connect with current and prospective customers.

Why companies use digital marketing?

1. Internet Users: As per the internet usage stats, 40% of the world population is using the internet.
2. Mobile Phones: Most of the users globally today use mobile phones for communication. As per a report 4.77 billion mobiles phone users globally, which will increase to 5.07 billion by 2019.
3. Targeting the Audience: In traditional marketing strategies, it is very difficult to advertise to the target audience with specific demographics & details. Today with digital marketing we have so many customised & personalised methods to target the audience exclusively.
4. Low Cost and High ROI: Most of the small and medium scale companies rely mostly on digital marketing strategies due to its low cost and high return on investment.

Digital Marketing Types

1. Search Engine Optimisation: SEO is the process of optimising your website to "rank" higher in search engine results pages, thereby increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic your website receives. The channels that benefit from SEO include Website, Blogs or Info-graphics.
2. Content Marketing: CM denotes the creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and customers. The channels that can play a part in your content marketing strategy include Blogs posts, Ebooks and whitepaper, info-graphics, online brochures and look-books.
3. Social Media Marketing: SMM promotes your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business. The channels you can use in social media marketing include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, linked In, Snap-chat, or google+.
4. Pay-Per-Click: PPC is a method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google AdWords, which allows you to pay for top slots on Google's search engine results pages at a price "per click" of the links you place. Other channels where you can use PPC include Paid ads on Facebook, Promoted Tweets on Twitter.
5. Email Marketing: Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people toward the business's website.

Digital Marketing Strategies

Here is a list of five simple digital marketing strategies that any business owner can implement to help their business grow:

1. Setting a goal: Digital marketing is a great way for small businesses to prosper, but going into the method blindly can leave you with a jumbled mess. A lot of strategy and precision goes into digital marketing and having a goal helps you recognise what to focus on.
2. Creating a Marketing Funnel: The most successful businesses have a good marketing funnel in place. A marketing funnel is when you map out a customer’s journey from when a customer is a complete stranger to once they become a lead, then put certain methods in place that may encourage them to move through this funnel. Things like lead magnets, calls to action, opt-ins and offers are all effective pieces of a funnel. You’ll consider a marketing funnel in four parts: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.
3. Developing a call-to-action: A call-to-action (CTA) is a picture or text that prompts visitors to take action, like subscribe to a newsletter, read a webinar or request a product demo. CTAs should direct people to landing pages, wherever you'll collect visitors’ contact info in exchange for a valuable marketing offer. In that sense, an effective CTA results in more leads and conversions for your web site. This path, from a click on a CTA to a landing page, illustrates a lot of desired process of lead generation.
4. Creating an Effective Lead magnet: The idea behind a lead magnet is to trade information. You supply something like a free download of a white paper, but in order to complete the download the individual has to fill out a form that will provide you with more information about them. You’ll use the information you gather to interact with them more as they progress through your funnel.
5. Driving Traffic: There a variety of ways you can drive traffic to your website.

• Quality Content: Use content like blog posts, press releases and articles on authority websites. Insert links to various places on your web site inside this content to create your brand name through exposure and drive traffic to your website.
• Keyword Strategy: Inserting related keywords into content will help your content and website show up in more search results, this leads to higher volumes of web traffic.
• Website Optimisation: Ensuring that your website is optimised and functioning at its best is essential. People don’t want to visit a website that doesn’t work properly.
• Social Media: Use engaging social media posts to attract more traffic to your site. Using pictures, video, and other relevant media will help your posts get more engagement.

We have many different specialisations so you will have different options to start your career.

1. Digital marketing strategist
2. Digital marketing executive
3. SEO analyst
4. Social media specialist
5. Google AdWords specialist
6. Email marketing specialist
7. Web Analyst
8. Online reputation manager

APIs became so valuable it comprises an oversized part of several businesses’ revenue. Major companies like Google, eBay, Salesforce.com, Amazon, and Expedia are simply many of the businesses that build money from their APIs.

API stands for application program Interface. It refers to a group of tools, protocols or routines used for building applications. An API informs software how it should interact.

In other words, APIs are all about connection, and it’s a way to integrate data from one source into another source, such as a web service or mobile app.

An API defines functionalities that are independent of their various implementations, which allows those implementations and definitions to vary without compromising one another. Therefore, a decent API makes it easier to develop a program by providing the building blocks.

APIs allow developers to save lots of time by taking advantage of a platform’s implementation to try to work. This helps to reduce the number of code developers need to produce, and it helps produce a lot of consistency across apps for constant platform. APIs can control access to hardware and software resources.

Programmers tend to solve programming problems by more programming.

Why APIs are Important?

Now, you’re probably thinking there is no way major companies are handing out their valuable code and technology. But, you might be afraid that just about each major tech company think Facebook and Dropbox, simply to name a couple is giving away insights into their code and platforms, and this is what actually makes APIs so good.

Our Internet experience runs on APIs. Instead of accessing four different companies four separate times, we use one software to access all four at the same time.

1. APIs is huge time saver: Have you ever logged into an application or a website using your Facebook account? It’s yet another example of how an API saves you the time of creating an account, and saves the company from creating a system from scratch.
2. Businesses are creating apps that rely on APIs: One of the most famous company built on a foundation of APIs is the ride-sharing app Uber. Without its API connection to Twilio, the messaging platform, or Google Maps, the company would have never existed.
3. APIs helps businesses: APIs can allow businesses, from startups to massive corporations, to concentrate on their core competencies without having to do the work that has already been done.

Types of APIs

There are various types of APIs, for example, you must have heard of Java APIs, or interfaces inside classes that allow objects talk over with one another within the Java programing language. Along with program-centric APIs, there are also internet APIs like the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Remote Procedure call (RPC), and maybe the most popular at least in name Representational State Transfer (REST). There are 15,000 publicly available APIs, according to Programmable web, and many thousands of more personal APIs that companies use to expand their internal and external capabilities.

Future of API experts

We already rely on APIs so much without us knowing. Whether we use an app to view current traffic or to check the weather, these apps frequently rely on APIs to pull apps data. With all co-dependence, it opens up realms of opportunities for applications to become integrated. It also allows developers and technology to advance much faster, because the internet and applications share information with each other.

There are currently over 15,000 public APIs available today and that number is expected to quadruple in the next four years, the opportunities for innovation are going to be endless.

We should not fear the future of APIs, but rather embrace the road, and let’s see where it takes us.