Florence by mills, a skincare and beauty brand, faced a unique challenge in October 2021. The brand noticed a disconnect between the person transacting on their website and the end-user of the product. Often, it was a parent or family member buying products for a younger relative instead of someone purchasing for themselves. This presented a challenge in terms of engaging and converting both Gen Z consumers and their parents. The brand needed a solution that would guide both the end consumer and the gift-purchaser throughout their shopping journey, ensuring that the right products were recommended to the right customers.

Ethan Allen Workforce Solutions, the largest full-service agency in the Hudson Valley area, was facing challenges in managing the talent lifecycle efficiently. The company specializes in healthcare, administrative, and industrial sectors, providing both direct recruitment and temporary staffing solutions. Despite transitioning to the Bullhorn Platform, the team was still grappling with manual processes that were time-consuming and inefficient. The challenge was to implement a system that could automate various stages of the talent lifecycle, from attracting and engaging to onboarding and nurturing talent. The goal was to enhance the candidate experience, create a consistently engaged talent pool, and lower the cost of talent acquisition.

Mama Money, a rapidly growing tech company specializing in cross-border payments, was facing challenges with their customer support system. They were using Google Sheets to track all customer interactions, which became increasingly cumbersome as the company expanded into new regions and increased their field agent strength to 2500. The company was facing scaling and growth-related issues and needed a solution that could cater to their specific needs. These included identifying new channels for rapid market acquisition, managing the increased volume of customer interactions, and providing a simple and intuitive user interface, especially in markets like West Africa where users were less tech-savvy.

MediusGo, a cloud-based tool developed by Swedish software company Medius, was facing a significant challenge in managing a high volume of customer support tickets. The company was initially using Desk.com from Salesforce as their customer service solution. However, the solution was soon retired, and MediusGo needed to explore alternatives. The company evaluated several solutions, including Salesforce Lightning, Zendesk, Kayako, and Freshdesk. The primary goal was to find a solution that would allow them to be self-sufficient and not rely on consultants for every move. They also wanted to improve the adoption of self-service among their customers to reduce the number of support tickets. The company receives a large volume of support tickets every month, and they wanted to equip their customers with the knowledge and tools they needed to solve their own issues, reducing the need for regular contact.

Candace Junée, the founder of Epic Fab Girl and 6-Figure Maven, was facing a challenge with her rapidly growing Instagram account. In less than a year, her follower count had surged from 10,000 to over 50,000. This growth led to an increase in direct messages (DMs) from followers asking about products or seeking customer support. Candace, who values attentiveness to her followers as a crucial part of her brand, found it increasingly difficult to respond thoughtfully to the large volume of DMs. She was looking for a more efficient way to manage her inbox, engage with her followers in a meaningful way, and continue to provide the high-quality customer experience that her followers had come to expect.

Humber River Hospital, a major acute care facility in Toronto, Canada, was grappling with a significant challenge - the nursing shortage. The hospital was continually seeking first-rate ICU nursing candidates to staff its facility. However, the traditional recruitment methods, such as job ads on Indeed, were not yielding the desired results. The high competition among other Toronto hospitals made it difficult for Humber River Hospital to stand out with only a text ad. This resulted in a low return on investment (ROI) for its high cost. If the hospital didn't get enough candidates through job boards, they would have to resort to recruitment agencies, which cost an average of $15,000 per hire. The hospital was in dire need of a more cost-effective way to attract and qualify candidates for its internal recruitment agents.

Nikmit, an eCommerce marketplace based in Macedonia, was struggling to generate the desired return from their Facebook ad strategy. The company was primarily using Facebook ads with a traffic objective and boosted organic posts to generate interest and surface new products. However, this approach was not yielding the expected results. Nikmit needed to reach the right audiences and initiate conversations with them to boost awareness and sales. The company's goal was to better surface product lines and build relationships with new audiences through Chat Marketing.

Zoom Video Communications, Inc., a leading enterprise video communications platform, experienced significant growth during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This rapid expansion required a scalable and secure identity solution that would also provide a seamless user experience. Zoom's legacy identity management environment was not equipped to scale easily with the public cloud or to the hundreds of thousands of systems in use. The company needed a solution that could handle the immense growth while maintaining security and compliance standards. The challenge was to find a solution that could secure server access, alleviate the pressure on Zoom's data center operations team, and provide a seamless user experience to the millions of customers who rely on Zoom for work, education, and personal use.

Emerson, a global technology, software, and engineering company, faced a challenge in elevating its digital engagement with customers and prospects. The company, which already had millions of web visits annually, wanted to improve the customer experience and connect customers with subject matter experts more efficiently. The goal was to reduce the time it takes for customers to get their needs met, replace form fills, capture intent, and deliver high-value leads directly to their product experts. Initially, Emerson used a simple web-based calendaring solution, but scalability was a problem given the company’s size, personnel depth, and geographic diversity. They needed a solution that could provide artificial intelligence with chat capabilities, which their previous tool lacked. Furthermore, Emerson required a globally scalable solution that would consider customer intent and a partner that could support them without adding headcount.

Employment Hero, a rapidly growing startup based in Sydney, Australia, was faced with the challenge of providing an exceptional customer experience. The company, which offers a suite of powerful employment tools to over 80,000 businesses worldwide, wanted to engage buyers on their terms. They used digital marketing strategies to attract prospects to their website, but they needed a way to interact with these prospects once they were on the site. They wanted to be fully aware of the customer's location, activities, buying stage, and preferred engagement channel. The challenge was to find a solution that would allow them to engage with customers in real time, track and monitor their behavior on the site, and make the sales cycle more efficient.

Proofpoint, a global leader in cybersecurity and compliance solutions, faced a significant challenge in enhancing its buyer experience to match its high customer satisfaction and renewal rates. The company aimed to drive more traffic to their site and create a better buying experience for their visitors. However, their existing chat solution offered little visibility into site traffic and lacked integration with their existing sales and marketing platforms. This made it impossible for them to operationalize, scale, or enable chat across all of their regions. They needed a solution that could deliver a friction-free and highly relevant buyer experience, improve response times, filter and route traffic quickly and accurately, and increase sales efficiency by integrating with existing platforms and automating previously manual tasks.

Augmented Human Lab, a research center at Auckland Bioengineering Institute, was faced with the challenge of inspiring curiosity for science in children, particularly those who lacked confidence in science subjects. The lab's founder, Suranga Nanayakkara, wanted to create a fun computer interface that could become an extension of a child's curiosity and imagination. This led to the birth of the Kiwrious project, which aimed to make science playful and exciting by using plug-in sensors that capture environmental phenomena. However, to spread the Kiwrious mission, especially in disadvantaged schools, Suranga needed powerful cloud solutions to free up his small team from mundane tasks such as server maintenance, enable unlimited scaling power, and protect the identity of pupils with world-class cloud security.

Autonom8, a US and India-based enterprise workflow management software business, aimed to help clients reduce costs and improve customer interactions through automation. The company provides a low-code SaaS platform that includes components like A8Studio, a chat platform, and an analytics module. However, the changing customer demands of enterprises, the rising cost of building software with experienced developers, and the need for customer journeys to evolve due to changing consumer habits and regulations posed challenges. Autonom8 initially deployed on a multinational cloud service, but the decision to opt for a microservices architecture that enables individual services to scale independently while running in a containerized environment demanded high-quality container orchestration. Furthermore, many of Autonom8's clients were financial institutions in India, legally required to retain data within the country's borders.

Avocados Don Goyo, a leading exporter of fresh Hass avocado, was facing significant operational challenges due to its reliance on on-premises infrastructure. The company's servers were located in rural areas, making them vulnerable to inclement weather and recurring power outages. This resulted in stressful situations for employees who feared potential damage to equipment and subsequent data loss. The company's access to its SAP systems was heavily dependent on weather conditions, which hindered its ability to manage operations effectively and explore new business opportunities. As a company aiming for scalability and international expansion, Avocados Don Goyo realized that relying solely on on-premises infrastructure was no longer viable. They needed to transition to a more agile cloud technology that could provide full availability of its SAP systems, regardless of weather conditions.

AVROTROS, a Dutch radio and television broadcaster, was facing challenges in engaging its audience through online media and mobile apps due to the limitations of its existing infrastructure. The broadcaster's infrastructure was not optimized for the scale that popular mobile apps work at, leading to outages and users being locked out of the app. This was a significant issue as AVROTROS aimed to foster a deeper connection with its audience by using every channel available. Additionally, AVROTROS had outsourced its back-end and was totally dependent on its suppliers, leading to stability issues and outages. The broadcaster needed a next-generation infrastructure to engage and retain its audience with next-generation apps and gain greater control and visibility into its infrastructure management.

Bareksa, an Indonesian fintech startup, was founded in 2013 with the mission to provide investment opportunities to the rapidly growing middle class in Indonesia. However, as the popularity of the platform grew, Bareksa found itself struggling to scale services during spikes in customer demand. This was a significant issue for a startup that relied on speed and 100% reliability to succeed. Additionally, its engineering team was spending a significant amount of time on DevOps tasks, such as provisioning servers and managing databases, leaving little time for creating innovative fintech solutions to grow the business. Bareksa was operating in a monolithic on-premise environment, with physical servers and a self-managed database, which was proving to be inefficient and time-consuming.

Bedatadriven, a company that leverages data and analysis to achieve their clients' goals, was facing challenges with their core project, ActivityInfo. ActivityInfo is a database platform for humanitarian relief operations and development assistance, used by over 75 organizations across Africa and Asia. The platform was initially developed for UNICEF’s emergency program in eastern Congo and is now used to track relief and development activities across more than 10,000 project sites. The challenge was to ensure that the system was highly available, given the challenging environments that ActivityInfo users work in and the nature of the crises. They also needed minimal system administration, allowing Bedatadriven to focus on product development. The platform also needed to scale up and down according to the load, with minimal human intervention. They also required clear monitoring tools to help pinpoint performance problems.

BlaBlaCar, a leading long-distance carpooling platform, was facing challenges with its on-premises infrastructure. Initially built to support the French market, the infrastructure was struggling to keep up with the company's rapid global expansion. The company was experiencing issues with returning carpool search results consistently, processing payments, and connecting drivers and passengers. The engineering team was spending more time maintaining servers rather than focusing on enhancing platform features. The company needed a scalable, data-driven infrastructure that could support its growing global community and meet users’ needs in real time.