Nubian Skin Beats Spikes in Customer Interest with G Suite
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“Nude” comes in all shapes, sizes and colors. But for Ade Hassan, finding undergarments to match her skin tone took more effort than necessary. Born in the U.K. to Nigerian parents, Hassan searched unsuccessfully for underwear and swimwear that matched her skin—a problem that continued to frustrate her through college and into her professional life.
“My nude isn’t the nude I see in shops,” Hassan says.
Like many other black entrepreneurs, she created her own solution. Hassan founded Nubian Skin, a company that sells lingerie, hosiery, and swimwear for women of color.
With shades like “cafe au lait” and “berry,” Nubian Skin products reflect diverse skin tones and are sold in shops located in the U.K., Nigeria and the U.S., as well as online. Beyoncé and her dancers even asked Nubian Skin to outfit them for their 2017 “Formation” tour.
Since nearly the beginning, Hassan has used G Suite to keep her business humming.
From managing meetings with retailers and manufacturers, to coordinating publicity efforts with fashion press, to keeping track of retail invoices, G Suite has helped Hassan scale her business as quickly as people have demanded her products.
“There are so many pitfalls and so many things that are hard about business,” Hassan says. “It’s really amazing to have something like G Suite that is easy and intuitive.”
Nubian Skin’s fashion fame arrived seemingly overnight. When Hassan posted the company’s first campaign images, its Instagram followers jumped from 50 people to more than 20,000 in just a few weeks.
“People called asking, ‘Can we have the contact for the press department?,” says Hassan. “But at the time, it was just me.” To easily handle media requests, she set up a press@nubianskin.com email address through the G Suite Admin console. And because she had used Gmail for several months before launching the company, using the business version of Gmail came naturally.
“Having that nubianskin.com address gave the business an air of professionalism, which we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” Hassan says. “Usually you need a whole IT department to set up new emails and passwords, but the Admin console removes the hassle of that process.”
Because Nubian Skin employees aren’t always in the showroom together, they need to be able to access business documents—like model photos and customer invoices—from anywhere.
To help, Hassan securely stores business documents in Google Drive (which can be accessed on mobile, too) and works collaboratively with her finance team to process orders using Google Sheets.
“Everyone has access to the spreadsheet so we can fill in what we need at any given point,” says Hassan. “This way, nothing slips through the cracks.”
And when she needs to connect with colleagues quickly or face-to-face, she uses Hangouts Chat or Hangouts Meet. Chat makes it so employees are only a message away, and Meet helps her connect with people as if they’re in person at the office.
Five years after launching Nubian Skin, Hassan is a recognized entrepreneur who’s influenced other retailers to create more inclusive designs.
“Even if you’re small, you want people to see you as a professional business,” Hassan says. “If you’re still growing, you need the building blocks to get you where you want to be. I can’t imagine working without G Suite.”
The Divercity Story: Using Google Cloud to Achieve a More Inclusive and Sustainable Workforce
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Despite a growing number of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Black and Latinx people remain highly underrepresented in tech. Although comprising 12.6% and 18% of the U.S. labor force respectively, Black professionals hold only 5% of tech positions, while Latinx professionals fill just 6% of tech roles.
Long-standing biases in hiring practices and non-inclusive work environments are the primary contributors to this lack of diversity. Even when underrepresented professionals are successfully recruited, invisible barriers to promotion and layoffs that disproportionally impact Black and Latinx employees make it extremely challenging for tech firms to retain top talent.
We founded Divercity to help employers build diverse workforces that are more inclusive and sustainable. With our comprehensive recruiting and retention platform, tech companies can accurately measure employee diversity and gender parity, seamlessly connect with underrepresented talent, and significantly reduce turnover.
As Divercity continues to grow, we’ll introduce new services and solutions that empower the tech world to build inclusive companies while improving compliance with state and federal equal opportunity laws. We also hope to expand the reach of Divercity to support DEI initiatives in non-tech industries and bolster recruiting underrepresented professionals in other countries as well.
Scaling Divercity with the help of the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund
Shortly after founding Divercity, we participated in the 2021 Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator. The incredible support and guidance we received during and after the program highlighted the importance of long-term collaboration with reliable technology partners who actively champion diversity and inclusion.
That’s why we became part of the Google for Startups Cloud Program. After completing the program, we used Google Cloud credits and Google for Startups Black Founders Fund funding to cost-effectively trial, deploy, and scale key Google Cloud solutions. In just months, we rolled out new inclusion tracking and recruiting tools on the highly secure-by-design infrastructure of Google Cloud to expedite the sourcing and hiring of underrepresented talent in the tech industry.
With the support and mentorship of the Google for Startups Cloud Program and the Black Founders Fund, Divercity is well on its way to becoming one of the industry’s most trusted sites for DEI measurement, recruitment, and retention.
Delivering predictive diversity analyses with a 99% accuracy rate
We rely on the expansive Google Cloud ecosystem to power all the services offered on the Divercity platform. Specifically, we leverage Colab to write and execute the sophisticated TensorFlow machine learning (ML) models that deliver our predictive diversity analyses with a 99% accuracy rate.
We also use BigQuery to democratize insights and run analytics at scale with 27% lower three-year TCO than cloud data warehouse alternatives. BigQuery seamlessly integrates with Looker and Data Studio to display company diversity and recruitment data on interactive dashboards—and automatically populate reports with detailed demographic information.
We also accelerate the development, launch, and management of new Divercity tools with Firebase, while taking advantage of key features such as A/B testing and messaging campaigns to boost user engagement.
In the future, we plan to explore how Google Cloud AI and machine learning products such as Vertex AI and AutoML can further refine our diversity score analyses and applicant recruiting pipeline. We’ll also continue leveraging the many resources provided by the Google Black Founders Fund, including opportunities for technical project partnerships, early access to new Google Cloud products and tools, and collaboration with dedicated Google experts.
The Google for Startups Cloud Program and Google Black Founders Fund have been invaluable to our success. Since completing the Black Founders Accelerator program, we’ve been named a top 10 HR tech product by HR Tech Outlook, significantly increased our subscriber base, and received positive feedback from investors. We can’t wait to see what we accomplish next as we empower tech companies to build more diverse, inclusive, and sustainable workforces.
If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.
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How Haydenshapes Expanded its Business to 70 Countries With Real-Time Collaboration
Hayden Cox was only 15 years old when he broke his surfboard. And he was only 15 years old when he decided to make one.
That’s how Haydenshapes, Cox’s surfboard manufacturing company, took form. That was five years ago. Today, the company has manufacturing units in Los Angeles, Sydney, and Thailand and is selling surfboards in 70 countries around the world.
One of the major enablers that ensured Haydenshapes expanded its reach across continents—in just five years—is collaboration. For any company wanting to spread its wings and expand quickly to reach more customers, real-time collaboration is imperative.
That’s why Haydenshapes turned to Google Cloud’s G Suite to ensure its teams in Los Angeles, Sydney, and Thailand are working together towards the same goal in real-time. Its marketing, sales, and other business teams collaborated on Google Docs, Slides and Sheets to help the business grow across the world.
This, in turn, ensured that Cox could dedicate a significant amount of time in coming up with the next big idea and getting more products out to market quickly and cost-effectively.
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There’s no doubt that Google Cloud is one of the most recognizable user interfaces in the world—everybody knows how to use it to find the information they need. It has upheld this standard of ease-of-use throughout their entire suite of cloud applications for business.
Simply put, G Suite—Google Cloud’s collaboration and productivity platform—provides an environment where people feel comfortable. Because of this, there is naturally less friction and resistance to adoption.
While moving to the cloud has tremendous benefits, but it’s a big change. Big changes at companies require thoughtful guidance and communication even when the change has as much upside as G Suite.
That’s why Google Cloud gives you plenty of tools, training resources, templates, and examples for quick transition and minimal disruption.
G Suite contains productivity-boosting features like multi-person, real-time collaboration in Google Drive and fast message search in Gmail. Though these apps are top of their class, it’s their seamless integration that really helps business operations shine.
That’s probably why 64% of Fortune 500 companies trust Google Cloud with their data. Download this ebook to find more fascinating numbers around how Google Cloud can help you leverage a comprehensive collaboration platform that gives a competitive edge to your business.
AI-powered Business Messages for Timely, Engaging and Helpful Conversations with Customers
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Over the last two years, we’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of people using messaging to connect with businesses. Whether it was checking hours of operation, verifying what was in stock, or scheduling a pick-up, the pandemic caused a significant shift in consumer behavior.
- 45% of users are spending more time on messaging services because of the pandemic
- 85% of consumers would like to message brands directly
With the rise in demand for messaging, consumers expect communication with businesses to be speedy, simple, and convenient. For businesses, keeping up with customer inquiries can be a labor-intensive process, and offering 24/7 support outside of store hours can be costly.
To help businesses seamlessly deliver helpful, timely, and engaging conversations with customers when and where they need help, we introduced AI-powered Business Messages.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fcgP3RHjBLY%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26
What is AI-powered Business Messages?
With AI-powered Business Messages, you can connect with your customers in their moment of need, in the places they’re looking for answers—such as Google Search, Google Maps, or any brand-owned channel. For instance, check out how Walmart customers in the US are able to receive real-time information on product availability, straight from a search results page.
People turn to Google when they are searching for answers to their questions, looking to buy something, or trying to accomplish a particular task with one of our many tools. In fact, 68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine.
At Google, we know how important it is for interactions with a brand to be personalized, helpful, and simple. With AI-powered Business Messages, customers are able to chat with virtual agents that understand, interact, and respond in natural ways.
We are also combining smart automation with the ability for customers to chat with live agents when it’s really needed. This approach saves your customers precious time, while also saving you money. And with Business Messages automatically handling many customer inquiries in the background, businesses have the option to distribute their human customer service agents to address other needs.
Getting started with conversational AI is easy with Bot-in-a-Box
We know it can be difficult to get started with AI. That’s why we are utilizing existing Google AI tools like Dialogflow—part of Google Cloud Contact Center AI—to create the capability within Google’s Business Messages called Bot-in-a-Box, which makes getting started with Conversational AI easy. Bot-in-a-Box allows for fast and effective adoption of automation for businesses of all sizes.
Enabling Business Messages with Bot-in-a-Box can be as simple as leveraging an existing customer FAQ document you already have, whether it’s from a web page or an internal document. And since the conversational AI is powered by Business Messages and Dialogflow working together, your chat bot is able to understand and respond to customer questions automatically without the need to write code.
Bot-in-a-Box also supports other critical journeys like “Custom Intents.” That means that your bot is able to understand the different ways customers express a similar question and respond accurately by using machine learning capabilities.
Finding success
In April 2021, Wake County courthouses in North Carolina partnered with Tango Technology to implement Business Messages when it became apparent that being able to provide the public and attorneys with around-the-clock access to information would significantly reduce the pressure on courthouse staff. Using Bot-in-a-Box, Tango Technology was able to customize a solution for Wake County Courthouse, Justice Center, and Clerk of Superior Court in just four days.
“With the combination of Google’s Business Messages, GCP, and Dialogflow, we were able to spin up an AI-driven bot for the courts in days. And the technology stack allows us to continually improve by adding functionality in an agile process.”— Mike Lotz, Co-Founder, Tango Technology
With Business Messages, North Carolina courthouses saw a 37% decrease in the call volume handled by courthouse staff. With 398,298 fewer phone calls during the first year of operation, the AI-based messages helped Wake County Courthouse work more efficiently and productively.
We’ve seen many brands benefiting from AI-powered Business Messages. For instance, Levi’s saw a 30% increase in off-hours shoppers and surpassed 85% customer satisfaction scores after implementing Business Messages. They also drove 30x more store-related questions than Levi’s website chat.
Bring Google’s conversational AI to your storefront with Business Messages
Google’s Business Messages makes it easier for businesses of all sizes to engage their existing or potential customers in a virtual conversation, when and where they need it.
To learn more, watch our Cloud Next session here or visit us at g.co/businessmessages. We have specialized services to help you get started and can share the wisdom of our channel partners and dedicated experts who specialize in unleashing the potential of conversational AI.
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How You Can Collaborate in Real Time to Build Pitch Proposals Overnight
It’s no secret that marketing and sales teams have a love-hate relationship. But there’s one thing that binds them like no other: The pressure of creating pitch decks overnight.
The struggle is real.
Be it for a new marketing campaign or a sales idea, pitch decks need multiple teams in different parts of the world to collaborate towards a single goal—and race with the clock.
That’s why, more often than not, marketing and sales teams watch deadlines fly past and risk losing potential customers, fail to beat the competition, and adversely impact revenue.
But with G Suite, marketing teams can now collaborate in real time, tweak proposals, add missing data, and write and edit the same file—all together. In fact, 74 percent of all time spent in Docs, Sheets, and Slides is on collaborative work—that is, multiple people creating and editing content together. That means they can create pitch decks overnight.
With AI and machine learning powering, and protecting, the G Suite, today’s marketing and sales teams have a smarter, quicker and more secure platform to ensure their ideas get to market faster and also remain within the organization.
That’s probably why companies like Whirlpool, Nielsen, BBVA, and Broadcom are among the many who chose G Suite to move faster, better connect their teams, and advance their competitive edge.
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