Advanced version of WeChat public China Merchants Bank account development

Abstract: After more than a year of development, China Merchants Bank has exceeded 15 million fans in 2014, ranking first among banking WeChat public accounts, and can be called the most successful WeChat public account case. As the developer of China Merchants Bank’s credit card WeChat platform, Shenzhen CloudSoft has summarized the following experiences regarding the development of advanced applications for WeChat public accounts.

In April 2013, China Merchants Bank’s credit card WeChat public account was launched with the people-friendly image of “little trick”. In less than half a year, it gained the favor of millions of users. After more than a year of development, it has grown to With more than 15 million fans, it ranks first among banking WeChat public accounts and can be called the most successful WeChat public account case. As the developer of China Merchants Bank’s credit card WeChat platform, Shenzhen CloudSoft has summarized the following experiences regarding the development of advanced applications for WeChat public accounts.

Planning must be ahead of schedule

When planning, most companies adopt a try-it-and-try attitude and do not invest enough. They only do WeChat because their leaders say they should do it. I didn't make long-term plans, so I just tasted it. Many WeChat public accounts just link to the page and make a microsite, without in-depth consideration of how to provide corporate services to customers through a good experience. For a forward-looking plan, you must first choose a platform that has a stable and reasonable architecture, sufficient business flexibility and openness, can gradually add and develop business, can flexibly adjust the experience, and can connect to various back-end system resources, etc.

The structure must be reasonable

The WeChat platform is not a simple link entrance, it is a pipeline connecting enterprise services and users. Therefore, the WeChat platform needs a reasonable architectural design so that the platform can flexibly switch between different interaction modes and various forms of service resources, and maintain a good experience. In general, WeChat interaction includes three categories: light app experience of clicking menus, message interaction in chat windows, and page interaction. Message interaction includes automatic message interaction and manual message interaction. From a long-term planning perspective, the platform needs to meet the following requirements:

1. High performance and high availability;

2. Capacity scalability;

3. Monitorable , manageable;

4. The business is scalable and can be flexibly changed and loaded;

5. Open, customers can carry out secondary development of business processes and provide standardized interfaces and Connect with third-party systems, including access to multiple IM channels.

Many of our customers are already applying or planning omni-channel access, which can implement multiple modes such as WeChat, Weibo, QQ, WebChat, and email.

Many details of the design of the platform architecture come from business and operational needs, as shown below.

1. The requirement for concurrency determines the interface design mode. Only by adopting asynchronous, stateless, and multi-threaded interface mode can we meet the processing of extremely large concurrency and be easy to expand. China Merchants Bank currently issues 4 million consumption reminders every day, with more than 200,000 reminders issued in half an hour during peak periods.

2. The requirement for reliability determines the persistence of the cache, ensuring that even if a node's program goes down or even suffers a physical failure, transaction data will not be lost. Our early solution also had flaws. Under special circumstances, if the interface program crashes or is restarted, the data in the sending queue will be lost. Although the amount is not large, it is important to banking business and can lead to complaints from users.

3. The support of database performance for DB transaction volume and the requirements for distributed architecture determine the existence of the database middle layer. A good architecture must not only support a single database to maximize performance, but also consider that the server hardware can be expanded if there is a bottleneck, because the database will always be in use due to various reasons such as computing power, I/O throughput, storage, etc. At a certain point, it reaches an insurmountable bottleneck, just like 12306. When a large number of user requests pour in in a short period of time, it will bring great pressure to the system. The final bottleneck of the entire system is often the database. The solution is to use Distributed solutions. CloudSoft IMCC supports horizontal and vertical expansion in its architecture. In theory, it can support unlimited capacity as long as the network bandwidth permits.

4. Regarding the efficiency of communication connections, WeChat’s protocol is an HTTP two-way POST protocol, using a short connection method. This communication method is actually very inefficient. Each request requires establishing and releasing a connection. For a single service node, its performance is much lower than that of TCP long connections. The protocol also has more byte redundancy and requires higher transmission bandwidth. However, the advantage is that it can be easily expanded through multiple nodes and the difficulty of development is also low. With the improvement of computer performance and network bandwidth, the amount of transmission data that was previously saved in bytes can be ignored, and the short connection method will be widely used in the future. Although the communication within our platform uses TCP long connections, which can reach up to tens of thousands of messages per second in a 100M network environment, which is much more efficient, the disadvantage is that it requires relatively high development requirements and needs to handle many network abnormal events. It is also not convenient for multi-node expansion.

China Merchants Bank’s experience design emphasizes experience but emphasizes backend

The design of China Merchants Bank’s micro-customer service products fully reflects the attentive service concept of “paying attention to user experience and paying attention to service details”. Although China Merchants Bank has implemented more than 70% of its traditional customer service and business service functions on the App on the WeChat platform, you will feel very refreshed in terms of user experience. Many functions are hidden behind when you are not using them, and what is displayed is just The most commonly used functions, once you need them, can be obtained through simple and direct operations. As the saying goes, they come when you call them and go when you wave them. They will never occupy your attention when not in use. For example, if you say "overseas consumption" to Xiaozhao, Xiaozhao can quickly find the corresponding answer and related questions such as exchange fees. Coupled with the voice recognition function later provided by China Merchants Bank, the operation is simplified to the point where it can be done as easily as possible. We call this mode tile mode. Compared with the past, where you had to go through multi-level menus and multiple interactions to find the functions you want, tile mode allows you to get what you want, especially for mobile terminals like WeChat. It is more convenient when the capacity is limited and the operation input is inconvenient.

A lot of cross-border methods have been applied to solve the problem

In the communications industry, flow control is very common. It can block requests beyond the system's capabilities, so as not to bring down the system. Users You may get a prompt such as "The system is busy", but in the computer and Internet industries, the concept of flow control has not been widely used. Take WeChat as an example. WeChat itself provides external flow control and rejects requests if they exceed a certain frequency. However, it does not consider the flow control of the external system. When requests that exceed the system's processing capacity pour in, they can only be discarded. Therefore, what is provided is Impairment of service. For lossy services, we need to use a cache and resend mechanism to ensure the effective delivery of data. It will not have much impact on daily chat, but for some financial services with strict requirements, it will cause customer complaints.

For another example, we refer to the design concept of separation of business and bearer in NGN, and separate message transmission, session control and business process engine. The hierarchical software architecture design is not only the key to meeting business flexibility, but also The core of software architecture expansion. As an operating platform with tens of millions of users, while pursuing stable services, it must also be able to continuously launch flexible new services, rather than having to update and upgrade the software every time the business changes, or even restart the service to load new business functions. . The Yunsoft IMCC platform used by China Merchants Bank has considered this point from the beginning of its design. By separating message carrying and business processes, the basic platform has become an underlying platform that has nothing to do with the business, and various business processes are carried out through the process engine. Parse and implement dynamic loading of business.

The business process engine design tool of China Merchants Bank platform also refers to the visual process development method of traditional call centers and encapsulates various commonly used process processing components, called "components". ”, which greatly improves the efficiency of secondary development of business in the later stage, and reduces the skill requirements for developers. Developers with a little programming foundation can quickly complete the definition and release of business processes. Moreover, this engine is not a closed system. Through custom nodes, we can call external system interfaces to achieve docking with other systems, and can call custom functions, which has strong flexibility.

Professional multi-customer service system

The earliest starting point of China Merchants Bank’s WeChat platform is to build an online customer service platform based on Internet channels. Therefore, when selecting a platform, the first choice is the IMCC platform, which has accumulated experience in IM customer service of China Telecom Group. The 800010000 platform based on marketing QQ built in 2010 already has 50 million friends and a cluster architecture of hundreds of servers. . IMCC has many functions designed for professional customer service in call centers. The so-called multi-customer service is actually very similar to a telephone call center. Users call in from one number (telephone, QQ, WeChat, etc.), and there is a call center team in the background to handle the users. chat request. Therefore, the system needs an ACD server to implement different routing and queuing strategies, such as first come, first served, average distribution or proportional distribution, last service priority, VIP queue jumping, etc. In addition, the call center team must be able to queue and route according to skill groups. For example, one group is for consultation, and another group is for VIP services. It is also necessary to allow one work number to have multiple skills, which can be placed as resources in different skill queues. Pool queue.

Professional call centers have very intensive business and require very high operational efficiency. Agents are required to reduce inefficient actions as much as possible. For example, the function of pinning important messages to the top can prevent important chat information from being difficult to find when scrolling in the window. There is also the collection of the reasons for incoming calls, which can be completed by simply clicking on the collection tree. In addition, in order to improve the efficiency of operator knowledge retrieval, we have set up a function that triggers automatic retrieval of the knowledge base in chat messages. As long as it is properly maintained, the answer can be retrieved directly from the user's input, greatly reducing the operator's workload. Intensity of work.

Personal chat software such as WeChat and QQ are stateless. Users do not care whether the other party is online or when to reply, but this brings a lot of trouble to professional customer service. For example, a user may send a sentence and then walk away, but the session window will always hang there. Customer service may access hundreds of sessions every day. If it is occupied all the time, the customer service will not be able to concentrate on processing, and various KPI assessments in the background will be disrupted. Unable to proceed. Therefore, the professional manual customer service application scenario must be a stateful conversation, just like a phone call, with access and disconnection. But considering the user experience, we are also studying whether it is possible to achieve seamless compatibility of stateless sessions, that is, it feels stateless on the user side and can send messages at any time, but the processing on the customer service side is called stateful. It can ensure conversation efficiency and quality inspection assessment. This system is still under development.

An objective view of the application of intelligent customer service

China Merchants Bank is the most successful case of WeChat intelligent robots. Although it is the same IMCC basic platform plus Xiaoai robot, China Telecom and China Unicom are applying it The effect was not very ideal. The reason is that the businesses of China Telecom and China Unicom are too complex, with thousands of products and 100,000 knowledge bases, and the questions are too open. However, China Merchants Bank's credit card business field is relatively narrow, and a lot of manpower has been invested in manual knowledge identification and addition, which makes small tricks popular. Due to technical limitations, intelligent robots currently have two problems that have not been solved: 1. Automatic learning ability; 2. Real semantic understanding ability. If any company can make breakthroughs in these two aspects, it will bring extremely broad prospects for the application of intelligent robots.

For practical applications, we believe that if the number of agents does not reach more than 10, then the investment and benefits of applying intelligent robots will not match. Instead, it is better to use simple methods such as keyword responses. According to our statistics on China Merchants Bank’s WeChat data, 70% of user operations are menu operations, 25% are short words within 5 words, and the rest are conversations with manual customer service. The newly developed keyword matching method has fuzzy matching, longest match priority, automatic sorting misses, etc., and can already replace intelligent robots to a large extent.

Security Measures of China Merchants Bank

"Security" is the basic requirement for financial WeChat applications. In terms of ensuring security, China Merchants Bank uses dedicated line access to ensure Data is not transmitted over the public network. The latest news shows that Tencent is already conducting research and development testing of encryption protocols, which will make banks’ information security more secure in the future.

Other security measures include: applying HTTPS protocol, encrypting page transmission parameters to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, applying dynamic password keyboard to prevent hackers from intercepting passwords, background security policies, etc. In addition, it is also necessary to apply security scanning tools to simulate attacks and vulnerability scans on the system.

New advanced interface application

[Challenge of mass messaging]

China Merchants Bank has 13 million fans. Sending a mass message to all customers will give the system Brings great pressure. Tencent's message delivery capability is very strong. It only takes a few hours for more than 10 million messages to be delivered. These customers will definitely respond after receiving the message. They can simply check balances and browse pages. If it is interactive, Activities will have a fatal impact. Before WeChat provided an advanced mass messaging interface, China Merchants Bank tried mass messaging, which basically caused system congestion or even downtime every time. Therefore, the ideal mass sending mode must be a mode with controllable traffic and precise positioning according to the target user list. That is to say, it includes two modes: 1. All users need to be notified in full, according to the nature of the activity (pure notification, interaction); 2. Based on the customer group segmentation results, targeted user lists are sent regularly according to the target user list.

The advanced group sending interface provided by Tencent is limited to 100 times a day, 10,000 messages each time, which means that the maximum number is 1 million (actually 990,000) per day. It cannot meet the needs of all user notifications, but it does The MP background cannot be used for full mass distribution. In this case, the grouping function provided by Tencent needs to be used to divide users into multiple batches. Many of our customers confuse this grouping function with customer group grouping, and use the grouping function to achieve customer group segmentation. In fact, the segmentation of customer groups changes frequently. It is neither reasonable nor scientific to continuously synchronize Tencent's data through interfaces. Instead, the work of segmenting customer groups should be placed in the CRM system on the enterprise side as much as possible, and through the use of customer tags Method maintenance can ensure that accurate marketing based on CRM can be implemented.

[Matrix accounts, decentralized domain management and UnionID]

Many group-level enterprises now have multi-account management needs, but because WeChat OpenID can only follow Corresponding to one public account, the users accumulated on each account cannot be managed uniformly. UnionID realizes the same user association between multiple accounts, and can uniformly identify and manage users scattered across multiple public accounts. It can not only reflect the personalization of sub-accounts, but also centrally manage friend resources.

Although the China Merchants Bank platform can support multiple accounts and each account is managed independently, it does not mean that the more accounts the better. Because decentralized and domain-based management, if the granularity is too fine, it will bring excessive burdens to use and management, and the development workload will also increase accordingly. For group-level matrix account applications, my suggestion is: the minimum granularity of sub-accounts is cities, and smaller granularities, such as branches, branches, etc., it is recommended to use parameter QR codes to differentiate and identify customer channels, in the background Identify customers so that targeted marketing and services can be provided in the future.

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