It’s 3 a.m. and you’re up again tossing and turning, a stampede of wild thoughts running through your head about your latest work issue. Maybe it’s a project gone south, a recurring problem rearing its head again, or a difficult relationship with a coworker. Either way, it’s up to you to calm your mind, talk yourself through your worries, and get a good night’s sleep.

Reducing the time it takes to resolve a customer issue makes everyone happier. Getting there, especially if you’re aiming to shave minutes off your average service time, requires a smart and laser-like focus in helping customer support reps to be more productive.

A quality customer experience requires a dedicated sales team and support team. Sales reps start conversations with leads, and support reps continue those conversations once those leads become customers. But considering the way in which the former group passes the torch to the latter, it’s worth asking: Why aren’t more sales reps and support agents having conversations with one another?

As you embark on a new decade, you might want to take some of these apps along in your quest to wow your customers. These apps will not only ease your workflow to let you focus on what matters the most — customer experience — but also help you get more efficient at your job.

Recently, working remotely has grown dramatically in popularity primarily because it gives workers a lot more freedom and saves companies money. However, is this just a trend that will soon dissipate, or is it here to stay? The numbers speak for themselves. Remote work will soon become the new norm, as per a report from GetApp the number of people working remotely on a weekly basis has grown by nearly 400% in the last decade.

Mailchimp is an end to end marketing platform that started as an email marketing tool alternative to the expensive email software in the early 2000s. The goal was to provide small businesses access to technological resources and tools to grow like their larger counterparts. Today, it has evolved into a robust customer relationship management system that understands patterns in customer data and uses that insight to target the appropriate audience.

There is no shortage of software positioned as being staples for the everyday business professional. From accounting to procurement to reporting, businesses need a variety of software to keep themselves running. Not only is it difficult sourcing all of the tools needed to cover all aspects of their operations due to the sheer number of options, but it is also difficult getting all of these pieces working together seamlessly.

Every growing support team needs a standardized customer service process. Without proper guidelines in place, your agents would be left in the dark, not knowing how to approach an issue – leading to duplication in effort and a delayed response time for customers. While using a ticketing system can help automate certain actions, it is unlikely to solve your team’s productivity unless your agents follow a documented customer service process as well.

Matterpoll is a plugin that allows users to create polls in Mattermost. Since Mattermost is localized in 16 different languages, it’s optimal that Matterpoll is similarly localized. Because we rely on contributors to do the translations, we want to make it easy for them to translate new strings and determine whether already translated strings need to be updated because the “source” text changed.

Want to learn about the latest tools and trends in call center technology? In this article, we’ll go over some recent call center tech trends and even give you some helpful tools and tips to improve your call center operations.

As sales reps, we’re all familiar with monthly quota stresses. When it gets down to the wire, you add as many leads as you can to the pipeline to maximize potential deals. And it works! You successfully meet your sales quota. But there’s a new problem—your close rate is appalling.

Welcome to the first release of OneDesk in the new decade! This update was rolled out on January 28 2020. This release could be called “The Integration Release” because that was the main focus this month.

Freelance writer Evan Roxanna Ramzipoor is a writer based in California. She is the author of The Ventriloquists, and her writing has been featured in McSweeney’s, Salon, and others. Check out her work at erramzipoor.com. At some point, we’ve all experienced a problem with a process or strategy at work. But figuring out why the problem exists can be a daunting task. When you sit your teammates down for a discussion, emotions run high and miscommunication is common.

Do you want to hire software contractors, but don’t know where to start? You’re not alone. Research reveals that most tech firms use contract workers to meet 40 to 50 percent of their staffing needs. Whether you need to fill a skills gap or just need short-term help for a specific project, a contractor can bring many benefits to your business.

Jira is a highly adaptable and feature-rich platform, which promises to help all types of teams manage their work. There are several features and toolkits that are purpose-built for software, business, DevOps and any other iteration of IT team to plan, track and release world-class software.

Customer service plays a crucial part in guiding a business to success. You need to have well thought out customer experience goals from the inception of your business, and have a game plan on how to get it right. So, it’s very important that you pick the right customer service application based on your business’s vision and requirements. However, with a slew of applications available for customer service, how do you know which one is perfect for your team?

If you want to submit good pull requests, start with our contribution checklist. Today, that page talks about what to fork, how to style your code, how to write unit tests and where to push your code. Implicit in all of that is the need to write great code, of course! But this blog post isn’t about writing great code, it’s about making your pull request a great experience for you and your reviewers.

We’re excited to announce that Sell is now in the Zendesk Apps Marketplace, introducing a new line of apps to help sales teams sell more. Since 2012, the Zendesk Marketplace has powered the world of customer support. With just under 1,000 apps available for Zendesk Support and Chat, the Marketplace has allowed support organizations to extend Zendesk products to address unique business needs and ultimately enable companies to create the best customer experience possible for their customers.

The concept of “customer churn”, or customers leaving a business, is something that keeps executives around the world awake at night. Especially in the B2B (business-to-business) industry, losing just one major customer can make or break a business. So, what can companies do to ensure churn rates remain as low as possible? Here are six tactics.

“Wait. I don’t remember telling you the name of my hometown,” I said with an eyebrow cocked. “No, but I’m an intel analyst. So I know.” Truth be told, I was surprised the conversation hadn’t included more moments like this. I’m sitting in a tavern a few klicks down the road from the FBI’s training academy in Quantico, VA.

There’s a lot of pressure on the term “remote work.” It has been — and will continue to be — a trending buzzword. But, remote work as a concept seems to be thrown around loosely, and often fails to adequately convey all of its radical implications. Remote work is not just a sparkly employment perk. It’s not just working from the couch in pajamas. And it’s definitely not a digital nomad sipping a margarita in Bali while founding his next unicorn SaaS product.

One in four sales managers report being unhappy with their forecast accuracy, according to CSO Insights. However, it’s not always clear what your options are when you’re looking for a better alternative. For starters, most sales forecasting methods tend to follow one of two general approaches. The first is based on analyzing past revenue results and using that historical data to project future earnings, as in the case of a run rate or exponential smoothing formula.

Understanding the latest advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) can seem overwhelming, but if it’s learning the basics that you’re interested in, you can boil many AI innovations down to two concepts: machine learning and deep learning. These terms often seem like they’re interchangeable buzzwords, hence why it’s important to know the differences.

Did you know that 73% of businesses plan to launch SaaS products and make all their systems SaaS by 2020? Swiftly and Smartly, our World is shifting towards ‘Software as a Service’ era. Some of the saas companies are already there, while most others are likely to follow. Vendors and businesses are either building new SaaS products or acquiring the existing ones. Wait for a couple of more years and your workplace will never be the same again.

According to figures from Dimension Data, 84% of organizations that work to improve their customer service offering report an increase in revenue. Looking to invest in customer service, in order to put together a stronger team and boost your business? Here’s the exact way to hire a customer service representative in 2020.

There are many things to look forward to this year at Asana. So we talked to a few Asanas from our global offices recently to find out what they’re most excited for in 2020. From customers, to culture, to growth and mentorship, here’s what they had to say.

2019 was quite the year! For Scoro, it was all about making sure we’re offering the best quality service possible. That’s why we put all our effort into rolling out many great features and tons of updates to further improve the overall Scoro experience. Our team would like to thank you for choosing Scoro and being with us on this remarkable journey. We’re grateful to have you on board!

Many companies use Excel as their sales tracker tool. It’s one of the most popular database organization tools, so sales teams assume it’s the best software for tracking their activity. The reality is Excel isn’t an ideal sales tracker. It’s a complex software that can be a bottleneck for reps without Excel skills. More dangerously, Excel leaves room for error as a manual tool and limits analysis to hard-to-learn formulas and formatting.

Mattermost is starting a new open source campaign, this time around increasing the unit test coverage for the mmctl tool. The mmctl tool is a CLI application that mimics the commands and features of the current Mattermost CLI tool and uses the Mattermost REST API to communicate with the server. Using the tool, you can control and manage several Mattermost servers without having to access the specific machine on which the server is running.

In our previous blog on video support, we discussed how video technology is changing the customer support landscape. In this article, we’ll take a look at how video technology can help boost the customer support you provide. We’ll also take a look at the technology required to offer video support.

Why is content marketing important? Have a question, lets clear this Content Marketing costs 62% less than any outbound or traditional marketing method, and yet it generates approximately 3 times as many leads as conventional marketing. It’s cheaper and more efficient. Do you still need more reasons to trust content marketing over any other marketing strategy? I know it’s not easy to convince you unless I talk facts. So, here’s some importance of content marketing.

For companies that work on custom requests, it is paramount that they nail gathering requirements from their customers. We live in an increasingly distributed work environment, which sometimes exacerbates the difficulties in ensuring everyone is on the same page. When people aren’t aligned on expectations or requirements, it can delay when work is actually started, which is not ideal for the customer requesting the work and the company that is providing the service.

According to a recent study, 89% of customers switch seller or service provider, if they find the quality of service is poor. Undeniably, a high level of service delivery tops the wishlist of almost every customer. Another study found out that Tech-based companies such as hardware, software, or cloud specialists are affected the most concerning meeting the expectations of customers. That’s why automating some tasks are of absolute necessity.

According to Enlyft, there are around 135,711 companies that currently use Slack as collaborative software. Chances are, your business might be one of those 135,711 companies. Though using Slack as a means of communication between members of the same team or different teams in a company leads to productive work culture, companies can leverage the instant messaging platform even more. How, you ask? By turning Slack into your business’ employee support hub. Here’s why.

Ask most people to describe a customer service interaction, and they’ll likely give examples of telephone calls, emails, or maybe even text-based chat. The image of call centers staffed with cheerful agents wearing headsets while multi-tasking between chats, emails, and phone calls have come to symbolize a typical customer service program for many. Not surprisingly – these technologies have dominated the field for decades.

As companies and teams become more and more distributed, communication only becomes more important. For organizations that deal with finance matters, this is only more true. There is no room for miscommunications and distractions when there are large amounts of money being transferred and worked with. One client came to us seeking a solution to their management of tickets, along with some sensitivity to permissions, communications, and the ability to track change.

When it comes to customer service, are you crushing the competition? According to Microsoft, 96% of consumers say customer service is an important factor when choosing between brands. In this ultimate guide to customer service, we’ll provide you with the information and inspiration you need to push your customer service offering higher.

We released Zulip Server 2.1.2 today. This is a security release, containing a few dozen cherry-picked changes since Zulip 2.1.1.

When it comes to setting quotas, a lot of sales managers like to turn to a simple annual run rate. And while an ARR may be the quickest and easiest way to predict future sales results, we’ve seen that it’s far from the most precise metric. By contrast, the exponential smoothing formula lies on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Although it’s one of the most complicated sales forecasting methods, it is also arguably the most accurate.

Mattermost 5.19 includes new features that will help your team work together more efficiently. Try these new features by downloading Mattermost 5.19 today. Since it includes security updates, upgrading is recommended.

Ice breakers are a fantastic way to get team members acquainted with each other—especially if teams work remotely or there are new faces in the office. We often spend more time with our coworkers than family or friends. But teams don’t always know the best ice breaker questions or games. You can use these simple team building activities to quickly help diffuse anxiety or awkward silences in meetings.

You’ve read every article, watched all of the webinars, and you’re convinced: today is the day we take our customer service to the next level. But it turns out that buying into the importance of good customer service is the easy job. First you have to uncover the definition of good customer service, and then provide proof to management in sales, product, and other departments that exactly how customer service has a major impact on your company’s bottom line.

Gantt charts consist of horizontal bars that indicate a project’s schedule on a horizontal timeline. Each bar represents a task with the left end of the bar positioned at the start of the task, and the right end of the bar at the tasks finish.

The IT Service Desk is a primary point of engagement between users and an IT organization. To put it in simple terms, it is the single point of contact between the service providers and users for day-to-day activities. Typically, a service desk manages service disruptions and service requests besides handling user communications or outages and planned changes to services.

Today we're releasing new versions of our Android, iOS, and Desktop apps with a quick Do Not Disturb button. When pressed, you can quickly choose a time period in minutes, hours, or days, and all notifications for your devices will be silenced during that period. Once the time period is up, your notifications will resume automatically.

Sales is a mind game. You can’t expect to convert a lead into a customer if you don’t understand the motivations behind their purchasing decisions. Why? Because humans have innate psychological tendencies—cognitive biases—that affect their perspectives and decisions. If you want to convert more leads, you have to understand what motivates them and how to use that to your advantage. This article is a guide to doing just that.

Building a product is no easy task. Coming up with a new idea, hiring people to execute it, and being updated on customer trends can sometimes become a bit overwhelming. While every business tends to be customer-centric, some dreaded questions arise in our minds from time to time.

There has never been more pressure on development teams to build software faster and more efficiently. The rise in popularity of DevOps has largely been the result of its promise to speed up dev cycles, increase agility, and help teams resolve issues more quickly. And while the availability and sophistication of DevOps tools have improved greatly in the last few years, simply choosing the latest and greatest tools is no guarantee of a smooth, problem-free development lifecycle.

The principles of Agile project management took root in the software development and engineering fields. There are many different methodologies (such as Scrum or Kanban) on how to implement these processes, but agile does not have to be complicated and can be applied to any field (but maybe shouldn’t be). This article aims to take you a few steps beyond the simple principles of Agile, with actionable information, while avoiding the dogma of any particular methodology.

When it comes to switching to a new programming language, timing is of the essence in order to land qualified programmers for the project. The language must be new enough to bring technical progress, and at the same time tested and disseminated in such a way that there are enough qualified programmers who will enjoy working with it.

Artificial Intelligence refers to the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, computer systems to be precise. These processes primarily include learning, reasoning, and self-correction. Machine learning is a term that is synonymous with AI. As the name suggests, machine learning refers to empowering machines to learn by themselves using the data provided and predict the best possible outcome of a complex problem.

Human Resources Learn what it takes to keep employees engaged and content from these pioneering company leaders

How do you like the idea of creating an application that will be rebranded by others? Your client gets to resell it as their own product, but not before they pay you all the charges for production/designing. If this idea interests you, then this page is where you need to be. Take a break from your work or anything that you’re doing right now. This blog post needs your undivided attention. 5 minutes will be enough. Let’s start with the basics.

The new year is here and with it comes our annual list of key customer service trends! Our 2019 trends article was a huge hit, so here’s what is set to make an impact in 2020…

In OneDesk, dashboards are a type of ‘view’ which are displayed in the left panel and show you some useful charts and statistics about your data. You can create and save your own dashboard-views, just like you can create tree-views, card-views, gantt-views, etc.

When was the last time you forgot to do an important task? And, when was the last time you decided to create online to-do lists, but never kept up to it-because obviously, who has the time to pull out a pen and paper to note everything down? Well, you are not alone. It’s a human tendency to forget things, and later regret not being efficient at task management.

What a good feeling it is to look back at our past year knowing we’ve been more successful and productive than ever. Among other things, we opened our new office in London, as well as launched our partnership program and productivity calculator. Last but not least, we also made some great improvements to our website and logo – that’s right, we had a rebranding. And we are not stopping here.

Shift your conversations and files into channels, and help your entire team leave silos like email behind Human Resources

Customer service is what truly makes or breaks your business. Every interaction your support team has with end-users is essential in shaping their perception of what your brand represents. Customers, at each stage of their journey, expect a good standard of service and will not appreciate slow, unprofessional answers. In fact, we found out that 56% of consumers globally have stopped doing business with a brand due to a single bad service experience in the last 12 months.

ChatOps is about bringing conversations, tools, files, and automation into a single space. Mattermost has a number of plugins that support ChatOps and real-time DevOps workflows through integrations with developer tools like Jira, GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, and Jenkins. At the core is the Mattermost Server.

Looking for the best autodial software? Autodial tools can help businesses automatically call phone numbers and connect them to an agent or pre-recorded message. It’s the perfect way to quickly go through your list of contacts and engage with leads and customers. That’s why we’ve listed down everything you need to know about the best auto dialer software in 2020. We’ll highlight their pros and cons and also show you what you should look for when selecting an autodial tool!

OneDesk ships with some pre-set report templates included. These let you quickly generate reports on tickets, tasks, projects, timesheets, and invoices with just a few clicks. However OneDesk also includes powerful tools to let you create your own report templates, schedule them so that they run without your interaction, and can be automatically emailed out to you, your team, or your management.

In the last decade, automation has brought about considerable changes in simple and complex processes for quicker output. In the call center industry, programmed automation has enhanced customer experience and made a significant impact on support efficiency. With artificial intelligence being at the forefront of change, there is apprehension over whether AI will take over end-user support completely.

Two years ago, we hosted our first-ever community event in London, bringing together local Asana customers to meet and learn from one another. During the event, Chris Butler-Stroud, CEO of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation, shared the following about his team’s experience with Asana: "I can genuinely say that there are more dolphins and whales alive today thanks to Asana".

Today, we’re excited to announce Mattermost is available on the DigitalOcean Marketplace. Our 1-click install enables teams to run open source messaging and collaboration in the cloud with a frictionless developer experience.

Four takeaways from the best-selling author on what being indistractable means, and how to foster a culture that promotes it

The most successful brands in today’s competitive market have one thing in common – they offer outstanding customer support and prioritize customer satisfaction (CSAT). CSAT is largely dependent on customers’ interactions with your customer care department, starting with the first touch. Having the right team is the key to delivering outstanding customer experience.

Mattermost is well-known as a flexible, open source messaging platform. But what makes it even more useful is its ability to automate connections with bots and webhooks and to link up to external applications. These automations and connections are known as integrations. Many integrations are available off-the-shelf through the Integrations Directory. But there are lots of ways to create your own.

In OneDesk, you can have conversations by adding messages to tickets and tasks. When you do this, the followers of those items will get your messages via an omni-channel messaging service: by email, inside the ‘messenger app’ inside OneDesk, on the live-chat widget, and by mobile push notification (coming very soon). However you can also use the OneDesk messaging system to have conversations with users outside of the context of a task, ticket or project.

The growth of Artificial Intelligence has had an enormous spurt in the last few years. The use of AI in Helpdesk Automation is reducing the burden on professionals. Chatbots integrates with IT Service Management(ITSM) and acts as a virtual support agent.

Does your team love tests? Unit tests, functional tests, systems tests, acceptance tests. They can seem like a lot of extra work, but they’re crucial to creating valuable, stable products. It’s never fun, though, when a test run breaks right before release and the scramble starts to fix the code and get release back on schedule. I can’t tell you how to not commit breaking code.

“What is team communication?” is a million-dollar question as it has various definitions based on the business preferences and requirements. Healthy and unhindered team communication plays a vital role in boosting the productivity and efficiency of any organization. Working in isolation and a silo-type environment will break down the equations between working staff and harm their productivity. Team communication helps in achieving goals in a unified and targeted way.

The role of software in management cannot be overlooked. Software has found application in diverse management areas beyond naming, and the roles continue to expand with more recent development in software. The market for software products has also witnessed immense growth in response to demands, and most software providers are adopting specialization and outsourcing as coping mechanisms to focus and better serve their target customers. Our new-found client, a software company is no different.