Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

April 2020

Five expert tips for running effective virtual meetings

Meetings are ubiquitous across companies of all shapes and sizes, and it takes a conscious effort to ensure they’re actionable and productive, rather than a laundry list of status updates. As teams around the world have transitioned to fully remote-work, many have had to completely rethink their meeting practices, including everything from content to cadence.

50 Ways to Improve Team Communication at Work

“We have communication issues.” You’ve probably heard this one a million times as an excuse for many things. Be it unfinished work, employees who are in a bad mood, poor teamwork, or something else, this sentence pops up quite a lot. If you take a look at some surveys, poor communication is one of the biggest reasons for problems at work. But what does poor communication really mean for you? When communication is poor, deadlines don’t get met. Starting projects is difficult.

Provide solutions when offline with Freshdesk Field Service Management

As a field service provider, it is routine to receive calls for help from remote places. At Freshdesk, we see our customers responding to field service requests daily and delivering solutions in person when helpdesk agents can’t do the same remotely.

Mattermost localization: 700,000 translations, hundreds of contributors

Mattermost shipped with Spanish in version 2.0 on February 16, 2016. The effort was largely completed by our first translations contributor, Elias Nahum. The very next month, Mattermost shipped with Brazilian Portuguese, soon followed by French, Japanese, and more. Today, Mattermost ships in 16 languages, and 26 other languages are in progress. In total, hundreds of contributors have translated more than 700,000 words. 700,000 words. Wow! I am amazed by what our localization community has achieved.

Digital Workers to the rescue: Reasons why Digital Transformations fail and how AI-Powered Chatbots with Automated Workflows can help

Chances are, you have found yourself on this blog because you’re a Business Owner, a CIO, or an IT Manager, who’s looking toward digital transformation to stay relevant with changing times. Can’t blame you though. According to this survey, market pressures are the leading drivers of digital transformation as most efforts are spurred by growth opportunities (51%) and increased competitive pressure (41%).

Using Miro to run seamless remote meetings & workshops

Whether you’re running a professional workshop, holding an impromptu brainstorming session, or transitioning your Agile ceremonies online, managing and facilitating online sessions can be challenging. From introducing new technology to keeping everyone on track, there is a lot to consider. Over the last weeks and months we’ve seen a growing need for solutions that enable online, collaborative sessions.

Looking at Asana's Anatomy of Work: Remote Teams Survey

As the world recently transitioned to remote work, at Asana, we have been curious about the impact on people navigating the realities of working from home. In a time when clarity, empathy, and human connection are imperative, it’s important to understand how new worldwide macro trends affect people on a personal level. To do so, we conducted a survey to evaluate the behaviors and attitudes of 5,140 full-time employees currently working from home.

5 tips for effective change management communication

As businesses respond and adapt to life after the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s more important than ever that organizations get their internal communications right. To do that, senior leaders should focus on the audience of their change management communication: their employees. Read on to find out how a focus on effective communication and employee engagement can help you carry out an organizational change for your business.

What is a customer data platform?

The process of collecting and processing customer data has become complex for businesses. Traditionally, teams have only had access to limited amounts of customer data analytics, and in many cases, the information is inconsistent across systems. With a lack of basic best practices for customer data management, businesses are missing the ability to see the full scope of how customers move through the buying journey.

5 types of customer loyalty programs

As a brand, you want to create long-lasting relationships with customers, but relationships don’t just materialize from nothing. It takes time and effort to establish trust with the brand. To do that, businesses often include customer loyalty programs in their marketing strategy. Loyalty programs, if executed well and with the customer at the center, can help your existing customers feel good about purchasing from you.

How AI4ALL is reprogramming remotely for success

In the past two months, companies everywhere have shifted their workforces from office cubicles and conference rooms to home offices and dining room tables. The coronavirus pandemic’s thunderous impact – bolstered by government mandates to maintain social distancing protocols and shut down non-essential workplaces – has forced companies to pivot hard and fast to a new reality, whether they’re ready for it or not.

New study: Now is the time for communication, collaboration, and coordination

Right now, millions of teams are learning how to work from home. But even before the world was thrown into remote work limbo, the Asana and Zoom Video Communications teams in Australia were curious to understand how teams experience work outside of the office. Our joint research, which surveyed more than 1,000 Australian workers, found that remote work success depends largely on the three C’s: communication, collaboration, and coordination.

Top CRM benefits for sales and support teams

Companies today manage three times more customer data than they did five years ago, according to the 2020 Customer Experience Trends Report. In many ways, this greater access to data is a blessing. With more information on leads and customers, sales reps are better able to provide personalized service.

Building Strong Relationships with B2B Customers who Prefer Live Chat - Part 3

For the third and final part of our three-part series (Part 1 and Part 2) on building and maintaining strong relationships with customers who prefer live chat, we’re going to look at an area some companies forget to evaluate entirely. In the first part of our series, we focused on the pre-conversation efforts of setting yourself up for successful chat interactions with B2B customers. The second part was all about improving the actual chat experience for both the agent and the customer.

How Rocket.Chat is deploying AI to spot COVID-19 and unburden the Brazilian health system

The arrival of COVID-19 in Brazil brought serious challenges to states, city halls, and the federal government: how to optimize healthcare services to the population, without overloading the health system and reducing the pace of contagion? Rocket.Chat partnered with Amazon and other players to provide a solution for that: a digital assistance platform to help Brazilians diagnose the virus quickly and easily.

Hiring programmers with a take-home test

There’s no perfect process for hiring great programmers, but there are plenty of terrible ways to screw it up. We’ve rejected the industry stables of grilling candidates in front of a whiteboard or needling them with brain teasers since the start at Basecamp. But you’re not getting around showing real code when applying for a job here. In the early days of the company, we hired programmers almost exclusively from the open source community.

All about emojis

In person, you can easily tell someone’s mood based on their body language and how they speak, but that’s much more difficult with text alone. Emojis are a great way to add tone to a piece of text and also help make text-based conversation feel more casual, relaxed, and fun. Thanks to emojis, we can chat with much more real emotion than you might get by being careful about your word choice or by including just the right number of exclamation marks and periods at the end of a sentence.

9 Tools Shaping Up Automation for Remote Teams

“The next big thing most likely to kill 10 million people will not be a war but a virus.” — Bill Gates, Ted Talk 2015 Who could have imagined that his farsightedness would hold true in 2020, have us locked in our homes, and the global economy falling like a house of cards? COVID-19 has affected lives of people across the globe in a way that many unexpected things are becoming the new normal.

How to avoid isolation when working remotely

April 24, 2020 Remote work isn’t just a growing trend anymore – it has rapidly become a necessity for businesses all over the world. While many are adapting to working from home for the first time, even teams that are already remote are having to adjust their routines and mindset. They are having to deal with a whole new work dynamic that they’ve never tried before.

5 steps to reducing friction in customer support

The software-buying process is notoriously stressful and complex, which tends to carry over when buyers become customers, given the challenges many support organizations grapple with. According to Dan Gingiss, author and keynote speaker, customer support experts and practitioners showed marginal improvement in 2019. Since the buying journey is already complex, does the customer journey have to be just as complicated?

Working Together, Remotely

Remote working has never been such a hot topic as it is today, with the COVID-19 situation pulling the rug out from under the feet of a lot of companies. And while some have been able to adjust quicker, then most everyone has had to make some changes and overcome challenges. And it’s important to share the difficult lessons with others as well – because sometimes all we need is a reminder that we’re all in this together.

Our next chapter:Bringing teams together, wherever they're located

Teamwork has always been at the heart of everything we do here at Miro. We operate a distributed headquarters, with leaders and employees spread across four time zones and five hubs. That’s why we’ve codified “Play as a team to win the world” as one of our core values. We see effective remote collaboration as our competitive advantage.

Building Strong Relationships with B2B Customers who Prefer Live Chat - Part 2

This blog post is the second part of our three-part series (the first part is here) on building and maintaining strong relationships with customers who prefer live chat. In the first part of our series, we focused on the pre-conversation efforts of setting yourself up for successful chat interactions with customers. For this part, we’ll focus on how the actual chat conversation impacts the customer relationship.

Creating Relationships between Objects in M-Files | Intelligent Information Management System

By using relationships, you can define metadata connections between objects, just as via the metadata card. For example, you can link a customer with an object. The customer then also appears in the metadata of the object. Likewise, the relationships entered via the metadata card will appear in the Relationships dialog. 00:23 - 01:04 Relationships through metadata/metadata card 01:04 - 01:26 Use case / example 01:26 - 02:17 Adding relationships through the relationships dialogue

How Biteable CEO Brent Chudoba held a remote leadership offsite using Miro

When I became CEO of Biteable in February, I knew it’d be a challenge to lead an internationally distributed team. Biteable is the world’s leading video maker and in my first month with them, I flew over 20 hours across the world to meet investors and co-founders. But that journey was nothing compared to what was in store next: COVID-19 was a curveball that no one expected. Suddenly, our in-person leadership offsite – a crucial part of my onboarding – had to be fully remote.

How to measure change management success, according to 2 change leaders

The only constant in life is change—and it’s difficult to embrace the unknown. That’s why the employee experience is essential to change management, when leaders are charged with supporting their teams through adjusting to new and different ways of working.

Customer churn rate

Customers can be a fickle bunch—happy one day, gone the next. That’s why it’s important for companies of all shapes and sizes to track and understand their customer churn rate. Customer churn rate is an important metric that impacts nearly every aspect of a company’s business, from product and revenue to customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. Because what’s a business without customers?

Building great customer experiences with Zendesk and AWS

Creating great experiences for your customers starts with having a complete understanding of who they are—and that requires having the right customer data. But too often, this data is siloed in disparate systems that don’t talk to each other and is spread across a complex landscape that’s hard to analyze and understand. The end result is ineffective agents, poor customer insights, and unsatisfied customers.

How the E-Commerce and Logistics Industry can Adapt to Serve Customers in these Challenging Times

During the COVID-19 crisis, the spotlight is on the e-commerce and logistics industry when it comes to providing essential and non-essential goods for consumers. With the lockdowns across the world, these companies are critical to ensuring people are able to get the supplies they need to live on. So what are some of the responsibilities and challenges they face and how can they overcome them, when operating under the current circumstances? We caught up with Sriram Sridhar, the CEO of lateshipment.com.

Introducing Rocket.Chat 3.1: Get To Know New Features & Updates

After significant development and thanks to our team and community, we are delighted to announce the arrival of Rocket.Chat 3.1.0, full of exciting features! In this post, we will give you a quick overview of the main features brought by our latest release. Find the entire list of new features, updates, and bug fixes here. Thanks to this feature, there is no need to create a private channel to have a chat with multiple users anymore.

Rocket.Chat SaaS: A Secure Hosted Service

In recent years, the move from deploying applications on-premise into the cloud has accelerated quickly and changed the whole industry. Today, most services are ready to be used in as short as a few minutes. Rocket.Chat is no different and there is no need to wait any longer: Rocket.Chat as a managed service is ready for you.

How the Asana community stays organized while working remotely

Staying on track while working remotely comes down to one thing: effectively collaborating with your team. But learning to collaborate while working remotely means finding ways to maintain visibility into team projects and stay organized from anywhere. To get a glimpse of how people worldwide are staying organized and connected while working remotely, we asked the Asana Community to share their best practices. Read on to learn their tips for collaborating effectively with Asana.

Why your business needs a change management plan

Change can be scary. We’re living through a global pandemic, SpaceX is launching more rockets into space, and scientists have discovered a way to grow mini brains from skin cells. People like the comfort of things they know, like their favorite fuzzy socks or Mom’s chocolate chip cookies. So even when change is a good thing, it might be met with fear and resistance. And when it comes to business, leaders need to recognize that the human side of change can impact their outcomes.

How to Set Up Your IT Team to Enable Remote Work

In the wake of remote work becoming the new normal, businesses today have newfound gratitude for their IT teams. IT admins have been working tirelessly to make sure you have a seamless work-from-home experience by giving you the best technology, warding off bad actors from getting their hands on your company’s data, and onboarding or offboarding employees. In this interview, Prasad, the Chief Information Officer at Freshworks shares what goes on behind the scenes of our IT team.

5 Business Survival tips for SMEs During the Current Crisis

With the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, work-life has slowed to a crawl in most parts of the world, and remote work is the new normal. For startups and small enterprises, there are some important decisions to be made to ensure business survival in the short term. To aid that decision, here are a few tips that could prove useful.

Beyond the Crisis: Proactively Towards the New Normal

I don’t think any of us could have confidently predicted back in February that we would be working from home for several months. But here we are, continuously trying to find our footing and hoping we will get things under control soon. More than that, growing impatient to get back to our normal lives. However, I have caught myself thinking about whether we will ever go back to the way things were before.

Building Strong Relationships with B2B Customers who Prefer Live Chat - Part 1

It’s no secret that more B2B (business-to-business) customers are using live chat than ever before. A simple way to get a response from a business without having to call (and often face hold times) or email, chat is a real-time form of communication many businesses leverage daily. But what happens when most, if not all, of your conversations with a customer happen over chat?

Dropbox vs Google Drive vs Onedrive: Which Storage Solution Is Ahead of the Game?

First thing’s first: Why are you comparing Google Drive with OneDrive or Dropbox? If you’re reading this dropbox vs google drive review, it’s safe to assume you want to make a more informed choice about choosing your cloud storage solutions. Given how all these three giants are rolling one feature after another, the choice can be tough. And that’s what we are here for - to take the pain out of the dropbox vs onedrive comparison trap and simplify it for you.

Seamless branch deploys with Kubernetes

Basecamp’s newest product HEY has lived on Kubernetes since development first began. While our applications are majestic monoliths, a product like HEY has numerous supporting services that run along-side the main app like our mail pipeline (Postfix and friends), Resque (and Resque Scheduler), and nginx, making Kubernetes a great orchestration option for us.

How KingHost Reduced Its Email Volume By 70% & Increased Team Efficiency With Rocket.Chat

Being in business for over 13 years, KingHost is a well-known technology provider for website hosting, email marketing, e-commerce hosting, cloud hosting, and marketing automation. Acquired in 2019 by Locaweb, the leader in Latin America for hosting services, communication plays an essential role to maintain market leadership. Let’s dive into their challenges and how Rocket.Chat helped the company to improve increase efficiency in 70%.

5 Remote Work Tips From Remote-First Companies

The transition to remote work has all the feels. Like many teams, we’re navigating the transition to entirely remote work. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we’ve turned to our customers and community members for tips. Several of our customers have been operating remotely for years, and have developed effective strategies to empower their workers for success. Here are a few of our favorite tips.

What is the CRM process?

Consumers today expect a personalized customer experience catered to them as individuals. In order to meet these expectations, you need to understand what your audience wants and needs, and you must understand how to deliver on those needs better than your competition. The CRM process helps your organization achieve these goals. Consisting of five main steps, it’s a strategy for keeping every customer interaction personalized and meaningful.

Strategies for increasing customer engagement

Your customer support team are heroes. Zendesk was founded on a belief in the power of great service experiences. We wanted the world to experience a positive interaction as the norm—as customers, as agents, and from any other side involved in using, operating, maintaining and paying for a customer support solution. Your company may have been founded on an entirely different passion. For amazing chocolate, or an alternative to big-box retailing experience, or a certain kind of footwear.

The challenges of implementing a field service solution

Whenever an organization decides to implement a field service solution, its immediate focus will be to remain competitive and manage their long term strategic goals. During the implementation phase, there will be multiple challenges that will make these organizations lose focus as such implementations will bring out their deficiencies in preparation, reveal process gaps and also question some of the business practices of the organization.

Work From Home Tools: How to manage your remote staff during COVID-19

COVID-19 is going to be a tipping point for the work-from-home business model. Work from home tools and productivity apps like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, and Troop Messenger have become an essential. Business owners and team leaders are now relying on these tools to manage their staff remotely. Remote work has become a trend that’s showing no sign of slowing down. There has been a considerable upswing in the businesses that are operating remotely.

Be the Leader You are Meant to Be-Even from Your Living Room, Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we introduced Mike Caracalas, leadership coach, executive consultant, and author of Ten Strategies to Get Better Results with People, who says that “Right now, you as leaders have only one option: Lead your way out of this challenge.” We continue our chat with Mike, talking about how to keep things fresh as the weeks go on and how to reacclimate to working “together” in the literal sense when our workplace doors open back up.

How private-sector tech companies are stepping up to the COVID-19 fight

In a drastic worldwide attempt to curb the spread of COVID-19, one third of the global population is now experiencing some form of lockdown. For the millions of Americans who have filed for unemployment over the last few weeks, there is nothing to do but wait. But for those on the frontline, time has never felt so limited. As hospitals around the world face buckling under the pressure of wave after wave of new patients, increasing the capacity of our healthcare systems has become our priority.

Asana tips: 9 work from home best practices from our customers

Right now, teams around the world are learning how to work from home. The transition can be a challenge, especially if your team has never worked remotely before. And, no matter how much experience you have with remote work, we’re learning—together—that it takes time to find your groove and settle into a routine in this new “normal.” But you aren’t alone.

How digital customer engagement can boost your business

Every business owner wants to keep their customers happy and loyal. But in today’s digitally connected world, word spreads faster than ever before, so if a customer isn’t pleased, they might let their entire social network know about it. Your customers want to get in touch with your business the same way they would with friends and family—so you need to be present on the channels they prefer.

Customer data visualization

What is data visualization? Well, it’s exactly what it sounds like — using charts, maps, infographics, and other images to visually convey the meaning of data. There’s nothing particularly new about data visualization. One could argue that ancient cave drawings constitute an early example — even the pie chart, dates back to 1801 when it was used to illustrate the Turkish Empire’s landholdings.

Upcoming channel sidebar features: Custom categories, drag & drop, unread channel filtering, and more

Join us in testing an experimental feature set offering additional functionality for managing channels in your sidebar. The features will roll out in stages beginning in v5.22 (April 16, 2020) under an opt-in config setting that can be enabled by System Admins: Experimental Sidebar Features. We are excited to share these powerful features with you and look forward to your feedback. As we iterate on the user experience, we plan to release the features for general availability later this year.

Video Conferencing - A trade-off between Privacy and Usability?

Zoom is currently undergoing a lawsuit regarding illegally disclosing user data to third parties, including Facebook. “According to the suit, Zoom’s privacy policy doesn’t explain to users that its app contains code that discloses information to Facebook and potentially other third parties.” What lessons should companies take away when investing in tools like zoom?

COVID-19: Accelerating the Future of Work

As remote work becomes the 'new normal' for many around the world, the security threats resulting from the rapidly changing work conditions are posing an unprecedented challenge for businesses. The immediate need to shift work conditions left organizations scrambling to institute remote working policies with many executives unprepared to roll out the right tools and procedures securely and at scale. However, for companies it's not just about being prepared for a global pandemic.

How Businesses Are Reacting to the Coronavirus Outbreak: Bitrix24 COVID-19 Survey Results

With over 6 million organization signing up with Bitrix24 since the launch in 2012, we have a unique insight into how businesses and non-profit sector are adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic. Last week we've run a short survey in order to understand what effect coronavirus had so far, which industries adapted best and what future steps companies are planning.

Support Without Boundaries - Customize Freshdesk for your Multilingual Needs

At Freshworks, our mission has been to help customer support teams deliver “moments of wow”, thereby enabling every business to create customers-for-life. It is the foundation for everything we do here at Freshworks. And we strive every day to deliver on that promise by continually improving our product and the customer experience.

How Working From Home will Impact your Customer Service Operations

Many of us are now working from home for the first time. In light of the global pandemic, companies have handed out laptops, closed down their offices and transitioned to being fully remote. It’s certainly not the ideal way to dip a toe into the remote workforce. However, for those of us that are lucky enough to have the opportunity, working from home means we can continue to support our customers and earn a living.

Phillip Ahereza and Allan Guwatudde win Mattermost Bot Hackfest with DigitalOcean Plugin

More than 2,000 developers from around the world participated in our open source bot hackfest, which we hosted on HackerEarth from January 10 through March 2. The goal of the event was to work with our community to create open source chatbots that integrate with Mattermost to accelerate DevOps and DevSecOps workflows, and we received many amazing submissions! We gave away $10,000 in prizes, including $6,000 cash to our top contributors.

7 Benefits Of Virtual Teams And How To Manage Them

Tons of companies have now been forced to start working remotely because of COVID-19. And for good reason, right? It allows employees to practice social isolation to keep themselves safe and avoid passing on the virus to anyone else. But increased personal safety is not the only benefit of having a virtual team. Virtual teams can help your company in tons of different ways!

Be the Leader You are Meant to Be-Even from Your Living Room, Part 1

“Right now, you as leaders have only one option: Lead your way out of this challenge.” That’s what Mike Caracalas, leadership coach, executive consultant, and author of Ten Strategies to Get Better Results with People advises. He’s right. But leading in the best of times is difficult, and while many of the best leadership qualities and practices must apply these days more than ever, leaders must quickly adapt to an ongoing, very complex way of getting work done.

The Complete Guide to Customer Service Training (incl. Ideas, Games, Videos and Programs)

It’s impossible for a business to place too much of an emphasis on its customers. If your customers are happy, your business will have a better chance of succeeding. To make sure your business thrives, it’s critical for you to guide your valuable customers through each stage of their journey with your company and help them get amazing results along the way. However, keeping your customers happy isn’t easy.

Customer retention: How to keep customers happy and reduce churn

Every business has a customer base that they’ve worked hard to attract and retain through a combination of marketing, social media and brand strategies. You invested a lot of time and effort (and probably money) to gain those customers’ trust, so it makes sense that you want to keep them. That’s where a strong focus on customer retention comes in handy.

10 Free & Paid discord Alternatives to watch in 2020

First things first, why are people searching for Discord alternatives? Well, Discord has surrounded itself with quite a few controversies. In 2017, Discord became a target tool for alt-right groups, and the app, due to lack of security, was used to rally up supporters. Discord is vulnerable to hacking attempts,and that’s one of the reasons why security-conscious organizations are looking for better and more secure alternatives to discord.

Wire named High Performer in G2 Crowd

First - a big thank you to all of our customers and partners who continuously show support and share their experience using Wire. When we launched Wire as the most secure collaboration platform, we were hoping the reception of the platform would be positive. We were not expecting to move from "Niche Vendor" to High Performer in such a short time.

Alternatives to Zoom: Top Reasons to Use Rocket.Chat For Secure Video Calls

As companies experience the outbreak of COVID-19, you’re likely holding team meetings with Zoom, Skype or similar applications. While Coronavirus made these applications popular, it also exposed serious privacy issues and security problems. Many remote companies trust proprietary-code platforms, such as Skype or Zoom, to communicate online. Although easily accessible, they do not disclose how they actually function.

The change management process: 7 tips for success

With evolving technology and rising customer expectations as the byproduct, businesses need to be agile and accept change. Change is difficult, but as we’re experiencing in a world gone digital, imperative. At its core, change management is about helping people through change, whether you’re restructuring leadership, rolling out new software, or adjusting strategies that are no longer profitable.

How An Oil Company Utilizes OneDesk's Helpdesk System

Technology in Oil Companies Technology has become an indispensable part of any business organization in every industry. Whether it is deployed in a segment of business operations or used in the daily operation and management of the entire organization, every thriving business must integrate technology to stay productive and competitive. A new client who only recently discovered OneDesk has also found this fact to be true.

4 CX Leaders on How to Build a Community

All of us are in the expectations business now, and with customer expectations reaching an all-time high, it’s up to companies to re-invent the wheel to stay relevant and engaged. But how do you identify the right channels to engage with your customers and how do you nail it the first time? That is always the burning question!

Expert tips for managers on managing remote teams successfully

Managing a team remotely comes with its own set of pros and cons. If you’re managing a remote team for the first time, it’s easy to focus on the cons rather than the pros. You’re probably having a tough time staying on top of what everyone on your team is working on. In tandem, you’re most likely doing all you can to make sure that your team has everything they need to work conveniently.

How Keeping Customer Support Morale High Influences CX

Especially in an era of remote work, it can be difficult to manage the morale of your customer support team. After all, a support agent isn’t a career choice for professionals who are afraid to talk to people. Support teams in the B2B (business-to-business) industry are often full of social personalities and employees who choose to work in an office environment where they can collaborate with colleagues to solve problems.

Managing Team Projects with OneDesk

If you work in a team, OneDesk offers an easy way to manage and share projects amongst team members. While you can share projects with individuals, often it is faster and more consistent to share your projects using teams. In OneDesk you can organize your users into ‘Teams’. Using teams is a great way to manage access to projects, with the least amount of managerial overhead. Here’s everything you need to know about teams in OneDesk.

10 tools you need for remote work

As more and more teams adjust to working remotely, we’ve been relying on technology to help us to keep work going — even when we can’t be in the same physical space. Today, we wanted to share our remote work tech stack: the tools that have been helping us to continue working without interruption behind the scenes. Some of them we’ve been using for years; some of them have been on our radar for a while but we’re only fully utilizing them now.

Find your flow with these work from home playlists

If you’re used to working in a bustling office, you might find the newfound silence of remote work deafening. On the other hand, if you’re sheltering in place with a house full of family or roommates, you might be looking for a little help tuning out. Thankfully there’s a quick and social distancing-approved solution to both scenarios: music! Various studies have shown music’s power to lift your mood and help you maintain focus—two things many of us could use right now.

MatterCon 2020 highlights the power of a remote community

As a remote-first company, we bring employees and members of our community together once a year at our offsite event, which is called MatterCon. MatterCon isn’t your run-of-the-mill conference—it’s more of a meeting of the minds where we’re encouraged to get to know the people we work with, share ideas with each other, and create together.

What is conversational business?

Messaging helps people foster strong relationships with their family and friends. Now messaging platforms are open for business. Conversational business comprises the different ways messaging channels can be used in support, marketing, sales, and beyond. Customers, shoppers, prospects and leads want to communicate with businesses with the same ease and convenience that they experience when talking to their friends and family.

How to Effectively Manage Information During the Time of a Crisis

We all know that knowledge is power. Having a colleague around, whose shoulder we could tap on and ask for help, is also something that is very powerful. However, the whole tap on the shoulder for help option hasn’t been available since most of us shifted to a work-from-home setup – the best alternative we have is reaching out to a teammate on our internal collaboration tools.

5+5 Remote Collaboration Software and Tips to use during COVID-19

With the COVID-19 pandemic, work from home has become a norm and remote collaboration software has become more important than ever. In fact, due to the coronavirus outbreak, a vast number of employees are working from home for the first time - which can be daunting for the unversed. And it can be even more complicated if you don’t know the right tools. Fortunately, we live in a world where remote collaboration can be as effective as face-to-face interaction.

7 Challenges Virtual Teams Face (And How To Tackle Them)

Struggling to manage your virtual team? There are many advantages to hiring remote workers — but only if you’re prepared enough to overcome the challenges of virtual teams. However, with the sudden COVID-19 outbreak, most teams aren’t prepared to deal with virtual work immediately. This is why we’ve decided to cover the 7 biggest challenges of virtual teams and cover how you can deal with them!

The Majestic Monolith can become The Citadel

The vast majority of web applications should start life as a Majestic Monolith: A single codebase that does everything the application needs to do. This is in contrast to a constellation of services, whether micro or macro, that tries to carve up the application into little islands each doing a piece of the overall work. And the vast majority of web applications will continue to be served well by The Majestic Monolith for their entire lifespan.

How our remote team ships like clockwork

On the 16th of every month, we release an update to the Mattermost server. The release happens on the same day, every month, without fail. It’s a cadence that our customers have come to rely on, and it helps us deliver new features and updates with drumbeat regularity. Hitting this hard deadline every month while ensuring high-quality releases requires clear processes and organizational discipline. This is a challenge for any team.

Stepping through the OneDesk Quick-Setup Wizard

In OneDesk there are a large number of options that allow you to configure the software to behave in just the way you want it to. However, most of these options are non-critical and only need to be tweaked along the way, as you decide you want to change the way some things work. Out-of-the-box, OneDesk is almost ready to go to work for you, but you do need to take a few actions and provide a bit of information to get fully configured.

How we're making remote IT work

One day you’re grabbing your to-go latte, responding to Slack messages on your subway commute, and arriving at work to find a coworker waiting by your desk with a broken computer… and the next, you find yourself at home, sipping on plain old drip coffee while making huge decisions about remote work that will affect your entire organization – all with only a day’s notice.

How to plan a virtual event - even when your team is remote

You suddenly need to organize a virtual event in a matter of days, but your team – and possibly your audience – is all remote. How can you be agile and quickly transition to remote planning for a large virtual event? And once it’s planned, how do you actually pull it off? This may sounds like an impossible task, but don’t worry – we’ve put together this guide based on learnings from our online conference, Distributed, to help you get started.

How to Build a Customer Service Operations Team that Elevates your Support

To deliver the perfect customer experience, activities such as creating efficient processes and workflows, quality management, planning shift schedules, etc. are absolutely critical. These come under the umbrella of customer service operations, a core capability that helps scale and improve the level of customer support offered by your company. So who ensures support operation tasks are ideated and executed well so that your customer service standards do not drop?

Sick of TeamViewer? Try these 7 Free alternative to TeamViewer

Looking for free alternatives to TeamViewer? We hear you Fortunately, when it comes to finding a better TeamViewer alternative, there are a variety of options and discussion on Reddit. But before we look at the best alternatives, let’s review why TeamViewer may not always be a perfect choice. One of the reasons why TeamViewer users want to migrate to a different remote desktop access software is that it is not free for commercial use. The plans are expensive.

How to Identify and Fix Your Customers' Pain Points

If your customers succeed, you succeed. So it’s critical for your Customer Success team to work closely with your customers and understand the needs and specific problems they face. However, that’s easier said than done. You’ll need to develop a keen understanding of your customers and their various pain points. In this piece, we’re going to lend you a helping hand. We’ll dive deeper into the science of pain points by covering the following: Let’s get started!

How to Motivate Your Remote Teams

Have you ever wondered what keeps you motivated at work? Is it a word of appreciation from a colleague? Healthy competition between you and your teammates? Or a coffee-break that you spend catching up on a game or just getting a breather? Motivating factors like these work best in an office environment. However, things are different when you’re working from home.

11 Tips to Select the Best Field Service Management Software

When you order something on e-commerce sites like Amazon or order food online, tracking your delivery is very seamless. It shows they have a field service management software in place, enabling you to track everything within your app. Reaching out to field service technicians like electricians and plumbers also involves managing and planning field service.

The 3 Secrets to a Great B2B Customer Support Team

Creating a great support team isn’t something that happens in a day, a week, or even a month. It’s a long-term goal for many companies, and even when they get there, it’s important to sustain that excellence over time, particularly as the company grows. The pressure to maintain a high level of support exists because of the impact the support team has on their business’ reputation.

New App Integrations and much more

Last month, we introduced features like Automation Error Handling, Automation Marketplace, Custom Authentication, and Action Versioning. We also made it easier for you to debug failed actions as well as added New Actions for various applications. This month is no exception. This March, in the newest version of Workativ Assistant, based on our consensus of most used IT help desk apps, we’ve added new applications and actions for them. Let’s check them out now.

For IT Helpdesk: Proper process for remote working is the need of the hour in the time of COVID-19

A pandemic is identified as a rapidly spreading infectious disease that poses a global threat. The result? Decelerated economic growth and social chaos. The COVID-19 outbreak is taking the world by storm. On March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization declared it as a pandemic due to more than 20,000 confirmed cases back then. The count has only surged now!

How Freshworks prepared for a complete transition to remote support

Even with the world in a state of flux, businesses have to continue serving customers, and support teams have to adapt to their new environment. But making the transition from working together in the office to remote support can be a tricky affair. We understand completely because we at Freshworks are in the same boat.

Using AI and Knowledge Management to Delight Customers

For companies in competitive markets, customer support is a key differentiator. In fact, it can be one of the key reasons a customer decides to renew or churn. But with customer expectations higher than ever, and modern support no longer involving only simple, repeated questions, your front line is often dealing with a high volume of tickets across multiple channels that involve product and process complexity.

How Strengthening Self-Service Helps Companies Prepare for the Future

As organizations continue to settle into working remotely due to the ongoing crisis, customer service is under strain to deal with the rising volume of inquiries. Understandably, customers are looking for information on how the current situation affects the products and services they rely on. So how can self-service help companies reduce the burden on their agents and employees? To understand that, we had a conversation with Mr. Sagi Eliyahu, the CEO of KMS lighthouse.

Best Remote Team Communication Tools For 2020 (Features, Pricing)

Tons of companies have gone remote due to the COVID-19 outbreak. But if your team’s remote, how do you communicate with them? How do you get project updates? How do you conduct meetings? Seems impossible, right? It isn’t! The best remote teams use multiple communication tools to collaborate efficiently. To help you out, we’ll highlight some of the best remote team communication tools for your team.

Slack Virtual Keynote at Enterprise Connect

As business leaders everywhere navigate our new reality of remote work, we’re inspired and humbled by how organizations worldwide are bringing teams together in Slack. We’ve seen companies, universities and nonprofits align around new priorities in a matter of days, or even hours, while maintaining morale.Join Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield, Chief Product Officer Tamar Yehoshua and General Manager of Platform Brian Elliott for our Enterprise Connect virtual keynote.