The last quarter has seen some exciting developments with Teamwork Spaces. Now, you have the ability to create content without having to start from scratch with our new Template Gallery; you can easily share and collaborate on content with clients and stakeholders using our new Public Page Share feature; and you also have the ability to export a space as a PDF.

Engineering Four ways Slack can help engineers find their ideal state of flow

We’ve all gone through goal-setting exercises at work—but how many of those goals felt relevant, achievable, or personal? Despite the time and energy most teams put into goal-setting at the beginning of the quarter or year, we rarely see the same level of follow-through. That’s because workplace goals are often disconnected from our real work. To set achievable goals, we need to connect them to our day-to-day work.

To remain competitive as a professional services provider for rapidly growing and evolving companies, consultants have to deal with an ever-more-complex business environment. Very often, today’s projects have a broad and large scope, involving global locations, multiple stakeholders, and of course, high client expectations. These days, meeting those expectations often requires beating the odds.

We released Zulip Server 3.1 today. This is a bug fix release, containing a few dozen cherry-picked changes since Zulip Server 3.0.

Here are the newest integrations from Zendesk to help your agents provide great customer experiences.

“Cloud is about how you do computing, not where you do computing.” – Paul Maritz, VMware CEO Once you decide to implement a new B2B customer support software solution, the first step is to do an internal assessment to determine how to choose the right provider.

High productivity. Low turnover. Satisfied workers. Less stress. A larger talent pool. Fewer office expenses. ADA compliance. And better work-life balance. When you list the benefits of remote work, there’s a lot to love – for both businesses and the people they employ – which is a huge reason why more and more companies are starting to embrace a remote workforce.

For many of us, the way we work has changed since the start of 2020. We’ve had to adapt to the unexpected, embrace remote working, and learn to keep work going even when we’re not all in the same office space. But among all the uncertainty, one thing has become clearer than ever: even when we’re apart, we’re all in this together. And teamwork has never been more important.

In unprecedented times, how can organizations use technology to achieve continuity and clarity? It’s a question that countless organizations around the world are asking themselves today. We believe that the solution lies with work management platforms. They allow everyone to do their best work and enable businesses to flourish. But with economies and individual organizations under extreme pressure, we need facts to prove work management platforms are a vital part of the modern tech stack.

So, it’s official. We are in a recession. But some experts say investment in digital transformation during a recession should remain steady. The National Bureau of Economic Research declared on June 8 that the recession began in February. It’s an unusual recession, by all standards — one not caused by macroeconomic financial mechanisms as in 2008 with the housing market collapse or in 1981 on the heels of tight monetary policy and an energy crisis.

A lot will happen over the next 1,000 years, and the codebase for the Mattermost open source project will be along for the entire ride. On July 8, GitHub successfully deposited 21 terabytes of open source repository data in the Arctic World Archive, a (very) long-term storage facility located on the Svalbard archipelago in Norway near the North Pole.

If you’ve been looking for a project management tool with time tracking capabilities, you’ve probably heard of Jira. Used by tons of companies, Jira is popular for its ability to support any type of project. While many teams use Jira time tracking to manage their projects, it’s not the only thing they offer. From project roadmaps to Agile project development features, Jira has a host of great project management features to help you out.

Your mood, your demeanor and your verbal and nonverbal behaviors exert a powerful influence on your team members and the working environment. Every moment of the day, our brain is busy scanning the environment for unpleasant things we should avoid and pleasant things we should rush toward. Those things we actively work to avoid put us in “defensive” mode, and the positive items we seek out trigger what she describes as, “discovery” mode.

You want to stop focusing only on getting tickets closed and instead work on building strong relationships with your customers. You’ve determined that e-mails and spreadsheets are no way to manage support interactions. And you want to break down the silos between support, sales, and product development and improve collaborations between these departments.

This decade has begun with economic uncertainty. From COVID-19 to political and social movements, businesses of all types have been impacted by these events resulting in major fluctuations in consumer trust.

Hopefully by now you have all upgraded to Element, with Android users leaving behind the old legacy Riot Android app. If you haven’t already been previewing it via RiotX (which has been in beta for a year now), it should hopefully feel like a game changer: as we said in our Welcome to Element post, we’ve got more than just a rebrand going on here! But let’s rewind a bit.

Think of communication as the oxygen of a remote team. Like a good relationship, it takes work to communicate well, and there are ups and downs. As Carol Dweck from Stanford University, shares in her book Mindset: "It takes work to communicate accurately. It takes work to expose and resolve conflicting hopes and beliefs. It doesn't mean there is no 'they live happily ever after' but it's more like 'they worked happily ever after.'"

It’s no secret that the significance of an effective customer service strategy lies not only in delighting existing customers but in drawing in new business as well. Customers have become increasingly impatient and expect companies to respond to them faster. They are also likely to switch to other businesses or companies if your response time is too high.

Covid19 has changed the world we live in. We shop and work differently. Companies have changed their ways of operating. Businesses have been transformed to ensure employees and customers are safe. Our processes are leaner and more orientated towards digital tools. Teams found a new way to collaborate and because we need to stop the spread of the virus, we communicate more frequently with online tools. This is what is called digital transformation.

It’s been more than a year-and-a-half since we started using Cypress for our automated functional testing, and it has been well worth the investment. Cypress has now become an essential part of our process to automate regression testing, which helps us ship new releases faster, with increased quality.

Back in the mid-90s, just as Netscape Navigator was giving us our first look at what the visual internet could be, web design came in two flavors. There was the ultra basic stuff. Text on a page, maybe a masthead graphic of some sort. Nothing sophisticated. It often looked like traditional letterhead, or a printed newsletter, but now on the screen. Interactions were few, if any, but perhaps a couple links tied a nascent site together. And there was the other extreme.

To commence this discourse regarding effective employee communication we shall, before all else, formalize a definition for the term. The above is an example of over-inflated written communication. Big words are used making the sentence unnecessarily complex.

A work order is a documentation of a job or service request that is issued to track and monitor the status of the request which is raised by either a customer or internal stakeholder. Companies that provide field service, or operate in industries that involve regular inspection or maintenance of equipment or machinery deal with work orders frequently.

Now that we’ve reviewed four elements of B2B customer support excellence and the strategic business impact of each in Part 1 of this blog series—profit contribution, brand reputation, efficiency, effectiveness—let’s take a look at goals and action items that will get you there.

One of our favorite things about Mattermost is that it makes it easy for teams to collaborate on projects and topics in specific channels. Today, we’re excited to announce that Mattermost users can now easily carry conversations over to a video conference and screen sharing with Jitsi, a leading open-source video conferencing solution.

The COVID-19 pandemic left conference organizers and event planners in a tough spot. Hosting a virtual conference seems to be the natural move for organizations that had to move away from face-to-face events in 2020. However, organizing online events might seem overwhelming for a few people.

Like the perfect storm, 2020 blew in and turned business on its head. And today, business operations, offices, and even customers look quite different. According to a recent McKinsey survey, over 75 percent of customers in the U.S. have tried something new when it comes to how they shop, the services they use, or how they communicate with companies. Many of these changes are likely to stick around long after the pandemic is over.

Successful businesses like Amazon are built on the basis of prioritizing customer service values over anything else. Their emphasis on customer-centricity shows how customer service values can reap a wide-reaching impact on the growth of any company. If you get the culture right, customer service values will follow. In growing companies, support reps are riddled with steep targets to be on the right side of service metrics.

Are you planning to enhance the productivity of your business operations? Do you want to implement specific changes in your marketing activities? Well, if your answer is yes, don’t just introduce the changes straightaway. It will undoubtedly invite trouble, especially if it’s a significant change that could impact your way of doing business. Rather, you should try out Team Management Software. But, if you ask me why, here is the answer.

When lockdown hit, it immobilized the entire industry; staff had to transition to working from home, tenants and clients could only be supported online or over the phone and all repairs and maintenance work was brought to a sharp halt. Fast forward to now, after months of moving operations online and trying to digitize processes, several industry challenges have been put under the magnifying glass.

You can never be productive if you take on too many responsibilities. You will end up spreading yourself too thin and will not get anything done, at least not well or on time. That’s often what separates highly productive people from those running behind – ability to prioritize and respectfully say no. Most people don’t feel comfortable turning down another person. Especially in a work environment where the fear of being judged for saying ‘no’ is heightened.

“Technical Support Excellence is the achievement of the maximum positive impact on profitability and reputation of the company, product, or brand being supported through the efficient and effective delivery of support.”1 That’s according to a recent report by ServiceXRG, a research firm that helps companies retain customers, expand revenue, and achieve cost efficiencies through service excellence.

M-Files bested all competitors in this year’s edition of the Nucleus Research Content Management (CM) Technology Value Matrix. Similar to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, the matrix places vendors in four regions — assessing them on two key factors: functionality and usability. M-Files earned the top spot for both criteria, placed in the Leader quadrant for the seventh consecutive year.

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 3.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes to help distributed and remote teams stay productive and focused. Zulip is the open-source threaded team chat app, used by thousands of teams globally. Zulip’s unique topic-based threading experience combines the immediacy of real-time chat with the asynchronous efficiency of email-style threading.

Artificial intelligence (AI) helps businesses meet the digitally-inclined customer on their channel of choice. From ticket deflection to smart automation, the impact of AI on customer service is announcing itself in surprising ways. A customer can now start a conversation over chat, continue it via phone, and pick it up later over email within the same conversation thread.

With e-commerce swiftly becoming popular all over the world, chat bots have become the new rage where every business online is ready to invest in them. Chat bots for customer service have become essential as this software application has proven to be an excellent online collaboration tool when it comes to automated conversations with clients.

Stop playing ticket volleyball with your B2B customers When you stop playing ticket volleyball with your B2B customers--bouncing tickets from agent to agent or even dev ops—and achieve swift ticket resolution with the right B2B customer support software, everybody wins. We conclude our four-part series about how a B2B customer support software solution like TeamSupport can help solve the many points associated with your current customer support system.

As small businesses grow and acquire new customers and users, their work management needs also grow. For agencies that offer multiple, different services, it’s challenging keeping track of every piece of work and every person that is involved with making it happen. Over the course of a business scaling up, they pick up new tools along the way to address needs as they are identified.

Sales The global customer data platform stretches across organizational boundaries and stays in sync with more than 40 partners and 20 customers in Slack Sales

Break down silos and build up communication among teams. In today’s hyperconnected world of business, it’s hard to believe that silos still exist between departments. Sadly, they do. But with the right B2B (business-to-business) customer support software, it’s easy for support, sales, and product development teams to all have full visibility into the history of the customer, what products they are using, and what communication has occurred throughout the relationship.

Although Element is working with companies around the world, our busiest region is Europe and in particular European governments and public sector organisations. There are multiple reasons, but three of the biggest are: Data ownership, open collaboration and privacy are driving the use of Matrix Element’s messaging and collaboration solution, being based on the open source Matrix project, is decentralised.

Hi everyone, We are incredibly excited to announce that Riot is now Element! In fact we have simplified all our naming: Element is also the name for New Vector (the company behind Riot) while Modular, our flagship Matrix hosting service, has become Element Matrix Services. For those discovering us for the first time: Element is the flagship secure collaboration app for the decentralised Matrix communication network.

In the new normal of remote work, we rely heavily on technology to collaborate more effectively and re-create the connection of being together. Each of the apps we use is like a virtual conference room, providing a digital space to communicate, make decisions, provide feedback to one another, and update each other on the status of projects. But there’s one conference room staple that’s missing from these tools: the whiteboard.

Two years ago, we first shared our vision for the future of work. Fast forward to today, and I’m proud to say we’ve delivered on that roadmap with the launch of Timeline, Portfolios, Workload, Automation, and now, Goals, giving organizations a living system of clarity that connects daily tasks to companywide objectives. And we’re just getting started.

Many small and midsize businesses (SMBs) rely on a patchwork system of multiple tools just to capture customer information and respond to requests. This can result in time wasted, missed requests and lost sales—not a great look for a growing business. What’s more, these workarounds and stopgaps simply don’t scale. As your business matures, your technology needs to mature too.

Over the years, the rapid emergence of gig economy platforms have created diverse job opportunities by connecting freelancers with businesses that favour a pay-per-task basis. However, being able to pick up temporary job arrangements has been both boon and bane. In the Asia Pacific, 84% of hiring managers outsource to freelancers.

Here at Mattermost, our team of developers and quality assurance analysts are proud of what we build and work hard to ship a quality product on the 16th of each month. However, maintaining our high bar for quality month over month isn’t without its challenges!

Mattermost Release v5.25 is generally available today. The new Extended Support Release offers many bug fixes for increased stability (see changelog for details) as well as the following new features.

When you’re looking to hire and build your customer service team, you’re faced with one question: What will you call your employees? Your titles say a lot about your company and explain what you expect your employees to do. So we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of all customer service job titles. To choose the best customer service titles for your company, take a look at this list!

As the saying goes, teamwork makes the dreamwork. Building an effective and successful team takes time, and it’s even harder in the case of distributed, remote teams. How can you run effectively a team of persons without, well, meeting in person? With the rise of remote work worldwide, many teams have found themselves juggling projects, deadlines, and goals while spread all over the country, or even all over the world. When the team works like a well-oiled clock, they can achieve big things.

How a support agent is introduced to a new role and how they’re coached until they can get up to speed plays a huge role in their performance throughout their career. In fact, organizations with a strong training and onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%1. So, it’s vital that you train and onboard your agents well, especially in a remote work environment.

We all know great customer service when we receive it. Providing exceptional customer service to others however, is the real challenge. Providing good customer service is a vital habit that every customer rep should have. It’s the best way to increase customer loyalty and the most effective way of handling even the hardest of customers. But, how can you and your customer service reps provide exceptional customer service consistently to every client?

In this release, we added some great new features to both the Community Edition and the Enterprise Edition. We will briefly walk you through the main features in this post.

According to the Zendesk Benchmark, it takes an average of 24.2 hours to provide the first response to an internal support ticket. And internal support teams receive around 492 tickets per month. This means that help desk agents in internal support teams have to spend approximately a whopping 11906.4 hours to solve tickets per month which leads to attrition. Moreover, the cost of manually handling a help desk ticket is $22.

Using Freshservice? Then this blog is for you. Not using Freshservice? Then this blog is for you. Confused? Read on then.

How Jira integration with Workativ Assistant can speed up workplace support You might’ve heard the term “Jira” used by any of the members in your product team at your company irrespective of what role you’re in. To make it clear for you, Jira is actually a tool developed by the Australian Company, Atlassian. It is used for bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management.

Information, in all its formats, is the lifeblood of business. Yet, it is an asset that’s often poorly managed, and therefore, provides less value than its potential. Let’s face it. Information only has value when it is refined and used for decision-making. So why do we not treat information with the respect it deserves? There can be many reasons for this, but I believe that fundamentally, it is about ease of access and use.

People barely consider email tracking to be a new thing these days. Salespeople and marketers have been using it for the last 15 to 20 years to engage with leads in a better manner and develop an email marketing strategy that actually delivers! Some of you might be wondering – what exactly is email tracking? And is there a hidden opportunity to use email tracking to provide better customer service? Keep reading to find out.

The right B2B customer support software means never having to say goodbye. In our first blog post in this four-part series we introduced the top pain points reported by B2B customer support professionals and how the right B2B customer support software will help you solve for all of them, starting with using a B2B help desk ticketing system instead of your inbox to resolve issues in a more timely, efficient manner.

Sales The edge cloud services provider connects with prospects and customers in Slack channels to manage rapid sales cycles and build customer relationships

According to a survey by Workopolis, 90% of people believe that Telecommuting contributes to more productivity. However, these are the people who have had a practice of working from home, unlike most employees today, who find themselves in an unprecedented situation in the year 2020 as a global pandemic rages and their bosses have ordained work from home as mandatory. Initially, the new work order may look heaven-sent and a miracle.

Finance aside, the majority of business challenges faced by management teams are deeply rooted in a need to build customers’ trust in the brand or to improve operational efficiency. The concern is well-founded. Businesses will face these challenges regardless of the size, industry, or approach.

As one observer noted, even large disasters like Chernobyl didn’t completely stem from a lack of documentation. This crisis caused so much damage because people failed to follow the planned and documented processes in time. While it’s important to document processes, no flowcharts or instructions will help businesses run more efficiently or overcome unexpected unusual obstacles if nobody follows them.

With the staggered re-opening of businesses following the shutdown, it’s time for customer support teams to up the ante on customer experience. After all, customers have also had to endure the ordeal and the last thing they want is a heated argument on the phone with a support agent over a refund. We believe the following apps will help you become more customer-centric in your approach and provide pre-COVID levels of service to all your customers.

One of the most important parts of the Mattermost source code is the one responsible for accessing the Mattermost database: the store. Every single database access is handled by the store, so we needed to find a way to extend its functionality while introducing as little complexity as possible. This is the reason behind the current layered approach using struct embedding.

If you’re still using emails to exchange work messages, who better than you can understand the problem of endless email chains, annoying CC’s, and accidental Reply All’s? While emails have a certain charm, they’re not the best tool for internal communication. If you use email for work chat, reviewing all the conversations about a single project requires sifting through multiple email chains.

If you’re still using emails to exchange work messages, who better than you can understand the problem of endless email chains, annoying CC’s, and accidental Reply All’s? While emails have a certain charm, they’re not the best tool for internal communication. If you use email for work chat, reviewing all the conversations about a single project requires sifting through multiple email chains.

Has your Inbox has screamed, “Enough!” because of all of the e-mails related to support tickets piled up? This is one of the top pain points reported by B2B customer support professionals, and this four-part blog series will explore how the right B2B customer support software will help you solve for all of them.

The results are in; after auditing leading video conference systems, Berlin's Data Protection Officer, Maja Smoltczyk, published a report, which attests that major video conferencing providers including Zoom, MS Teams, and Google Meet, do not comply with GDPR regulations.

The company’s consumer products cloud business unit designed a simple process to create engaging dialogue between employees and leadership Engineering

Rocket.Chat Mobile App 4.8 is going to be launched next week with many exciting new features, improvements, bug fixes, and user experience development efforts. Check them out!

When the entire company is working from home, pair programming is not only possible but even more valuable. If you were practicing it face to face, why not continue remote? If you weren’t, why not try? My team did a series of remote pair programming sessions in during the last month or so, and I want to share a few tips from that experience. If you’ve never tried pair programming before, here’s a good primer.

According to a recent NPR survey of state health departments, the national coronavirus contact tracing workforce tripled in just six weeks, jumping from 11,142 workers to 37,110—and public health researchers say it needs to grow even more. Recent surges in cases underscore the importance of reopening countries, states, schools, and businesses carefully and as safely as possible—when the time is right.

The world will keep changing, and now is the time to embrace it. Change can be challenging, of course, but it can also push you to build an even better customer experience, listen to your customers more closely and work harder to stand out from your competition—and these are all good things. One of the ways you can equip your team to embrace change is with a virtual sandbox environment.

It’s happened to everyone—you purchase a new product you’ve wanted for a long time. But despite your excitement to use it, you realize, to great irritation, that you don’t really understand how to use it. These days, customers have an abundance of options any time they want to make a purchase. If something is too hard to use, returning it or canceling the subscription is just a few clicks away. Closing a deal does not mean your customer will stay.

Team collaboration is important for a reason – it delivers results. But what are the keys to making team collaboration more effective for your company? Let’s find out the answer together.

Along with so many dramatic changes the coronavirus pandemic has abruptly introduced into our daily lives, a lot more business has moved to the internet. Because of social distancing, millions of employees have exchanged their commutes for a home office. At the same time, all sorts of companies have seen an explosion of traffic to their eCommerce and online service sites. During this time, businesses have been forced to rapidly shift both their marketing and servicing channels.

Part 1 of this blog series explored the meanings of and differences between customer sentiment analysis and Customer Distress Index (CDI™)—customer sentiment analysis uses text to indicate a positive or negative tone to the communication and the TeamSupport CDI uses data to indicate whether a customer may be satisfied or frustrated. But why should B2B customer support teams pay attention to customer sentiment and CDI?