In this article, we’ll show you the best customer service tools you can use to improve your service. We’ll discuss the following: …and more! By the end of the article, you’ll know exactly which tools are the best for each step of your customer service process. Let’s get started.

Oftentimes, it starts like a dream—fleeting, chaotic, unsolicited, and without structure. The idea is a strange thing, isn’t it? The way it begins and evolves is like life itself—literally out of nowhere, and then, in a hard act to follow, it branches out and sprouts arms and legs, and lands firmly upon the ground of reason to sustain itself through the years.

A little over 2 months ago, we announced Mattermost Omnibus (beta). Mattermost Omnibus is a new, time-saving approach to installing Mattermost. Since then, we’ve done a massive amount of testing, listened to your feedback, and added new features and options. Today, I’m excited to share some big news. The project is officially graduating from Beta status and is ready for any single-server deployments for use as test, dev and/or production Mattermost servers.

Modern leaders share how their companies successfully pivoted during Covid-19, and their views on agility as a fundamental business advantage.

While it’s absolutely true that no two digital transformations are created equally, maybe the most important factor for digital transformation at scale is that it begins and ends as true company-wide efforts. Without a clear understanding of the importance of the project — along with buy-in from any and all key stakeholders along the way — your efforts will be doomed to failure before they’ve even had a chance to really get going.

Customer segmentation involves classifying customer data by specific traits to learn more about the groups that make up your customer base. The more you understand them, the better you can serve them. There are countless ways to segment customers - by age, location, occupation, account type, company size, and more. Unless you’re prepared to keep a few thousand Post-it notes on hand at all times, you’ll need a sophisticated software solution for capturing and analyzing all that data.

Mattermost is a platform based on collaboration — not built simply for facilitating team and asynchronous communication, but built on the philosophy that having the ability to collaborate efficiently makes the world safer and more productive for everyone. This is true in many day-to-day situations in an organization, but it is especially true in the world of DevOps. When an emergency arises, information needs to be moved from person to person and team to team as quickly as possible.

Want to unlock the secrets of successful virtual office management? Perhaps you’ve heard about the benefits of a virtual office but don’t know where to begin. Or maybe you’ve had to turn to virtual work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Either way, we have some tips that could help you set up a virtual office in no time. In this article, we’ll cover what a virtual office space is, and how a virtual office can benefit your company.

Whether you are a customer support professional or manage a team of agents for your company, certain soft skills can significantly impact how positive each customer interaction will be. In Part 1 of this series we explored two, and here in Part 2 we take a close look at a few more soft skills that support staff should master in order to provide the best customer experiences. 4. Organizational & Time Management Skills

Whether you are running a design sprint, defining your brand’s tone of voice, customer journey mapping with a remote team, or something else, there are any number of ways you can organize your Miro board. After all, you have an infinite canvas. Possibilities are endless. But how do you know where to start? Should you use a linear, circular, or more free-form layout? How can you use frames, templates, and color-blocking to give your attendees both structure and space to be creative?

In this article, you’ll learn how to build an FAQ page that your clients will love to read and your staff will love to reference. We’ll also talk about: By the end of the article, you’ll know how to build a perfect FAQ page to answer your customer’s questions and streamline your customer service process. Let’s get started.

The word ‘workflow’ sounds familiar? Right? You might have heard it in your workplace conversations, usually in conjunction with automation and business processes. But, what is workflow exactly? Workflows are the day to day motions that make up your job. You might follow them routinely, you might document them methodically, or you might be somewhere in between. In any case, workflows make up a crucial part of your workflow life.

AI chatbots aren’t just for customers. They can provide useful support throughout a business, including your help desk. Help desks are the hub of your support. The help desk team not only supports your customers but also manages internal IT and HR support. They’re busy handling tickets, maintaining office network infrastructure, speaking to customers, and dealing with all manner of technical difficulties your departments could find themselves facing.

Automation in the workplace is when computers perform the types of tasks that would normally require human intervention, thus freeing up the valuable time of living, breathing employees so that they can focus on those matters that truly need them. These days, modern-day automation systems leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform everything from speech recognition to translation between languages to tasks that require visual perception and much, much more.

As an open source project, Zulip is committed to making it convenient for every organization to use Zulip. For those who cannot maintain their own server, we offer the convenient Zulip Cloud SaaS service. For organizations concerned about privacy, data control, and compliance, we do everything we can to make self-hosting Zulip convenient and painless.

Nearly half of startup leaders we surveyed for the Startups CX Benchmark Report 2020 said they are actively looking for a customer support solution. These are the top reasons they cited for needing customer service software: If any of these sounds like you, then read on for tips to help you find a CX solution that aligns with your goals, your culture, and of course, your budget.

Messaging apps are becoming a key channel across every stage of the buyer journey. Eighty-three percent of consumers use messaging apps to learn about a company’s products or services, 75% use the apps to make purchases, and 76% of consumers use messaging apps to contact support. Why? Because messaging apps are convenient. Consumers already use the apps to chat with friends and family, and they don’t have to wait for a live agent to get support.

Over the course of 2020, Community events have changed. We’ve seen sweeping changes in everything from the way people get together online, to the way they interact, to the platforms they use to meet. Mattermost is a Community-driven company, and as such we continue to try to work and interact with our Community as much as we possibly can.

Customer service can effectively make or break your business in the eyes of customers. According to Small Biz Genius, 95% of customers indicated that customer service is a decisive factor in their brand loyalty. In addition, 58% of customers said that bad customer experience can lead to them abandoning a brand they otherwise enjoyed purchasing from.

The global pandemic caused by covid-19 has highlighted several weaknesses that most companies had been avoiding for some time. From a management point of view, this scenario brought two lessons that are key for companies from now on: the first one is that the future is remote and the second one is that the secret of efficient team management is organized team collaboration.

Here are the newest integrations from Zendesk to help your agents provide great customer experiences—and to help keep things spooky this October.

A document management process automation enables organizing, securing, capturing, digitizing, tagging, approving, and completing tasks with your business files. For instance, Workativ’s document management process automation on Slack or Microsoft Teams app make it possible to access files, collaborate, track, and securely send sensitive content and information from anywhere there is an internet connection.

Although HR processes are embracing technology more than ever before, they still face rampant operational issues when working at scale. Issues faced by current HR processes include: Although such issues are keeping organizations from functioning at their maximum efficiency, they are also acting as key drivers that are motivating managers to explore new technological possibilities.

Strengthening relationships, creating online connections, and improving digital customer relationships have never been this essential. The year 2020 brought many uncertainties, but there is no doubt that efficient online communication helps to maintain good relationships between companies and customers in times like these.

Chatbots are no longer a new technology in customer service. Customers are using them to get support across a variety of industries, whether they need help changing a hotel reservation, paying a bill, or finding the perfect lipstick color. Business use of chatbots and conversational AI is only going in one direction.

We’re excited to announce the release of GitHub Plugin version 2.0, which adds some new features that increase productivity and reduce the need to context switch between Mattermost and GitHub. As usual, our open source community members have played a key role in developing all of these features and I’d like to say “Thank You!” for their help. Our GitHub plugin is one of the most popular integrations on Mattermost and we use it every day as part of our development process.

Remote work has become more popular in recent years, with 2020 speeding up the transition drastically. Further, thanks to the emergence of countless digitized platforms and online collaboration tools, it’s now easier than ever to manage a remote team. Working remotely has actually been found to increase productivity by up to 13%, and we can expect remote teams to become more and more common in the near future. Here are some of the reasons remote work gains ground every year.

Employee training and development is an important contributor to any company’s growth. Over the past few years, small and large businesses have started investing more and more in employee training. This is because effective employee training leads to numerous benefits. Some of these benefits can be increased employee retention, employee satisfaction, increased productivity, and ultimately better ROI for the businesses.

This series that began with Part 1 on why it’s more important than ever to revisit how to keep customer support teams engaged with each other, continued with Part 2 where we dove into tips for enabling collaboration and engagement among support team members and between agent and customer, and introduced solution tools that enable the most efficient customer support in a remote environment in Part 3, now concludes with Part 4 where we review more solution tools to empower customer support teams.

Sometimes it can be difficult to get your point across over chat messages. Discussions can go around in circles, and decision making can take much longer than it should. For times like these, you just need to jump on a video call to iron out issues, make quick decisions, or just see a friendly face — especially in this new age of remote work. Now, Teamwork Chat can make that happen with our latest feature, Video Calls.

The problem of too many redundant meetings isn't anything new. It is a trap many teams fall into, even in the office. It’s the trap of copious no-agenda, purpose-less meetings – and lots of them. But did you know that we’re actually having more meetings since going remote? According to a recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the average meeting count has gone from 5.9 meetings to 6.9. Yikes. Being remote, however, is helping us master meetings in a new way.

Knowledge is power, especially in the world of customer service. According to the 2020 CX Trends Report, companies that leverage the most data have 36% faster resolutions, 79% reduction in customer wait time, and four times as many solved customer requests. But to reap those benefits, you need a powerful business intelligence tool.

When a communication platform is tough enough and flexible enough for innovation, the possibilities are limitless. Learn why one of the most well-known cybersecurity providers from the US chose Rocket.Chat as their main secure communication platform.

Identity verification via OTP automation, simply put, is the automatic sending or triggering of OTP messages to individuals with no manual intervention. Process automation has become increasingly popular with brands as it allows them to save time by allowing employees to reset their passwords or unlock their accounts via OTP quickly. Additionally, they are making use of other types of SMS automations by using time or action-based drip messages that are triggered by specific criteria.

There’s a sense that productivity is soaring amongst companies as most have adjusted well from the shift to remote working. Like many others, Teamwork Desk has risen to the challenge and delivered a plethora of features, enhancements, and integrations over the last quarter — to help you work more efficiently. Here are some of the features the team has been working on.

Bringing all the right people along the creative journey of designing new web and product experiences is complex. At each step, collaboration is imperative; from the birth of a creative idea, to conducting user research, through prototyping concepts there’s a chance for misalignment amongst the core design team, or with collaborators and clients.

For professional services companies like consultants, accountants, legal professionals and others, success so often comes down to their ability to forge deeper and longer lasting relationships with their clients than their competitors. Anyone can provide a service — what firms really need to do to stand out in a crowd involves providing an exceptional experience in every sense of the word.

The most wonderful time of the year will look a bit different in 2020. The holidays are usually a time for parties with family and friends, wearing ugly sweaters, going to see The Nutcracker or taking beach vacations over the winter break. But with the pandemic still gripping the world, even Santa may have to practice social distancing. Traffic in brick-and-mortar stores is sure to be down, and economic uncertainty may mean reduced consumer spending.

One of the key benefits of using Kubernetes is that it’s very flexible and fault tolerant. However, that also means that it has quite a lot of complexity to deal with. A well-built operator abstracts that complexity away and helps manage updates and upgrades seamlessly. The Mattermost Kubernetes operator is basically like having a Mattermost Cloud Engineer running inside your Kubernetes cluster managing Mattermost for you.

In Part 1 of this blog series, we introduced why it’s more important than ever to revisit how to keep customer support teams engaged with each other and what tools will help enable collaboration and keep agents motivated and excited about providing excellent support to their customers. In Part 2, we dove into tips for fostering collaboration and engagement among support team members and between agent and customer.

Mattermost Release v5.28 is generally available today. The new feature release offers granular administrator roles, certificate-based authentication with AD/LDAP, and in-product notifications. The release includes the following new features.

We’re always looking to improve our platform, and lately, we at Workativ have been quite busy. It’s that time of the month where we give you all the news and updates and new features that Workativ has added to enhance the capabilities of Workativ Assistant. Without further delay, take a look at some of the key new features we have released.

In recent months, we’ve seen a surge in the use of collaboration and communication tools among remote teams to simplify collaboration, and keep company cultures alive while working from home. At Teamwork, we believe that communication and project management tools should go hand-in-hand to ensure smooth team collaboration, and that’s where our latest integration comes in.

Like most companies, the Teamwork Spaces crew have been working remotely for a while now, and they have been busy, delivering new and enhanced features for you and your teams. With the introduction of the Space Manager role, an improved access request flow, and new space categories — organizing your Teamwork Spaces account has just gotten a lot easier.

Back when COVID-19 triggered a massive exodus for workers from the office to their homes, many organizations found a silver lining to the disruption. They found out what their mettle was made of. They found resilience. Working from home was all the rage. I personally read article after article glorifying the new normal of remote work — and it certainly does have its upside. At the beginning of the pandemic, many companies were concerned that remote working would be damaging to productivity.

The customer has changed and so have their expectations on what customer experience means to them. As these expectations change, so must the company and their approach to customer experience. There was a time when hyper-personalization and chatbots were the leading methods to engage with customers. Today, customers are looking for a very different approach that addresses two key attributes: Access to information and speed to resolution.

Our customers are always looking for ways to work faster and more effectively inside Mattermost. As a remote-first company, we spend most of our time collaborating inside Mattermost, and we’d like to think we’ve learned a thing or two about how to use Mattermost productively over the years. Here are some of our favorite tips and tricks for getting things done on Mattermost. We hope these examples help your team achieve similar productivity gains.

In Part 1 of this blog series, we introduces why it’s more important than ever to revisit how to keep customer support teams engaged with each other and what tools will help enable collaboration and keep agents motivated and excited about providing excellent support to their customers. Now in Part 2, we dive into tips for enabling collaboration and engagement among support team members.

The new rules for customer service outsourcing in a changing world Customer service teams have seen an unprecedented level of disruption this year. Some have had surges in ticket volume, while others have seen business plummet. Agents have to do more with less, all while they’re adjusting to working from home. Regardless of your specific situation, you may be considering customer service outsourcing as a potential solution.

Efficient and frictionless communication has always been an important concern for our company, Quera. In the past, we have had problems using various communication tools. But after finding Mattermost, we knew it was a perfect fit. Now, we use it extensively as our main team collaboration tool.

Since our product conception, it has undergone a massive evolution. Rocket.Chat went beyond the messaging world, becoming a truly versatile platform able to support the entire customer relationship experience and cross-company communications, considered by Capterra’s users one of the best remote work platforms in 2020. Having evolved into such a comprehensive platform, renewing our brand seemed the next logical step to reflect our values better.

How many of your meetings take place online these days? If you’re like so many of the Miro users we hear from, your answer is probably “all of them.” And, with such a reliance on video calls to stay in touch, you may also find yourself and your teammates struggling with fatigue, dwindling engagement, and a lack of alignment.

Change is certainly tough on any organization — the scope, scale or specific nature of that change doesn’t actually matter. Some changes are major — like with digital transformation initiatives. When an organization decides that they are investing in a new information management system, for example, it can represent a change to the fundamental way people work — a positive change, but one that requires an adjustment, nonetheless.

“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 advised when we sat down with him last Spring. At that time, companies were scrambling to get their employees adapted to the remote work environments. It was new, exciting in both good and challenging ways.

Engineering and operations leads from Vodafone, Solarisbank and Veepee share insights for developing a DevOps culture

A knowledge base is a self-service centralized repository of readily available information about your business, its products or services, and industry-relevant topics. From the customer’s perspective, an external (or public) knowledge base is a go-to resource for them to learn everything they want about your company. For instance, your external knowledge base may incorporate FAQs, getting-started guides, how-to articles, feature updates, and so on meant for instant self-help.

Microsoft’s SharePoint is a robust business platform that offers improved collaboration, content management, search and business intelligence capabilities to organizations all over the world. Some of the leading companies are already leveraging these capabilities of SharePoint to increase their business productivity as well as efficiency. However, for many users SharePoint is somewhat difficult to navigate.

TFiR interviews Zulip founder and CEO, Tim Abbott. Watch now to learn how Zulip helps project managers catch up on important conversations. Learn about a how a community of mathematicians are collaborating 0n Zulip to develop a new software program called Lean to build a new digital repository that they believe is the future of their feild.

In November of this year, CIO Review will feature TeamSupport as a Top 20 CRM Solution. The editors sat down with TeamSupport co-founder and COO, Eric Harrington, to talk about customer support in the time of COVID and building strong customer relationships in Part 1 of this series, and current trends and the future of B2B customer support in Part 2. We conclude this series with Part 3, where Eric offers insight into the competitive market and what makes TeamSupport different.

Leaders from Box, Okta, Slack and Zoom agree that customising your tech stack is key to doing your best work

Leaders from Culture Amp, TRIBE and Slack on the power of company culture and why employee engagement is critical to business success.

With Goals in Asana, teams now have a way to connect big-picture company goals to the daily work that supports those goals. But to help your team successfully implement Goals, you need a powerful and established change-management strategy to set your team up for success. Simply put, you need the Asana Way of Change. The Asana Way of Change implements change management best practices to help your team develop a roadmap to lasting change.

To say that information governance is critical in the fast-paced digital era that we’re currently living in is probably a little bit of an understatement. Every day, businesses are creating countless volumes of data that contain the insight necessary to guarantee success for the next five, ten or even twenty years of that organization’s existence.

The issue of “emojis vs. professional ethics” has been floating around ever since emojis themselves became a thing. Even though multiple studies have been conducted (some dating as far back as the late 90s), researchers still can’t agree on whether emojis are great for communication or totally unprofessional. Now that we all have been pushed to use chats and emails even more frequently than we did before the Lockdown, the “emoji” issue is ever-relevant.

Reimagining work and management for a more flexible, productive and balanced future

Introducing new product innovations to help teams to collaborate, connect to their partners and systems and get work done.

How the team behind Kooth collaborates in Slack to align on messaging and deliver real-time online therapeutic support to more than 5 million people.

The Future Forum launches the Remote employee experience index to help organisations to redesign work

Stories of great customer experiences often go viral because they’re exceptional outliers. An airline saves the day by flying out a bridesmaid dress, or a support rep saves a life by realizing the caller was having a stroke. “We tend to think of customer experience as these big old moonshots, and going above and beyond, and just knocking socks off,” says Samantha Chandler, one of Zendesk’s customer success team managers.

Don’t bother choosing between speed and quality when it comes to customer experience, because businesses need both to be among the best. Speed plus effectiveness is the formula for CX success, according to findings by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Research. Leading CX orgs are customer-centric to the hilt; they resolve customer issues more quickly, all while handling more customer requests overall and engaging with those customers on more channels.

A good customer service interaction can lift your entire day. It’s no surprise that an excellent front-line team has the power to elevate your entire customer experience operation—especially when that operation is on the small side.

A company’s customer experience (CX) operation can mature just like people, careers, and bottles of wine, but only if it gets the high level of investment and prioritization necessary to reach that goal. The road to CX maturity means taking a few wrong turns, acknowledging mistakes, and putting lessons into practice until they become process. Leaders might have rough ideas about where they stand on this front, and many might say they know with certainty.

When it comes to customers, experience matters. Customer experience—commonly known as CX—is the impression customers have of a brand depending on every touchpoint in their buyer’s journey. With the rapid digital transformation of companies and the expanding use of technology and cloud computing in the global marketplace, customers now have a glut of interaction options at their fingertips. As the customer has gone nimble, so has CX.

With OneDesk you can help your customers to help themselves! Decrease your support costs by providing articles about your products or services, so that your customers can easily find answers to common questions.

New releases: we love it and we know you do too! To better understand what’s new on Rocket.Chat this month, we listed all of our (very exciting) new features and improvements below. You can check the full list of updates here!

Mobile devices: odds are, you can hardly remember what life was like without them. No matter where you are, you can reach out to anyone you know in a host of different ways. You can get information about anything you want when you want it. Bored? Entertainment is just a few taps away.

What is a document management system? Put simply, a document management system is an automated business software solution used to organize, secure, store, capture, digitize, and tag business files. Many document management systems extend beyond basic functionality to include document-related workflows.

Despite the global pressure of finding ways to solve customer challenges in the new normal, business leaders have found that the right set of tools with a focus on customer experience can be a powerful competitive advantage. But because of the pandemic, offices globally are working at limited capacity, and communication and collaboration with employees, customers and partners has become more difficult.

The pressure to ship quickly is greater than ever before. But for many organizations, including the U.S. Air Force, security and compliance concerns severely limit their ability to quickly adopt and integrate new technologies, putting teams at risk of being locked into approved vendors and missing out on critical innovations. In order break the cycle of slow-moving development, Platform One, the U.S.

Every product leader’s dream is to build a hypergrowth product. But how do you get from a great idea to something your customers can’t get enough of? Recently, Asana Head of Product, Alex Hood joined Traction Conference to break down his playbook for hypergrowth, including how to design your product for delight and build a legendary product team. Here are seven insights from that conversation, plus a peek into how we go about solving our own product challenges here at Asana.

For IT leaders, customer experience was already a hot topic, but the pandemic has amplified the importance of delivering a thoughtful and modern customer experience. Today's challenges bring into focus those attributes and hurdles that most directly tie to customer experience. In a nutshell, positive customer experience ties directly to revenue.

As many companies are aware, in 1992 the U.S. Congress declared the first full week in October “National Customer Service Week.” It is now an event celebrated worldwide. It is a week many companies use to say thanks, encourage, express gratitude, and show their appreciation for their customer service employees. This year’s theme is particularly significant, Ignite a CX Celebration!

We are thrilled to finally announce the launch of Wire's next generation conferencing calls with innovative audio and video capabilities. Built upon a reimagined and reengineered architecture using the latest technologies, the platform marks a new era in video conferencing security by providing enterprise, financial services and government customers with the world’s first completely end-to-end encrypted video environment.

A lot of companies react to growth pressures by trimming their customer support budget. That may provide some quick breathing room, but it’s not a prudent long-term solution. After all, it’s cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. And when we polled consumers on what factors inspire the most brand loyalty, 57% cited good customer service, making it second only to price. Luckily, there are ways to invest in better customer service without ballooning the budget.

In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you. By the end of the article, you’ll not only know all of the main differences between Zendesk and Intercom, but you’ll know which is the right tool for you. Let’s get started.

Learn how the global sports data company pivoted to simulated reality sports within 14 days and services clients in real time through Slack Connect.

At first, this may seem like an esoteric article aimed only at a financial services audience that deals in arcane concepts like shifting bank rates, currency exchange markets, and the LIBOR transition. But bear with me, here. What you’ll find is that the way financial sector companies can manage a voluminous and complex body of contracts and documents is applicable across the board for other document-related compliance triage.

At Zendesk, my team and I are going beyond adjusting for the new normal. We are taking this difficult time as an opportunity to completely reimagine how we work. Covid-19 forced us on a journey to reenvision and realign our practices, tools, and services.

Keeping up with customer expectations is vital to your business — and that means your support operations need to be nimble. Does your support software allow your team to easily add new channels? Or enable your agents to easily switch between channels keeping customer context? If not, it might be time to consider a switch. Here are four ways Zendesk can help you deliver great customer service (and make your life easier).

Across industries, people tend to fall into the habit of using acronyms to describe common concepts they encounter. Customer service representatives are no exception. But anyone new to the industry or trying to understand it from the outside, acronyms make communication confusing and difficult. And even people who have worked in customer service for years may still come across the occasional acronym that leaves them scratching their heads.