Like most business leaders, you want your company to provide a great customer service experience. You hope to respond quickly, have positive interactions with your customers, and give them the solutions they need. However, with customers being higher expectations than ever, and customer support teams being understaffed, this is easier said than done. If you’re wondering how to improve customer service in this salutation, then look no further.

Project Managers are presented with some challenging tasks which can hinder the success of the project. Some of the most prevalent challenges that keep project managers on the ball involve making sure the project is on track, within the assigned budget, keeping up with the project's pace, and managing resources.

‍ Thrust into the unfamiliarity of remote work, a huge number of industries around the globe have had to adapt to life away from the office. COVID-19 has prompted a surge in remote work like we have never seen before, with much of the American workforce being left with no choice but to work from home. In fact, the pandemic has ensured that tech priorities shifted for 95% of companies.

On Saturday Feb 27th, OneDesk released the February 2021 update to OneDesk with many new features and improvements.

Anyone who has ever spent an appreciable about of time working with business information knows full well that the sheer volume of content within their deployment is growing by the day. But at the same time, the variety of content is also on the rise — which can easily lead to governance issues before you know it.

We’ve heard it a thousand times: “the pandemic is unprecedented.” And it’s true—COVID-19 has changed the lives of billions of people around the world and many of those changes are here to stay. The good news is that the pandemic has also shown that many businesses are able to adapt and thrive. Bernard Salt AM, one of Australia’s leading social commentators on trends, business, and society, has a hopeful view for the future.

We know that companies have been trying to persuade customers to use self-service for at least the past ten years, with mixed success. Now due to the pandemic it is being adopted at unprecedented rates according to the Boston Consultancy Group. So how do we encourage customers to carry on using self-service portals when life returns to ‘normal’?

Almost every web application needs the functionality to send transactional emails in response to various triggers. Events like account registration, password resets, purchase receipts, and user verification are among the many tasks today’s applications need to accomplish via email. These emails are crucial for notifying users of important updates and enabling key user workflows in your application. This post explores three different options for sending email from within a Node.js app.

If you have worked on building user interfaces for a large project, you would probably have learned the importance of component libraries. They contain a set of ready-to-use components that help you build UI fast and also maintain consistency across the entire project. Building a consistent and seamless user experience is hard. This is where component libraries can help.

In a world that is so technologically-driven, having the right customer support tools is essential to delivering great customer service, keeping employee health in check, and gaining an edge over your competitors. With the range of support tools available today — one for shared inbox, one for bug tracking, another one to allow for inter-team collaboration, and yet another one for project management — how do you identify the tools that you really need?

One of the greatest values Mattermost provides to users is the ability to create a space for discussion, issue tracking, and succinct communication, which is made possible by administrators managing access. Our goal is to create a safe and secure communication platform for all of our users. This often comes with the need for tools to help ensure users are communicating in line with the culture of the organization or community to ensure a welcoming and inclusive experience for all.

That’s according to the Customer Success Association who tells us that being able to prove your worth in both directions is the most crucial aspect of determining success. Monitoring the return on investment (ROI) for the customer is therefore a vital capability, and in the other direction, driving recurring revenues for your company. The CSA advises that Value Management functionality should also include.

Trying to manage a project with multiple moving parts can feel like herding cats. Aligning the assorted tasks so they tie up neatly and ensuring everyone’s on the same page at all times is hard work. Enter the project manager’s best friend: a project timeline. A project timeline allows you to bulk schedule tasks so that you can see what needs to be done when and keep an eye on the overall timeline of a project.

What if I told you there was a simple way to increase productivity and communication within your organization? To create more connections and relationships that will improve your work environment, bring in mentorship. When it comes to mentorship, the connections made by a mentor and mentee goes well beyond just a connection.

You know that engagement is the secret sauce for any virtual meeting or workshop. But, it’s tough to get people to stay focused—let alone actively participate. A recent survey found that more than half of workers admit they do other things (like check email or peruse social media) during online meetings. This is where workshop activities come in handy.

“A design system acts as the connective tissue that holds together your entire platform.” —Drew Bridewell, Design Specialist Digital solutions are increasingly becoming more intricate with the rise in customer expectations, and product and design teams are transforming their approach to design—experimenting with style guides and pattern libraries—in order to create inclusive design systems that all users can appreciate.

To win over today’s customers, delivering good customer service alone is not enough. You also need to create a great customer service experience. Customer service experience is defined as the overall experience a customer has interacting with your company throughout their journey. Brands like Zappos and Amazon are loved by their customers for the memorable customer service experiences they deliver.

Now that we’ve settled into 2021 there is a much wider recognition that technology made a significant difference this past year and will do so in the coming years for business as well as individuals. Everyone has predictions for what technologies CIOs should prepare for and admittedly most of them are accurate. However, there is more to preparing for the future than just technology.

Customer service automation technology is commonplace in every sector, from artificial intelligence (AI) engines used to front-end a customer interaction and problem diagnosis, to ‘chatbots’ and robotic process automation (RPA) of transactions. The efficiency benefits are clear enough, but there are differences between the public and the private sectors that makes the adoption of these new technologies a little different. The key differences lie in complexity and risk.

Using the right boardroom technology is of utmost importance when shifting from physical to virtual board meetings. One of the most important factors to consider to make sure you choose the right technology is security.

How to convert (and keep) clients using client management Running a profitable company isn’t just about bringing clients in—it’s about keeping ‘em around, too. We all know the stats back this up. Time and time again, we’ve been told that it costs about five times more to attract new clients than keep old ones, and increasing retention rates by just 5% can boost profits from 25% to 95%. Sounds good, huh. So, how can you convert and keep clients in your portfolio?

How to convert (and keep) clients using client management Running a profitable company isn’t just about bringing clients in—it’s about keeping ‘em around, too. We all know the stats back this up. Time and time again, we’ve been told that it costs about five times more to attract new clients than keep old ones, and increasing retention rates by just 5% can boost profits from 25% to 95%. Sounds good, huh. So, how can you convert and keep clients in your portfolio?

Handy new features to help your teams work better – with anyone and from anywhere

In 2020, tens of thousands of retail professionals descended as usual on the Javits Center in New York City for the National Retail Federation’s Big Show. Barely a year later, the annual conference was entirely virtual, your parents knew what “Zoom fatigue” was, and the Javits was a Covid-19 vaccination center.

Another month, another release: Rocket.Chat 3.11 is here with many new exciting features and improvements. To give you a clearer view of what’s new, we listed every update on our latest release – check it out below! If you wish to see the original list, click here.

It seems like everyone is talking about the customer these days, but it hasn’t always been a top priority. Long viewed as a cost center by many businesses, customer service has been thrust into the spotlight during the pandemic. With so much uncertainty in the air, we are reaching out to businesses for help more than ever before.

Mattermost v5.32 is generally available today. The new feature release offers the following new features (see changelog for more details).

Digital transformation has always been an integral part of corporate development. It has been a critical consideration for successful business growth since the 90s. It has become increasingly rampant this past year due to the pandemic, especially for boards. Digitalization has unlocked many opportunities for organizations. However, digitalization spans different regulatory regimes, and this can cause a lot of transversal challenges to businesses.

Wire has introduced a new App-lock feature for Wire Pro customers. Team owners can now enable a mandatory App-lock for the entire team. Once enabled, members of the team will be required to authenticate themselves using a passcode or biometrics (depending on the user's choice when configuring) every time they open their Wire app. Owners can also customize the duration after which an unlocked app will be locked again.

With WhatsApps’s latest move to monetize data, personal users and businesses alike have become much more aware of the privacy element of the applications they use. Other major tech players and industry figures have even jumped on the news coverage to further highlight the issue. Apple has arguably taken on the role of privacy watchdog and has made bold statements about how damaging data harvesting is to the world.

Despite all of the changes to the workplace last year, one thing hasn’t changed—employees are still spending 60% of their time on work about work. These activities, like searching for information or chasing status updates, take time away from meaningful, strategic work that moves your organization forward. In 2018, we introduced Portfolios to help teams reduce work about work and organize their most important strategic initiatives with project portfolio management.

Mattermost now gives users flexibility to organize channels and direct messages into custom, collapsible sidebar categories. Users gain full personalization of their sidebar to improve productivity, reduce clutter, and focus on what matters. Upgrade to Mattermost server v5.32 (releasing February 16th) and later to access these feature enhancements on your desktop, with mobile support coming soon.

In this article, we’ll go through everything you need to know about chatbots. We’ll explain what a chatbot is, how it works, and why you need one. We’ll also go through information like: By the end of the article, you’ll know exactly what a chatbot is and how to get started using one. Let’s dive right in.

Throughout the pandemic, the collaboration tools market experienced a major boom with the rise of remote work. However, the recent acquisition of Slack by Salesforce has reinforced the growing separation between workplace tool suites and specialized collaboration tools. Suites have become “one-stop-shop” solutions that can fill multiple functions for companies and employees, which brings into question, what value is there for niche solutions?

Germany’s railway infrastructure is considered the backbone of its economy because of a single company: Deutsche Bahn (DB). As the country’s local and long-distance railway service provider, the company’s growth is remarkable: Industry: Railway transport, Logistics Headquarter: Berlin, Germany Headcount: 300,000 employees Annual Passengers: 151 million passengers transported in 2019

“Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you – they might have different tastes.” — George Bernard Shaw When it was time to look back and reflect on my three-month onboarding period at Miro, I was convinced that I’ve never been part of such a collaborative, open team culture. Curiously enough, I’ve never met anyone from my team (or company) in person.

It's safe to say that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge for all of us — especially for organizations that were in the process of undergoing their own digital transformations as the lock downs started in March 2020. The need to use technology to support a fast-paced and agile workplace was always paramount — but somehow, it's become even more so in an era where most of your employees are going to be working from home for the foreseeable future.

As the world adjusts to the “new reality” of the pandemic, industry leaders look back on what has worked well for them and share advice about what to expect in the future. In case you missed it, here are some highlights from recent interviews with industry leaders, as part of Zendesk’s CX Moments virtual events series.

When it comes to customer service, the most important thing you need to shine is an excellent team. However, a great team won’t just happen in a day. That’s why it’s essential to have dedicated training and onboarding for your customer service team. We’ve put together this article to help you make sure that your customer support staff are all ready for their roles by giving them the training they deserve.

ERP – or enterprise resource planning – is a term thrown around fairly often when discussing the operations of a business. The focus of ERP is to improve efficiency by seeking insight into where resources are allocated and improving how they are being utilized. To develop a full picture of where resourcing is currently, analysis and planning needs to be done across verticals – from finance to human resources, from distribution to procurement.

You have the perfect product and competitive pricing to carve a special place for your brand in the market. The reactions and verdict from customers and critics are in, and your product is an instant favorite. However, no matter how pathbreaking the product or service is, your company’s customer perception is only as good as the support you offer. So what’s the best way to increase the likelihood of your customers staying with your company? It’s all about your customer service plan.

Digitalization has had profound effects on existing employee functions such as assistants or corporate secretaries. Some see emerging technologies brought about by rapid digitalization can potentially render certain roles futile. On the flip side, they also offer a wealth of opportunities to redefine or improve people’s work. Digitalization has triggered the improvement of various processes in business operations. The boards also experienced this improvement as they went digital.

A playbook for delivering the ultimate customer service experiences The customer experience is the new marketing. That’s what Micah Solomon, best-selling author, customer service industry consultant, and Forbes contributor, asked as he opened a recent webinar based on his new book, Ignore Your Customers (and They’ll Go Away): The Simple Playbook for Delivering the Ultimate Customer Service Experience.

Since the dawn of time—when humans were still living in caves—we’ve been solving life’s problems through innovation. Back then, we invented fire and hunting spears. Today, we create things like portable toasters and wireless headphone translators to meet our needs. As a product designer, I’ve learned that great design comes down to one important thing: listening. I practice the principles of design thinking to solve problems in a human-centric way.

On February 2nd and 3rd, Shy Ruparel joined me for another Courier and Contentful crossover stream. This time, we decided to play around with an IoT E-ink display and use it to show the latest posts from Contentful and send notifications using Courier. During Tuesday's Contentful Live we started working with the newly released Adafruit MagTag. The MagTag is a 2.9" grayscale E-Ink display that can show data on its screen even when power is removed.

Last year, Atlassian announced a shift in focus to cloud and data center products. Effectively, this spells the end for Atlassian Server products, but there’s still a fair way to go before the final goodbye. Although the move to cloud may still seem daunting for some businesses, particularly those with large, well established server instances, there’s plenty of support available.

Customer needs and expectations are ever changing. Identifying, analyzing, and meeting customer needs is the key to providing better customer service and growing your business. In this blog, we cover the A-Z of customer needs to help you create a product or service that is in line with everything that your customers need. Table of contents (click on a link to directly read the section of your interest)

If your application sends emails to confirm new accounts, reset user passwords, or handle billing and invoicing, then it’s sending transactional emails. This kind of functionality is extremely common, so naturally there are a lot of vendors that provide these services. But which transactional email API is right for your application?

Over the years, document management systems have evolved to the point where they've become a major contributing factor to the productivity of your organization... or they can be, under the best possible circumstances. So how do you lean into the strengths that make these solutions so powerful, taking advantage of those "best circumstances" at every opportunity? By making seven little changes to your approach that add up to a big, big difference before you know it.

Looking for remote working software for your team? Remote working has become as common as working in an office. And the availability of various software has made it even more feasible for an entire team to work remotely in perfect harmony. But how do you choose the best software for your remote company? In this article, we’ll cover all the basics of remote working software. We’ll also list down the seven best software, along with their key features, pricing, and user ratings.

Subtasks are an item in OneDesk that represents the break-down of complicated tasks into smaller ones. They act similar to any other item and have the same functionality. When you create a subtask, you are creating a regular item. This means that you can unlink it, delete it, assign it separately, move it to another project, or update its status.

Are the people in your organization equipped with the tools they need to get their work done efficiently, effectively, with minimal roadblocks, and maybe—just maybe—have fun while doing so? This is not a distant reality. 2021 will be the year for IT professionals to step up and play a major role in driving organizational success by helping employees thrive despite the challenges presented by distributed work.

Chatbots sit in an interesting space in the digital world. On the one hand, they clearly offer potential. The ability to answer queries and take the menial workload off means more work-hours saved. And yet, there are considerable hurdles to implement them. Firstly, AI-powered chatbots are hardly perfect. How many times have we had a hilarious encounter with a chatbot which keeps giving us answers we never asked? Often, the very utility of conversational AI-powered chatbots is questionable.

Wondering how to increase work efficiency? If you’re noticing delays in meeting deadlines, failure to reach targets, and reduced creativity, there might be a problem. All these aspects point to one thing — workplace inefficiency. It’s time to re-evaluate your team’s efficiency. You’ll have to figure out the root cause of inefficiency and look for foolproof ways to eliminate it.

Marketing to your chosen demographic is important, particularly for a growing business; choose the right target market and effectively market your product to those individuals, you’re on the path to success. It’s an essential component of the company business plan, but what is a B2B Buyer Persona, and why is it an important component of your company? What effects can misrepresenting Buyer Identity have on your business?

Thanks to big data and the acceleration caused by the pandemic, communication in healthcare now demands extra attention. In order to stay relevant and improve the quality of patient care, more and more companies are following HIPAA guidelines. Ensuring that practitioners and patients are having their data protected is the first step to a brighter (and safer) future.

If you’ve handled a group project or managed a team, you already know how important it is to communicate with your team members. If you want to streamline communication and collaboration at your workplace, you must onboard your teams on the best work collaboration apps But, what are those apps that can help you break silos and improve productivity at the same time? Known as a feature rich office chat app, Troop Messenger is an easy-to-use tool with seamless UI and UX.

Whether you do it quarterly, annually, or even weekly, running a planning workshop can be challenging. You need to make sure everyone understands the big picture and vision. You also need to ensure each person has a voice in the planning process. Finally, you need to lead the group to alignment and verify that they’re clear on next steps. These are the challenges I confronted while leading a goal-setting session at Miro’s recent Executive team offsite (virtual this year).

In this series, I explain how to use Twitch EventSub and Courier to automatically send notifications to multiple destinations – Slack, Discord, and more – when your Twitch stream goes live. In part one, we built a Node.js app using Express.js to accept events from Twitch EventSub. In part two, we listened for our event and triggered a notification using Courier. Now, in part three, we're going to use Courier’s List API to send multiple notifications when our event is triggered.

Good customer service runs on good information. Agents need to be ready with an instant answer to any question, or the customer will walk away unhappy — even if the eventual resolution is effective. The information shared with customers also needs to be consistent. No one likes to be bounced around between departments that all say something different. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to ensure your agents have accurate information at their fingertips.

In any transaction where a seller sells equipment or products to a buyer for which periodic servicing or maintenance is required for its proper functioning, it is advisable to enter into an agreement between both parties on the terms of servicing of that equipment or product. These agreements, commonly referred to as an Annual Maintenance Contract (AMC), are essential to formalizing this process.

In theory, the world of integrations is designed to make our life easier. By bringing systems together, teammates can share information more quickly, and managers can have more oversight over performance, deadlines, and budgets. But what happens when this individual software and system integrations become too unwieldy or complicated to manage?

Are you finding social media collaboration a challenge within your remote team? This article will guide you through the exact steps and tools you can use to make it easier. Remote working is a necessity that a lot of worldwide companies had to adapt in order to survive. But something that once was a necessity actually turned into a preference for many employees. In fact, studies show that 99% of employees would choose to work remotely, at least part-time, for the rest of their careers.

A push notification. A bolded channel. A red badge next to an unread conversation. These are all ways that Slack manages your attention. For the messaging giant, managing attention is deeply intertwined with their mission of making work life more productive. Too much noise and suddenly what was an invaluable collaboration hub turns into a distraction. Not enough and it’s just another tool gathering virtual dust.

When most people think of startup incubators, they probably imagine famous hubs for startups like Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Austin. The small team at INVANTI is trying to change that paradigm and cultivate entrepreneurs from their startup studio in South Bend, Indiana.

M-Files is launching a new online user community on March 15. In the weeks prior to launch, it's a good time to take a step back and consider online user communities in general. What do they do? What needs do they serve? And why are they so important for SaaS success? It used to be that technology adoption was viewed as a relatively simple transaction — with a clear start and end. Decide what software you need. Buy it. Learn how to use it. Done.

Our Makefile entry point for developing against the Mattermost Server already tries to simplify things for developers as much as possible. For example, when invoking make run-server, this build tooling takes care of all of the following (among other things!).

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) originated with companies having to clean up after their mistakes. “It was born from when a company polluted a river, their corporate social responsibility program was how they offset that damage,” says Tiffany Apczynski, Zendesk’s former vice president of Public Policy and Social Impact. Today, companies are expected to take more proactive stances and resulting actions and to lead the way on important issues.

Customer Experience (CX) encompasses the entire cycle of a buyer’s journey that includes anticipation, discovery, and the fulfillment of desire. Technology and digital platforms have opened up new avenues for us to connect with commodities that fulfill our desires, and food certainly is one of them.

In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk with Freshdesk to find out which is the right customer support tool for you. We’ll compare these tools based on: By the end of the article, you’ll not only know all of the main differences between Zendesk and Freshdesk, but you’ll know which is the right tool for you. Let’s get started.