A discussion from Zendesk, Zip, Ecosystm and Slack about the importance of flexibility, culture and employee experience.

Many of the current customer experience metrics used are failing. This is why some businesses who have good NPS scores still lose customers. So, what measures do we need to put in place to drive success? How important is it to make it easy for customers to interact with you? Perhaps we should be paying more attention to emotions and sentiment, as they can reveal more about the state of our relationships with customers and potentially offer clearer insights into customer behaviour.

As a YC alum and co-founder of Mattermost, I often get asked by early stage YC companies about what it’s like to build a commercial open source business. With the start-up’s permission, we’ve started recording some of the Q&A sessions, transcribing them and sharing the more popular questions on the Mattermost blog in short form articles.

Want to know why contact center analytics is so important? Imagine having the superpower to decode customer sentiment or predict what they want! Today’s customer-oriented companies rely on advanced contact center data analytics to make the best business decisions. How? Contact centers generate tons of customer-related information every day. By analyzing them through charts and graphs, you can gain meaningful insights into enhancing customer experience.

Self-service is still good customer service. Offering an option for customers to help themselves can give your customer support reps more time to focus on improving the big-picture aspects of your service strategy. And the right customer support software makes it easy to give customers what they want when they need it.

Transactional emails may seem dull and unimportant compared with marketing campaigns. Yet 64% of recipients find them the most valuable type of message in their inbox, making them the most important communication you can have with your customer.

Cultivating long-term, meaningful customer relations is an important part of any business. It goes beyond offering an incredible product and encompasses the entire customer experience, which should be consistent across every interaction you have with your customers. According to a Microsoft report, 54% of consumers state that they have higher customer service expectations than they did previously. The pressure is on for businesses to differentiate themselves and take better care of their customers.

Want to set up effective call center training programs? During the last decade, customer service has moved on from being a mere necessity to taking a front-seat for most businesses. As a result, contact center services and operations have gone through a massive transformation. And it’s vital that the methods and practices in call center training sessions reflect these changes too. Frontline customer service agents must now be empowered to embrace and utilize these new trends.

Want to create callcenter scripts that can win over your customers? Businesses are constantly on the lookout for innovative ways to engage customers. However, nothing beats the personalized customer service experience offered by call center agents — be it on a live call or through real-time text chat. By developing customized call center scripts for your business, you can empower your agents to deliver an excellent and consistent customer experience.

Confused between hybrid vs remote work models? The COVID 19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we work. In line with pandemic guidelines, corporate giants like Amazon and Facebook have allowed their employees to work from home, at least for a few more months. Twitter has gone a step further and permitted its employees to work remotely forever if they desire. But can you do the same for your company?

OneDesk allows you to create items such as tickets and tasks by adding them manually. Usually, you will need to fill out the internal creation form for that given item. However, inserting an item allows you to bypass filling out the form and to insert items with the inline item insertion function. This function lets you add multiple items into a given location quickly by providing the minimum amount of information needed, usually just an item name. You can use inline inserting to add any item types.

Think about something that’s seemingly simple — like a sandwich, for instance. It seems straightforward enough, right? But now, push yourself to start thinking about everything that relates to a sandwich. What ingredients are used to make it? Who eats sandwiches? How are they made? Suddenly you’re bursting with all sorts of topics related to sandwiches, but there’s no rhyme or reason for how those different ideas are related to one another.

In the offline world, business owners and top managers could not access the numerous and elaborate characteristics that they rely on today. The primary criteria that they used to identify whether a specialist deserves a bonus or not was the experience of that employee. When a newer staff member joined the company, their supervisors explained to them how many units of goods or services they were expected to sell daily, weekly, monthly and annually.

You may already be familiar with chatbots and how useful they are. So, in this article, we’ll go through everything you need to know about great chatbot design. We’ll show you the ins and outs so you can design chatbots that provide excellent customer service, convert more leads, and engage with your audience. We’ll also go through: By the end of the article, you will have everything you need to design not just any chatbot, but the right chatbot for you. Let’s get started.

This web-based tool for tracking time and productivity is available for businesses of different sizes. The tool allows your team to streamline time entries with automated employee time tracking software. This desktop software is an alternative to Desktime and is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Employees can record their hours from anywhere with work proof using the desktop app. On the other hand, you can also review their work from a web-based dashboard.

At Asana we’ve grown a lot since going remote just over a year ago. We’ve grown into different schedules, work environments, and overall as people. We grew even more as a company, with almost 500 new Asanas joining us remotely from all over the world, who have never gotten the chance to meet or collaborate with their teams in person.

When Jeff Bezos was asked by CNN what the single most important feature of Amazon’s success was, his response was telling – “the most important thing is to focus obsessively on the customer.”1 With 90% of American consumers citing customer service as an important deciding factor in doing business with a company or not, providing great customer service can give companies a competitive edge.2 But what exactly does good customer service entail?

The world is changing and so is the way we shop. A few years ago, consumers made it clear that it’s no longer just about which tee is the softest. They wanted to know if the tee was made in a sustainable way, without using forced or underpaid labor. Now, coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic and social uprisings of 2020, shoppers also want—and expect—brands to speak up for social justice.

The first step in enhancing cybersecurity is acknowledging that cyber attackers do not rest, especially now that most transactions are online. Africa has recently experienced frequent attacks on cybersecurity, increasing the global risk for information leakage. Cyber threats usually target those in the financial sector, and today, the probability is higher due to lockdowns and sudden high reliance on digital processes.

Improving corporate governance should not just be a one-time thing but a continuous initiative. There are different development styles per country in Africa, which makes it important for governing leaders to assess the situation in their locality before planning out their goals for developing sound corporate governance. Africa has seen great efforts in achieving sound corporate governance in the past years. Corporate governance is now considered a prerequisite for economic development.

Our Omnichannel solutions allow companies to chat in real-time with the customers visiting their website. Now, for the second year in a row, Rocket.Chat is on the Capterra’s Live Chat Shortlist Report as a Top 20 Most Popular Live Chat Software. This recognition as an Established Player in our field is a result of our continuous efforts to improve the Omnichannel solutions to streamline your communication with your website visitors.

It's time to improve inclusion, flexibility and connection among our teams, no matter when or where they’re working

Employees at more than 74,000 organisations and counting can now securely direct message anyone – inside or outside their company

Building new tools for a new way of working

Remote working has taken over this past year, as we’ve all had to make changes to stay safe during the Covid-19 pandemic. Although it may have started as a necessity, many businesses and individuals have realised the benefits that remote work can bring, and are looking to continue to incorporate it into their normal routines going forward. But remote work doesn’t just benefit full time employees. There can also be a large number of benefits for contractors, and the teams that hire them.

The importance of the retail customer experience has increased multifold over the pandemic, even at a time when a record number of retailers have had to shut down their physical stores. But this period has also set apart the cream of retail stores from their contemporaries, through their agility to provide a seamless retail customer experience online – finding ways to stay relevant even with a decrease in footfall, and adapting their existing strategy to be digital-first.

Our community has been at the heart of what makes Mattermost great since the earliest days. The first community members were people who were trying out the earliest versions of the platform, filing bugs and wanting to make feature improvements. Our open source community has grown, contributing thousands of pull requests, from new features and plugins to translations and documentation.

Want to know how to increase accountability in the workplace? Missed deadlines, repetitive mistakes, and a lack of trust and engagement can be a sign of poor accountability. However, picking up on these signs isn’t the end of it. You need to work on them too. So how do you increase accountability in the workplace? In this article, we’ll cover what accountability is and why it’s important for your business.

OneDesk uses different naming conventions to refer to the things inside of OneDesk. There are a few main objects that OneDesk can contain: portfolios, folders, projects, and items. However, you can ONLY share projects and items, not portfolios and folders. Portfolios and folders create structure. Portfolios group projects while folders group items. Projects group folders and items together.

Building an email notification system often starts with an “and when this happens, we’ll send an email.” Before you know it, you discover this is more complicated than you initially thought. It’s not your core competency, and you can’t afford to divert engineering time toward email notifications right now. You’re starting to look at a slimmed-down version of what you really want.

Workshops are serious business — they tackle meaty material and move at a brisk pace, so it’s key to keep your team dialed in and following along. That was challenging enough for in-person workshops. For remote workshops, it can feel herculean. But great news — here are some creative ideas, tips, and techniques for grabbing and keeping your team’s attention from afar. Contributing Writer at Miro John Cockrell covers topics for Miro on all things remote collaboration.

Whether your marketing goals are lofty and far-reaching or finite and quick to achieve, the most important element they provide is opportunity and momentum for improvement. Things are now shifting more to the online space, particularly due to the past year, where many industries had to pivot from a primarily offline focus into unfamiliar territory online. In response, companies’ approach to customer service has become a quickly evolving landscape, and team members must stay adaptable.

A customer can be very satisfied with the products and services of a company, but that doesn't mean they’ll remain loyal. Competitors can attract them by offering better customer benefits, including proactive customer support. Customer experience is decisive for both satisfaction and loyalty. However, most companies do not offer great customer experiences.

With Rocket.Chat, you can add a chat room to your website or web app running with minimal code in a few minutes.

The customer experience market was valued at $6.5 billion in 2019 and is expected to experience a 17.7%¹ compound annual growth rate each year until 2027. With happy customers being the lifeblood of all businesses and the value of customer experience, it’s no surprise that 45.9%² of businesses rate customer experience as their most important priority over the next five years.

A lot of companies, and their underlying departments, face growing pains as they build on their success and establish themselves as true organizations. As product offerings and capabilities expand, departments and teams start to field wider ranges of requests for work, and this can lead to people specializing in order to build efficiency. Sometimes these requests can come from other teams at the same company even.

We’re excited to share that Mattermost has launched Open Source Fridays as a way to help our Engineering team have a structured opportunity to support and get involved in more open source projects inside and outside of Mattermost.

We are glad to inform you that we’ve added two new widgets to your Bitrix24 account! These widgets are designed to help you access the important information about your account and invite users to it.

In this article, we’ll go through the 20 best chatbot apps that will allow you to create chatbots the easy way. With chatbots, you can provide better customer service, make more sales, and engage with your audience 24/7, without the expenses of live customer support. They will help you to know that your live reps are spending time with people who need live reps, instead of having them answer the same questions over and over again.

If you want to take your customer service to the next level, you need to know how to make a chatbot. Chatbots engage with your audience 24/7 and can be as simple or as complicated as you need them to be. Don’t have coding skills? No problem! There are tools like the Messagely chatbot software that will allow you to create chatbots easily and in minutes with no required coding skills.

Teams are always looking for a speed advantage, and that comes from planning, crisp execution, and teamwork. To this end, we’re excited to release new enhancements to Incident Collaboration to help make life easier for DevOps teams during incident response. The Mattermost platform includes built-in Incident Playbooks with predefined response plans and task lists. Playbooks can be customized to your environment and specific use cases.

For over 50 years, the team at frog has harnessed the power of in-person collaboration to help their clients bring new products to market and transform their businesses. Their process and the incredible outcomes they produce have earned them a reputation for excellence. There’s a reason brands like Porsche, GE, and Pfizer turn to Frog to inject new levels of innovation into their product design.

Everyone knows customer service is important. Or at least everyone should know. Because we are all customers. And customer service is everywhere. Some customer experiences are obvious. You’re probably thinking about them now. For example, the way the clerk treats you in a store, or a company’s generous return policy.

In 2020, close to 306.4 billion emails were exchanged each day, and this number is expected to shoot up to over 361.6 billion daily emails in 2024.1 With so many emails being sent and received on a daily basis, email management is critical for organizations to function smoothly. Especially for customer-facing teams that deal with customer emails, day in and day out.

Mattermost v5.33 is generally available today. This new release offers the following new features (see changelog for more details):

In the digital era, workspace applications are the key to success in any business. When it comes to selecting the right collaboration application for your workplace, it can be difficult to identify what tools to prioritize and what ones can be compromised on. Some applications are more task based and lacking in collaboration or vice versa. Getting everything you want from collaboration apps can sometimes be a difficult feat.

Creating the perfect notification strategy is like walking a tightrope of constantly changing do’s and don’ts. Send too few, and you may fail to engage your user base. Send too many, and you may quickly annoy them. Utilize multiple channels for a more holistic strategy and risk overwhelming your user. Focus on a single channel, and they might not notice your messages timeously. Send your notification in the morning, and it could get lost amongst all the others.

It’s Women’s History Month, and we’re celebrating women in leadership all month long here at Asana. And strong leadership is critical to successfully managing a team—whether it’s one person, 10, or an entire company. Especially over the past year, which has been challenging in many ways, but also created unexpected opportunities.

“Do you want to make that a meal?” It’s the most common offer at a drive-through window, and one most of us say yes to. It’s also a great example of cross-selling hard at work. Next comes the inevitable follow-up: “Would you like to make that a large for a dollar more?” Of course you would. Bam. You’ve just been hit with the upsell.

In March 2021, the Mattermost server repository officially surpassed 20,000 stars on GitHub, and we couldn’t be more excited! Huge thanks to our community for their incredible support of the Mattermost open source project and their belief in the power of secure workplace messaging solutions built for developers by developers.

With the rise of remote work we are communicating online in more ways than ever, which is why ease of use and security have taken a front seat as many organizations grapple with maintaining productivity while protecting their data. The recognition comes as another accolade following the launch of our next-generation conferencing capability to scale and give customers better control of their data while supporting their workers' communication needs.

In late January 2021, CX executives and industry leaders gathered for an intimate conversation with CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria, author of 10 Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, to discuss the challenges that business leaders currently face. Zakaria’s book spans political, socioeconomic, environmental, and public health considerations and shows us how business and world events are inextricably tied.

Freshworks is a multi-product SaaS company offering numerous products in the customer experience, ITSM and CRM space, including Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshworks CRM and more products you can find on our website. As you might imagine, there are various capabilities like notifications and emails that each of these products must offer, instances where the technology involved is deep in terms of complexity. We would benefit as an engineering organization by solving them exactly once.

In the business world, the necessity of successful digitization is becoming unavoidable, and there may be no area in which digital transformation is as important as customer support. Consumers have questions and problems, and they want them addressed immediately and on their own schedules. As a result, lots of companies are pouring resources into their digital transformation projects. Unfortunately, those efforts often fail due to a lack of planning or lack of employee buy-in.

Customer retention is a crucial part of any business’s operations. You’ve heard it all before – it’s much easier to get an existing customer to buy from you again than it is to win new customers. Your chance of selling to an existing customer is between 60–70%, compared to 5–20% for a new customer. Do you spend time marketing to your current customers and drawing them back into your sales funnel?

Popular enterprise collaboration platforms help get the work done, but can their data collection policy result in a breach? Here, Wire’s Chief Revenue Officer Rasmus Holst provides a detailed overview of enterprise collaboration applications and the potential risks, along with ways to maintain security and privacy for organizational communication.

Most people who interact regularly with smartphones and tablets are familiar with what a push notification is. They want their calendar application to post an alert to their mobile or desktop interface, for example, whether or not they have the app open or their screen locked. If they want to change when, how, or if they receive notifications at all, they simply adjust those in the application settings. For app developers, push notifications are a great way to keep users engaged with a product.

Whether you’re testing the waters or already jumped in, one of the best ways to become the most productive business person you can be, is by learning from the experiences of top entrepreneurs.

The shift to remote work has disrupted many traditional organizational processes and company cultures. Too many of our day-to-day activities are quite challenging to replicate virtually. Now, shoulder tapping and meetings have become even more of a burden, and it seems more difficult to keep employees feeling happy, appreciated, and engaged with their work and colleagues. The struggle is real.

The shift to remote work has disrupted many traditional organizational processes and company cultures. Too many of our day-to-day activities are quite challenging to replicate virtually. Now, shoulder tapping and meetings have become even more of a burden, and it seems more difficult to keep employees feeling happy, appreciated, and engaged with their work and colleagues. The struggle is real.

The new M-Files Community launches on March 15, and you're invited to join us. Why should you join? As an M-Files customer or partner, you need access to expertise. Maybe that expertise comes from our internal team of technical experts. Maybe it comes from other customers who face the same challenges as you. Maybe it comes from your Customer Success Manager. Either way, by posting a question on the new M-Files Community, you can get the answers you need.

Last week, we were privileged to have some incredible industry experts from Retail Week, PayPal, Shopify, Parcelhub and Medallia discussing the most pressing matters in retail at an event we called Let’s Talk Shop – Your retail CX roadmap for 2021. We’ve put together this piece so you know what happened and what to take away.

A decade ago, where employees were concerned, the word ‘remote’ was used to describe workers in far-off offices. Today, it is the new cool. As a result of technological advancements and collaboration tools, working remotely now represents a more productive option for companies across different niches. According to a Gallup Poll, about 43% of gainfully employed Americans work remotely. With the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, you can expect this number to go up.

Users now gain the flexibility to express their current status in any way they prefer. Set a custom status to add a descriptive status message and emoji that’s visible to everyone throughout the app. Custom user statuses are available in Mattermost Cloud today and in Mattermost Self-Managed v5.33 (available March 16), with mobile support coming soon.

“While virtually all customer success management initiatives start out as “churnfighters,” you can’t stop there. The challenge is to gather and use the data from every interaction to move your team out of reactive mode and into far more effective proactive stances.”1

As of mid-March, 12 months have officially passed since hundreds of millions of people around the world began working remotely to help slow the spread of the newly emerging coronavirus. What many of us thought might be a month or so of “flattening the curve” has now been a full year of working from our homes, with far-reaching effects on our relationships, processes, and work habits.

“Transactional email is complex, and for most teams, it’s a tedious afterthought rather than a first-class citizen,” according to Postmark, an email API provider. When it comes to both transactional and triggered email, many software teams assume that the logical next step is to start building their own notification system. But moving down this path without a clear view of the complexities and the size of the undertaking might not be the best solution for your business.

Workplace flexibility is a key topic in the future of work that the pandemic has only accelerated. However, there are multiple benefits of employees working remotely for organizations that go beyond pandemic prevention. The future of work can’t be envisioned without flexibility. Companies across the world are asking employees to work from home. Hence, remote work has become the new normal for businesses and workers alike.

A chatbot is an AI virtual tool made to simulate a conversation with a user through apps, websites, and even on the phone. With a chatbot, you can sell your products, get appointments for your services, and provide customer service, all around the clock In this article, we’re going to show you how twenty-five companies use chatbots to boost sales and engage with their customers in the best way possible.

We are thrilled to announce that Wire is recognized as one of the top file-sharing softwares of 2021 alongside Box, Dropbox, Slack, and WeTransfer. Researchers at Digital.com conducted a 40-hour assessment of over 60 softwares, looking at solutions that deliver added security through AES 256-bit encryption, which prevents data thieves from stealing valuable files, as well as being user-friendly and seamlessly integrating with frequently used apps and tools.

We’re incredibly happy to count on many new exciting features and improvements on Rocket.Chat 3.12. To keep you updated, we listed the hightlights of our newest release, including UX/UI and Omnichannel improvements. Make sure you check it out! If you wish to view the full release, click here.

Leaders from Monzo Bank, Octopus Energy and Slack on how getting corporate culture right allows teams to thrive

Everyone has their own tried-and-true methods to jumpstart creativity. For many, the process involves physically writing down ideas on Post-it® Notes and then huddling around the whiteboard to flesh them out with colleagues. But as remote and distributed work environments become the norm, teams need a new way to ideate and collaborate online while still allowing for independent exploration with pen and paper.

You do your best to provide outstanding customer service. You work hard, follow best practices, and go the extra mile to try and deliver a positive customer service experience. But how do you know if it’s working? To really understand what your customers think about your company, you’ll have to ask them. That’s where customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys come in. Customer satisfaction surveys are a great way to find out how you’re doing — and how you can do even better.

For software products of every scale, emails are the de facto standard for notifying your users. It’s a fast, cost-effective, and readily accessible channel for reaching your users, especially if you’re sending transactional emails or generating event-driven alerts. In this post, I’ll go over three ways to send emails with Python. Apps can leverage Python for sending emails for an array of use cases.

Too many customer experience initiatives don’t even get their business case approved. Why is that? Usually because the business case is just weak. It lacks a clear focus on measurable deliverables that will have a positive financial impact on the business. To make the board invest in your CX business case you must show how the initiative will do one, two, or all of the following.

When a company first starts out, the team is often cross-functional in its nature. This overlapping of responsibilities allows a company to be scrappy and grow quickly without too much overhead. Over time and through this period of growth, companies start to expand and develop more definition in terms of its different internal functions: sales, marketing, customer experience, operations, finances, and more.

Need help getting started with an integration? Or curious what we’ve launched lately? With our in-app support center, you have everything you need to build and send notifications in one convenient spot. Check out our new support center here. To see the latest feature releases, what’s in development right now, and what’s on our future roadmap – including updates that don’t make our monthly highlights – visit updates.courier.com.

In Part 1 of this blog series we introduced the new imperative for customer support and customer success—achieving success for your customers…and for your bottom line. The first way to do so is to ensure product adoption and use. The second way is to use B2B customer support tools to proactively strengthen your customer relationships and reduce churn. That’s what we explore in Part 2. Reduce Churn and Prove Value Overall support demand grew by 10.6% in 2020.

Oh, the blank canvas. While the freedom of a blank slate may be a breath of fresh air for the new year, when you’re in a bit of a bind it can be overwhelming. You can end up spending hours searching for that creative spark and setting everything up just the way you like it from scratch—or you can tap into one of our templates to get the ideas flowing. When we started building templates for the first time, we wanted to give users the quickest of starts.

Automation got a bad reputation pretty quickly in the customer service world. Since the 1980s, customers calling support have had automated tellers putting them on hold and repeating the unconvincing assurance, “Your call is very important to us.” Automated tellers turned into chatbots. This technology could be just as frustrating with bots conducting clumsy conversations that fail to provide real help.

Mattermost is dedicated to providing effective solutions that can be utilized by as many people as possible. Accessibility is central to our core belief that chat should be simple, intuitive, and functional. For users who are visually impaired, elements such as predictable navigation are not just nice to have, but altogether necessary.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has created a challenge for us all — but few know this better than the dedicated HR employees who now have to figure out how to effectively do their jobs while working remotely. Thankfully, M-Files has proven itself to be more than invaluable to that end, offering a wide array of different benefits to human resources officials both during and after the pandemic has finally left us behind.

We’ve launched a brand new version of Element, called Element Home! It’s the Element app, but faster, personalised and under your control - all packaged up so you don’t have to worry about how it works! You can just enjoy the fact you know you chose someone you trust (us!) with your data. So that you know, here’s what’s going on behind the scenes with Element Home; in practice you’re getting your own fully managed, dedicated server alongside your Element app.