Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

January 2022

Simpplr on Simpplr: How we redesigned our own Simpplr instance to create a modern employee experience

In this two-part article series, I explain how in my role as a Corporate Brand and Communications Manager at Simpplr used our intranet product to assess our company needs, create a plan to improve organizational performance, and implement our strategies for the benefit of our employees, leadership, and the success of our business. I work at an industry-leading tech company.

Upwork Time Tracking: How to Use, FAQs, Limitations, Alternative

Upwork Global Inc. is a freelance platform designed for effective remote collaboration between clients and independent professionals, like a graphic designer or freelance developer. The platform allows clients to share information and communicate work objectives with virtual teams. And to ensure everyone gets their money’s worth, Upwork provides a time tracking software solution to invoice work time.

Your Comprehensive Guide to Optimizing Board Pack Preparation

How long does it take for meeting organizers to compile board packs? With manual execution, it could take them three to seven days for preparation, one to three days for distribution, and seven to ten days for review. It would take almost a month for corporate secretaries and board administrators to prepare for a single board meeting. As technological solutions are now widely available, how can boards automate board pack compilation?

3 biggest benefits of open source in education

Open source software is making its way into education. Even though using open source software for educational purposes is nothing new, we observe an increased demand for it across higher education institutions. Why now, and why such a surge in interest? Well, there is hardly any industry that didn’t experience an impact made by the pandemic. The conclusion across the board is almost unanimous: the future is digital, and it’s approaching us at a greater speed than ever before.

Contact Center vs Call Center: What is the Difference?

Although the terms ‘contact center’ and ‘call center’ seem synonymous, there are some key differences between the two. A contact center is a hub for managing customer communications and customer service across multiple channels, including phone, email, live chat, messaging, and social media. Customer-facing teams use a contact center software as a single platform through which they can handle conversations coming in from all channels.

Introducing the Miro Developer Platform 2.0, now in beta

Miro is all about empowering teams to build the next big thing. With our redesigned Miro Developer Platform 2.0, launching in beta today, we’re making it easier for third-party developers and partners to build and customize integrations to support Miro’s community of 30 million users.

12 Proven Tips to Nail Your Virtual Presentation

Delivering an effective virtual presentation is no easy task. Whether it’s for pitching to potential clients or discussing project goals with your team, you’ll have to compete for your audience’s attention and ensure your message gets through. In this article, we’ll cover the top 12 virtual presentation tips and best practices for your next virtual meeting. We’ll also look at some of the key benefits of virtual presentations.

What is EdTech? 10 companies transforming the way we learn

EdTech has been a crucial part of a digital learning experience for many students and teachers. Now, the market for online learning apps is drastically expanding. The abrupt increase in the number of EdTech users, fueled by the pandemic, has shown that digital education is necessary to equip students with the skills essential for their future. That’s why experts predict that the EdTech market will almost double in size by 2025 - meaning that the total EdTech spend will be $404 Billion.

Let your team say "no" - and create better work

Stress kills. Here’s the proof. And most of it can be avoided. But in the workplace, we put way too much emphasis on the task, and not the goal; on being busy rather than being successful. We say “yes” to more than we should, building our stresses. Why? Because we’re human. We’re social creatures, wired to please others and reap the rewards of acceptance. But if we say yes to everything, we’re probably going to start dropping the ball. A lot.

The Ultimate Guide to Becoming an Effective Team Leader

Strong and authentic leadership qualities are valuable in every role and at any stage of employment. Even if you are not yet in a managerial role, you can explore ways to demonstrate your leadership skills inside your firm. Being a team leader is one method to exhibit leadership abilities early in your career.

Jira Service Management Chatbot - FREE

Enhance yourJira Service Managemen experience with Slack or Microsoft Teams chatbot and app workflow automation, from Workativ. For Jira Service Managemen users and organizations using Slack or Microsoft Teams, Workativ enables you to deliver an AI-powered contextual chatbot with app workflow automation, to enable 24/7 conversational self-service for your employee support.

Fostering a Healthy Feedback Culture in Our Teams

Companies and leaders know why feedback is important for helping build relationships. But how can we make sure feedback is healthy and constructive? This VMUG features Maria Belen Senra and Karolina Zajac, Agile Coaches at King, who explore models and exercises you can use to build a culture of healthy feedback within your teams.

The Best End-to-End Encrypted Messaging Apps for Businesses & Governments

We never know how many more COVID variants are going to hit the people of this world and how long working from home or a remote location will continue to persist. Come what may, employers should be more inclined towards providing a productive work environment to their workforce to improve their company’s ROI. Additionally, they should look for encrypted messaging apps that offer E2EE and other secure access methods like multi-factor authentication to avoid security breaches on data.

Let's Volt In: How to Transition from an Individual to a Collaborative Mindset

Collaboration. It’s a buzzword in business that’s been given even more weight by the pandemic. Working together drives success, and it’s up to employers and team leaders to ensure that a culture of collaboration is fostered. The problem is that businesses often think they’ve created an environment that promotes teamwork. But in truth, they’ve only just scratched the surface.

Hacking PostgreSQL Internals to Deliver Push Notifications

PostgreSQL announced their latest version (PostgreSQL 14) on September 30th, which includes a bunch of features like pipeline API, gathering statistics on replication slots, query parallelism improvements and so on. While the origin of PostgreSQL can be traced back to 1986, it has been in active development for the past 30 years.

How to Make Your Business a Family-friendly Space for Your Customers?

As a business owner, you may have developed a great product that can solve your customers’ pain points and offer them the best value. However, the perfect product or excellent service is not enough if you don’t offer the best customer experience. Your goal should be to not only attract your customers, but also provide them with a remarkable experience. This will keep your customers happy and encourage repeat business.

Tools for Government messaging in 2022

Messaging apps have become part of human life. Individuals, families, and business organizations are looking at advanced messaging software to run their businesses and exchange communication on platforms. Does a normal messaging app work as a government messaging app? No, the normal and personal messaging apps are mostly limited to holding a large number of people and users on the platform, and their features are limited for government operations.

Top Productivity Tools for Remote Teams to Explore in 2022

Being productive when working remotely can be challenging if you are underprepared without the right tools to help your business. In addition, it would disrupt coordination between internal teams on tasks and cause problems around collaboration for meetings, performance reviews, and planning for existing and newer projects. Fortunately, with the fast-paced evolution of digital technology, there are multiple remote working tools for you and your teams to explore.

Tips to Improve Customer Retention of your Online Store

It is common knowledge in the eCommerce market that the cost of acquiring a customer exceeds the cost of retaining one. Customer retention is of the most important variables that formulate the user base of your store, and thus, it shouldn’t be taken lightly. Getting your customer retention rate to go up simply means making sure your business excels in the digital market. But the main question is how to improve customer retention?

What is Asynchronous Collaboration? (Best Practices & Tools)

Remote work has been the norm since the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, employees experience burnout symptoms more often with the constant meetings and notifications that come with synchronous work. Fortunately, asynchronous collaboration makes it very easy to regulate your office hours and work according to employees’ capacity. You can practice effective asynchronous communication with your team to overcome time zone and distance barriers. But what exactly is async collaboration?

How To Make Virtual Meetings Fun and Interactive in 2022

Virtual meetings are essential for the smooth functioning of your businesses. But keeping your employees engaged throughout the meeting can be challenging. They may get restless if the meeting runs too long or if the discussion gets repetitive. However, there are some simple ways to transform your online meeting into fun virtual gatherings! In this article, we’ll give you some amazing tips on how to make virtual meetings fun and boost employee engagement in 2022.

The 4 most important DevOps metrics and how to use them

When you’re working towards SMART goals, you’ve got to be able to measure the impact your efforts are having. In fact, that’s what the M in SMART goals stands for. In Agile teams and DevOps, measuring performance is critical to quantifying the impact of your team’s work. And, without measuring how things are today, it will be impossible to know whether all our hard work will actually make any difference in the future.

How HubSpot uses Asana to drive team alignment and scale

When a company grows quickly, it’s hard for teams to stay aligned. In today’s remote work environment, people require an increasing number of technologies to do their jobs effectively, but often lack a central place to coordinate work. As a result, the average person spends 60% of their time on work that’s about work—like writing status updates and sitting through alignment meetings—rather than on the strategic work they were hired to do.

7 Surprisingly Affordable Tech Solutions Businesses can Leverage

Will your technology be able to keep up as your company expands? Is it possible to scale it up or down based on demand? Despite the fact that we are in the midst of a fast digital revolution, many businesses are failing to keep up, losing out to more agile competitors. With that in mind, below are 7 surprisingly affordable tech solutions that businesses can leverage.

Secure collaboration for cybersecurity teams

Imagine being a CISO, hauled into a boardroom, and asked: “Why is your team using a collaboration tool that isn’t even end-to-end encrypted?” Where would you go with that? via GIPHY While there’s a fair amount of truth that you “never get fired for buying ,” there is far more truth in “you definitely get fired for failing to take basic precautions that make getting breached far harder.” Although to be fair that doesn’t trip off the tongue.

How to Create Effective Internal Communications

Have you ever had writer’s block when you’re called upon to produce a new internal comms campaign? You’re not alone! The constant stream of company-wide updates, administrative messages, and employee engagement campaigns is enough for even the most seasoned internal communications professional to feel creatively burned out. Why is it then that some organizations can create consistently effective internal communications across their employee experience?

Which Departments You Should Outsource in Order to Maximize ROI?

Outsourcing is a technique for contracting out corporate processes to third-party companies that is effective and, when done correctly, can generate serious ROI. When used properly, it reduces the risks associated with various processes, resulting in a variety of advantages ranging from cost savings to increased competitive advantage and service enhancements. It can help your company improve its adaptability, agility and flexibility in response to the market's ever-changing conditions and problems.

Digital education: 10 benefits for universities and students

The world is growing more digital by the minute. Although digital transformation has impacted businesses the most, educational institutions also face an increased need for digital strategies. Ever since the world went completely digital due to the pandemic in 2020, digital education has become a priority for students, parents, teachers, and educational institutions alike.

11 Habits of Successful People You Can Take Over

Exactly like team collaboration tools can do wonders to your employees’ productivity and business efficiency; your daily habits have the power to improve your life. The habits, like most things in life, necessitate effort and determination. To realize your full potential, you must direct your path through daily habits that prepare you for success. A recent study found that it takes 18+ days to acquire a new habit. Are you ready to take on this journey with full force?

How We Use Internal Hackathons to Create New Product Features

An internal hackathon is an effective way to engage your employees in short-term collaborative events. It spurs innovation, increases employee engagement, explores new feature possibilities, imparts corporate culture, and builds teamwork and collaboration skills. By organizing internal hackathons in your company, your employees can challenge and compete to solve internal or customer problems—which can lead to real-life features in your product.

Add a team poll to any Rocket.Chat channel

Have you ever wished to measure your team's sentiments on a topic with a live poll? There is a free Rocket.Chat app for that! As many of you discovered already, you can easily use our poll app to perform basic polls. But most of you found the existing poll app rather limiting. We heard you! We’ve launched a new app - the Poll Plus app that can do much more than the old app on Rocket.Chat.

CIO Classified: How IT can lead the future of the employee experience

With technological innovation accelerating faster than ever—and the pandemic entering a new phase—CIOs have never faced more uncertainty and complexity. That’s why we’ve partnered with Caspian Studios to sponsor Season 3 of the CIO Classified podcast. CIO Classified is a podcast for CIOs, decision-makers, and technology leaders that want to push their business forward and stay on the cutting edge.

4 Digital Tools You Need to Successfully Run a Remote AI Company

Remote employees are generally more productive and pleased with their careers, according to studies, and remote companies can absolutely be tenable and sustainable long-term. Employing remote employees who utilize their home offices to conduct their daily activities saves companies money on office supplies, space, and computers.

Structuring virtual meetings that your busy clients will love

Virtual meetings are the new frontier. As a consultant, an agency, or a freelancer, you use them to conduct strategy sessions, workshops, or to present your work. How your clients experience these meetings makes all the difference. If you want to ensure productive meetings with your clients, especially now with so many remote work challenges, there are a few hurdles you need to overcome.

Increase team engagement and collaboration with video messaging, powered by Vimeo

As a leader or manager of a team, you’ve probably been asking yourself the same question over the past year: How can you inspire your team when you aren’t together? Without the spontaneous, in-person conversations that sprout in an office environment, many distributed and remote team leads have turned to video meetings. But replacing informal catch-ups and quick questions with 30-minute meetings takes up time, costing individuals 157 hours in productivity over the past year.

Multichannel vs. omnichannel customer service: what you must know

Multichannel vs. omnichannel is a well-known debate in the online business world. The terms are used for both customer support and marketing, but what do they mean? What's the difference? And which method is best to satisfy the needs of both the business and the customer? While the final decision is entirely yours, let us help you learn about these two ways of interacting with clients, how they are different, what companies choose said ways, and which way is considered the best.

How to Set Up a Job Board Website?

As it is common for the online community to use the internet to land in their next job, a whole new opportunity comes along. It is your perfect chance to develop and grow your business that connects the employers and the employees. How to Create an Online Job Board? This question strikes our minds, but we often fail to answer them correctly. This piece aims to make you understand the setup of the Job Board Website successfully.

How to Schedule a Teams Meeting in 2022 (Step-by-Step Guide)

Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) is a popular collaboration and video conferencing app designed for individuals, freelancers, small businesses as well as large corporations. You can use it to conduct virtual meetings instantly. All you need to do is click the ‘Meet Now’ button to get started. But what if you want to schedule your next business meeting to accommodate everyone’s schedule?

What is a supply and demand diagram and how to read one

A family tree diagram is a simple chart that helps you track and document your ancestry. It visualizes your lineage and traces relationships back to common ancestors. You can create a family tree that goes back to your ancestors, such as great grandparents or grandparents, or you can draw one to show your children and any grandchildren. Some family diagrams show both ancestors and descendants. The goal of this chart is to record the important people and events in your family’s history.

Remote Work Slowing Down Projects? Here's How to Get Developer Collaboration Back on Track

As we head into a new year, technical organizations are more likely than ever to have distributed workforces. While over half of the developers we surveyed for our Guide to Developer Productivity said remote work has helped them be more productive, they still stated that team distribution is a significant blocker to developer collaboration.

3 Types of User Communication APIs and When to Use Them

As modern applications have become increasingly feature-rich and performant, user expectations are at an all-time high. Failure to communicate key information or displaying out-of-date information frustrates users and causes a loss of trust. Think about the last time you ordered something online: if you didn’t receive your order confirmation within seconds, you probably began to worry that something went wrong. Users require product transparency for consistent use.

Top 4 Chatbots That Help Students These Days

A few years ago, nobody knew about such a thing as a chatbot. Today, most companies use it for different purposes, from information updates and client communications to sales promotion. We are now used to the fact that these pieces of AI software are the first to answer when we ask a question. A human assistant gets connected when the machine cannot handle the case. Okay, it all makes sense for sales and customer service. But how are these chatbots useful if we talk about education?

Powering co-creation for a new era: This is the Miro Way

Throughout time, humans have proven to be inherently creative problem solvers – driven to create, collaborate, and innovate to solve the challenges that face us. But, sometimes, the solutions can be hard to find, obscured by siloed thinking or stifled by technology and tools that restrict imagination or fall short at truly connecting people.

CIO Classified: Driving insurance into the digital future

With technological innovation accelerating faster than ever—and the pandemic entering a new phase—CIOs have never faced more uncertainty and complexity. That’s why we’ve partnered with Caspian Studios to sponsor Season 3 of the CIO Classified podcast. CIO Classified is a podcast for CIOs, decision-makers, and technology leaders that want to push their business forward and stay on the cutting edge.

On-Premise vs. Cloud: Key Differences, Pros, and Cons

I am quite sure after learning the terms On-Premise vs Cloud you must be reinvigorating about the knowledge you have, perhaps some of you have minimum knowledge about them which is likely enough to be involved in the very start of the conversation. If you are thinking IT companies should be worried about this topic and you ain’t since your domain differs, let me illuminate the fact that by this end of the blog you will realize both on-premise and cloud apply to every domain.

One of the Best Live Chat Software in 2022

Vision Helpdesk offers live chat software your business can utilize and take advantage of. If you want to understand why Vision Helpdesk offers one of the best live chat software, you should go through the points below. Before we deep dive understand what exactly is live chat software and its benefits?

Gig Economy: The End of Employment?

Change is human nature. Sometimes it’s powerful. At other times, subtle. Change can be painful, liberating, scary, exciting – or all of that, at once. Regardless of how we perceive it, change is inevitable. Humans have experienced it throughout our tiny blip of cosmic existence, before the invention of anything. 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic revolution transformed human societies from hunter gatherer tribes, into farming communities. Slowly, we became experts of the land.

Best Apps for Team Collaboration

Collaboration is essential to business success in the 21st century. However, there are very few good tools on the market that can help you manage team collaboration. With the rise of remote teams and freelance workers, business collaboration apps have become a necessity. Creating new ways for people to get their work done regardless of location is a profitable and worthwhile venture.

What are UML diagrams, and how can you use them?

If you have a background in coding, you’ll probably be familiar with UML diagrams. Why? Because typically, software developers use UML diagrams to create new systems. But in today’s world, they’re not limited to a single capacity. In fact, UML diagrams are used widely across different areas of business. So whether you’re a business manager or a software developer, an understanding of UML diagrams can go a long way.

Virtual Teams And Flexible Work Hours: Boon Or Bane?

Virtual teams and flexible work hours have been the saving grace in the face of covid-19 and its impact on how we function as a society. Richard Branson’s quote from 2013 comes to mind where he quipped that the office would become a thing of the past. Well, it surely has, at least for the time being. The IT and Ecommerce industries have the luxury of possessing the required tools to embrace a digital working environment.

Vision Helpdesk: Help Desk Software, Satellite Help Desk, ITSM Service Desk, and Live Chat Software.

Vision Helpdesk is a leading customer service software that serves all small, medium, and enterprise-level business with its 4 different products. 1) Help Desk Software - A ticketing software to manage customer support over various channels like Email, Web portal, VOIP, Live chat, API, Facebook, Twitter, and more. It comes with unique features like Help Desk Automation Workflow, Ticket billing, Task Management, Online Knowledge-base, Forums, Help Desk Gamification and more.