Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

April 2023

4 Ways Ticket Deflection and Routing Helps Customer Service Teams Maximize Efficiency

Even a fantastic customer service team can be plagued by poor ticket deflection and routing. Your stellar agents may be equipped to answer many customer questions, but if they need to sift through dozens of issues that range from simple inquiries to complex matters, then they aren’t maximizing the ways in which they can help customers. This is where ticket deflection and routing comes in: to maximize the time and effort of your customer service agents.

How to make the most of distributed product planning

Whether you call it program increment (PI) planning, quarterly planning for product teams, or even big room planning, the reality is the same: These sessions are complex undertakings, even more so in our current hybrid reality. Every 8-12 weeks, dozens, hundreds, or — in some cases — thousands of product team members meet to to align on a shared vision, pinpoint cross-team dependencies, discuss features, and, ultimately, plan their product roadmap.

Streamline Your Success: 13 Essential Organizational Tools for Maximum Efficiency

Organizational tools have become essential tools for all types of industries. They are capacitated to become your virtual assistant and sort all the tasks ranging from trivial to critical. The accentuating fact is the quality of your employed organizational tool will determine the efficiency of your organization.

Message limits, email open tracking, SendGrid import

We are excited to introduce Guard Rails, now in open beta for Courier, a feature that allows you to set upper limits on the number of messages sent per time period. Courier business plan customers can configure these limits globally, or per user, or per user per subscription topic. Exclusions for certain subscription topics can also be set up, ensuring essential messages are always delivered.

Relay Bot Demo | Accelerator Apps | Slack

Deliver personalized messaging at scale within Slack using our Relay Bot. Team members need to deliver targeted information to multiple channels/people at once. Without an automated delivery system this task is either too large to accomplish resulting in missed opportunities or tedious and time-consuming impacting productivity and reducing resources.

Incident Bot Demo | Accelerator Apps | Slack

Reduce incident time-to-resolution by automatically alerting and connecting responders, subject-matter experts and impacted parties. With Incident Bot, you can assign user groups and product specialists to act for a given customer support issue. Individual users and customers (or automated alerts) can submit issue reports for admin review to kick off the resolution process. Share reports across multiple org units and workspaces.

Basecamp for Event Planners | Basecamp Office Hours

In this Basecamp Office Hours session (recorded live on April 27, 2023), Ashley, Laura and Kimberly from the Basecamp Customer Success team demonstrate how Basecamp can effectively be used to plan events. Kimberly, a former wedding planner and event designer, walks through an actual event planning set up in Basecamp. The team demos the Basecamp project management software, shares best practices, and answers customer questions live.

Why psychological safety is key to fostering creativity in teams

Creativity can be scary. Team members worry about being judged for an idea that is too out there, or they might be nervous about trying and failing. This temptation to stick with tried-and-true approaches is kryptonite for creative thinking — and it’s not just in your head. In fact, 85% of CEOs believe fear stands in the way of their company’s ability to innovate. But why?

Real-time chat: definition, features, and use cases in 2023

Digital communication today has evolved to connect people from across the globe with each other in an instant. One of the most popular ways to communicate digitally is via real-time chat. This efficient mode of communication is used for personal communication, but also for business one. Organizations use real-time chat solutions to connect their distributed teams and to assist their customers.

10 Time Wasters at Work and Quick Fixes

We’ve all been there. Sitting at our desks, staring at our computer screens, trying to get some work done but finding ourselves distracted by endless time wasters. Whether it’s checking social media, reading random articles, or just staring blankly into space, there are countless ways to waste time at work.

14 game-changing benefits of employee communication apps

As digital transformation revolutionizes the business world, employee communication apps have become a game-changing tool for organizations. These apps have become increasingly popular across industries by facilitating seamless internal communication and enhancing the employee experience.

Basecamp for Marketing Teams | Basecamp Office Hours

In this Basecamp Office Hours session (recorded live on April 6, 2023), Ashley, Laura and Kimberly from the Basecamp Customer Success team are joined by Basecamp's Head of Marketing Glenn Pajarito. During this one-hour session, the team shows how Basecamp can be set up for use by marketing teams while they demo the Basecamp project management software, share best practices, and answer customer questions live.

Basecamp for Web Designers | Basecamp Office Hours

In this Basecamp Office Hours session (recorded live on April 12, 2023), Ashley, Laura and Kimberly from the Basecamp Customer Success team are joined by Basecamp Principal Designer Jason Zimdars. During this one-hour session, the team shows how Basecamp can be set up for use by web design teams while they demo the Basecamp project management software, share best practices, and answer customer questions live.

12 best online chat rooms in 2023

Chat rooms offer a more flexible way of communication wherein people can easily use any device to communicate on a single platform. People have enjoyed connecting with others online for various purposes for many years now through some of the best online chat rooms available at present. Additionally, with technological advancements, these chat rooms have become better and better over time.

Employee onboarding survey questions every company should consider

The shift towards remote work has emphasized the need for transparent processes, clear communication, and thorough documentation. This has led companies to re-evaluate their onboarding programs—to ensure they convey a genuine portrayal of company culture and build trust with new hires.

Impossible Alone: Charting a new era of teamwork

Ever had an idea that seems impossible to realize? Or unexpected obstacles that seem too big to overcome? That’s where teamwork comes in. From space travel and climate change to bugs in code and remote equipment requests, no task is impossible with the right team, apps, and practices. Join co-founders Mike Cannon Brookes and Scott Farquhar to see how Atlassian can help your team achieve what’s impossible alone.

From hierarchies to circles: An evolution of work habits

A few years ago, Accenture Technology in the DACH region began revolutionizing the internal working model, roles, and habits within their Agile unit. Under this new operating model, five thousand team members now have more self-organization and enjoy a more flexible, modern work culture. This session captures the essence of the team’s learning journey, including ways of working, habits, and how they leverage Atlassian tools to steer their business.

END BSM NOW

Bad Service Management (BSM) is an affliction that has plagued enterprises. BSM flares up when development, operations, and business teams work in silos. The symptoms? Bloated budgets, irritable teammates, dizziness from complex setups, nausea from outdated interfaces, blurred vision, and in some cases, even death (of deployments that fail to scale). The best-known cure is to replace legacy ITSM. Discover the latest Jira Service Management advancements, and hear how other enterprises have joined the fight to end BSM now.

Automate Deputy HR Operations with Chatbot and Workflows

What is Workativ? Workativ is a FREE no-code SaaS platform for companies to quickly build, automate, and deploy conversational AI chatbots with app workflow automation out-of-the-box in less than 60 mins. No coding is required. Workativ differentiates itself by focusing on employee IT & HR support for digital and hybrid workplace transformation. Along with the chatbot, Workativ has a powerful app workflow automation engine and out-of-the-box automation marketplace with prebuilt bots and 600+ pre-built app workflows for the chatbot.

Service Desk Automation: Unlocking Cost Savings and Improved Efficiency

What is Workativ? Workativ is a FREE no-code SaaS platform for companies to quickly build, automate, and deploy conversational AI chatbots with app workflow automation out-of-the-box in less than 60 mins. No coding is required. Workativ differentiates itself by focusing on employee IT & HR support for digital and hybrid workplace transformation. Along with the chatbot, Workativ has a powerful app workflow automation engine and out-of-the-box automation marketplace with prebuilt bots and 600+ pre-built app workflows for the chatbot.

IDC on how to build trust and mitigate risk with a collaborative tech stack

This year, organizations will spend trillions of dollars to bring innovative products to market. However, most leaders are dissatisfied with current ways of working and their company’s ability to support such innovation. Adopting tools that help teams align against strategy, deliver on customer needs, and engage workers will be critical to competing in the modern market.

What's New: What we launched in April 2023

Small updates, big impact — that’s April’s new feature round-up in a nutshell. We hope they’ll make your Miro workflows that much more seamless, especially if your job is to build new products and you’re looking to collaborate, run sprints, or ship a feature much faster. Read on to see how you can integrate Miro’s newest features, from Private Mode to Card Panels, into your workflow.

Inbox message icons, JS client SDK, Datadog

We added the ability to customize the message icon for inbox messages. That means you can set a different icon for each type of notification that you send. To do this, Message Icons needs to be enabled in your brand’s in-app settings (they should be by default). Then you can add an icon to your notification template.

How leaders can turn obstacles into innovation

Times of crisis can trigger innovation—if leaders can guide the perception of a crisis, and if leaders understand how each team member responds to them. Study Abstract — Although a crisis provides room for creativity, organizations often suffer from creativity deficits in such a situation. Indeed, threat-rigidity theory suggests that an employee-experienced crisis may hinder employee creativity.

Communication Strategies in the Workplace: Tools and Resources for Doing it Right

A good communication strategy glues a business together. A bad communication strategy can pull it apart. An effective manager is always looking for the best mediums of communication for their business, but workplace communication isn’t just a matter of keeping in touch. Truly effective communication strategies mean understanding that your team consists of individuals with unique personalities and different communication styles in the workplace.

Want your distributed workforce to thrive? A new study reveals how leaders can make it possible.

Whether your distributed workforce engages in real-time or asynchronous work—or both—research points to three systems that support it all. Study abstract: Collaboration is critical to organizations and difficult when work is distributed. Prior research has indicated that when individuals are distributed, organizations respond by structuring their work to decrease reciprocal interdependence, reduce the complexity of tasks that individuals perform, or accept moderate inefficiencies.

Taking inventory of your intranet to enhance its capabilities

What is an intranet? It’s a powerful tool used within organizations to facilitate, support and improve internal communication and collaboration. But it goes well beyond that, and you’ll want to take inventory of your intranet’s capabilties to ensure its offering everything it can be!

How to Introduce Yourself During a Presentation?

Imagine this scenario: you are about to present to a group of people you've never met before. As you take the stage, all eyes are on you, and you feel a wave of nervousness wash over you. The first thing you need to do is introduce yourself, but how do you do it in a way that captures their attention and leaves a lasting impression? Introducing yourself during a presentation can be daunting, especially if you're not used to speaking in front of a large audience.

Mattermost Boards How-to: Sprint Planning

Mattermost Boards is an easy-to-use and lightweight tool to manage your backlog, plan your sprints, and so much more! Create fully customizable boards to track tasks and bugs. Boards are updated instantly as soon as any changes are made, so your teams can stay in sync with a single source of truth. For teams looking for a lightweight open source alternative to Jira, Azure DevOps, or Asana to manage Agile workflows, Boards is a great choice.

HP uses Miro to help hybrid teams collaborate and create sustainable behavioral change

HP Inc. (formerly Hewlett-Packard) provides products and services across a range of sectors worldwide. With over 80 years in the industry, HP inspires meaningful progress in climate action, human rights, and digital equity through its portfolio of personal systems, printers, and 3D printing solutions. HP continues to innovate and adapt its products to the changing work climate through sustainable tech and software to support hybrid work.

Fostering employee trust through authentic tone of voice

Most of us have a little bit of Etsy in our lives, and some a lot more than others. Who hasn’t spent a rainy afternoon on a laptop doing a deep dive into stained glass suncatchers, Chinese wallpaper, or antique custard dishes? Etsy’s an excellent platform to buy and sell stuff, but what makes it great?

Fostering employee trust - Interview with Katherine King, Etsy

In episode 37 of Simpplr’s Cohesion Podcast, Amanda speaks with Katherine King, Director of Employee Communications at Etsy. They discuss the spectrum of tone and voice, key business relationships that improve employee communications, and helping leaders develop empathetic messages. To stay in touch and learn more about Simpplr, please like this video and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

How to use (and improve) Slack for project management

As of this 2019 GP Bullhound report, Slack was one of the fastest-growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in history, reaching an annual average recurring revenue of $400 million in less than five years. Then the pandemic hit, and with that — well, you’ve probably seen the memes. Slack went from one of the leading business collaboration tools to a household name that remote workers everywhere rely on to stay connected to their teams.

Intch and Miro: How to Build an App Remotely

Imagine building a house with a fully remote team. It may seem impossible, but it’s not — as long as you have the right tools. The same goes for the app development process. And at Intch, we believe Miro is the essential piece that brings us all together to develop our AI-powered business networking app. Building our product is a cross-functional process that involves a diverse, globally-distributed team.

The UK's Online Safety Bill undermines everyone's safety

As a UK-headquartered company, we’re perhaps the most concerned of all the companies signing the open letter that urges the UK government to radically rethink the Online Safety Bill. As currently drafted the Bill forces messaging services to break their end-to-end encryption by implementing third party scanning of decrypted content, completely undermining the security that end-to-end encryption offers.

5 popular mind map types to help your creative thinking

HERE AT MIRO, WE ARE BUILDING the #1 visual collaboration platform to help you with any visualization task. One of the most effective ways to structure thoughts and organize the flow of ideas is to map them on a canvas. Thanks to recent updates, Miro now supports not only diagram mapping, but also automated mind map creation. Let’s have a look at some popular use cases and types of mind mapping that you can use to structure ideas with your distributed team.

How to Create an Automated SMS Notification System

All apps need a solid, automated notifications system. Whether it’s reminders, updates, or alerts, some notifications can be urgent and time-sensitive, in which case SMS is the most effective communication channel. Let’s take a moment to talk about what that means for you as a developer. You need to: Realistically, building this feature from scratch can be time-consuming and complicated.

What's New in Asana | April 2023

Welcome to the April edition of What’s New in Asana. First, apply multiple filters and sorts to help you quickly search for information within your project. Next, we’ve added more smart rules and widgets for integrations with Bynder, Notion, Confluence, and DocuSign so you can keep track of work across your tech stack. Finally, monitor key metrics at a glance in your portfolios. With custom field rollups, see the sum of custom fields across all projects, like budget, costs, and time. And like project Dashboards, create charts to get insights about the work within your portfolio.

Reset Password Notifications with Python and Auth0

Learn how to create secure password reset notifications using Python and Auth0. Attendees will gain hands-on experience integrating Auth0 into their Python applications and implementing password reset flows. Throughout the workshop, participants will learn how to use Auth0's APIs and features to handle user authentication and authorization, and will have the chance to test and deploy their code.

New Datadog integration for Courier notification logs and metrics

The ability to unify all notification metrics and logs across channels and providers into an easy-to-use dashboard is a core advantage of Courier’s notification infrastructure. However, with product notifications so critical to the entire application experience, it’s important to connect that data back to central cloud observability platforms that look across the entire stack.

Best On-Premise B2B Applications for Enterprise-Level Companies

In this digital era, undoubtedly, it is safe and secure to employ self-hosted or on-premise B2B applications instead of depending on SaaS applications. Since the former gives complete security to your data without relying on a third party, whereas the latter may be secure but less effective and efficient than on-premise applications. You may think that most businesses depend heavily on SaaS applications.

Asynchronous Work Report: What knowledge workers want and what's working

When you give something a name, you make it real in a new way. Knowledge workers are seeing this firsthand with asynchronous work (or “async”), which is when team members work on the same project or problem but at different times instead of synchronously. Suddenly, the term is everywhere — but asynchronous work is more than a buzzword. Not just a by-product of the shift to remote or hybrid, it’s about strategically making new ways of working work.

7 best open-source chat APIs for businesses

A reliable communication platform is imperative for businesses to communicate with customers and colleagues. Chat applications are becoming popular as they make collaboration easier and faster. Open-source chat APIs are a great way to integrate chat abilities into an existing application or deploy them stand-alone for live stream chat. In this blog, we have curated the best open-source chat API solutions for instant messaging and the benefits you can leverage from each.

A new study reveals how to solve perhaps the single biggest problem for work leaders

Ah, the “non-routine problem.” It’s arguably the single biggest type of problem one can run into at work. New research points to a solution. Research Summary — Solving non-routine problems—problems for which current organizational, recurrent action patterns do not offer a predetermined, effective solution—can be an important source of value creation.

Product strategy as a living document: The 4 most valuable components

Sixty percent of product managers (PMs) say that they want to learn more about how to build a product strategy, according to a 2022 Product Management Festival report. This is not surprising since a PM can drive more impact in their organization by being a strategic thinker. In fact, research by the Management Research Group suggests that behaviors associated with strategic thinking skills are: Product strategy is like a story a PM tells themselves, their team, and their stakeholders.

What is Webex: A Comprehensive Comparison of Webex and Chanty

We all know that with the growing number of remote jobs, there is an ever-increasing market demand for reliable and efficient meeting and conference tools. If you need help deciding between Chanty and Webex, we’ve got you covered! In this blog post, we’ll highlight the key features of these two platforms to assist you in determining which option will best meet your team’s collaboration needs.

Intranet decision time: Should you build or buy

Traditional intranets, which were little more than content repositories, are dead. Modern companies need an equally modern intranet that provides flexible options capable of engaging an increasingly hybrid workforce. But should you build or buy this technologically sophisticated center of operations? We have tips and criteria that will help you decide!

8 best patient chat apps for easy and secure communication

Technological advancement has revolutionized patient chat in recent years. Healthcare is not only a matter of proper medical advice these days. Patients want better service from their healthcare providers and solid medical guidance. This is why, presently, the industry is prioritizing fast, secure, and reliable digital healthcare communication to provide customer satisfaction to patients who want instant updates via patient messaging.

Craft.io Now Integrates with Miro and Axure

Craft.io is continually adding more workflow capabilities to our end-to-end product management platform. Recently, for example, we announced Craft.io integrations for design tools Figma, Adobe XD, and InVision. And now, you’ll find even more visual collaboration tools integrated into your Craft.io workspace — specifically Miro and the wireframing and prototyping app Axure.

Sneak peek I Audit conversations with Expanded Transcript Exports

This enhancement is aimed at enabling agents and admins to convert chat history into downloadable PDFs. As simple as it sounds. The main purpose is to cover security-centered organizations' needs as they deal with sensitive information and transactions, so they must have the ability to make conversations auditable.

What is Out of Band communications?

Out of Band communications is for classified discussion, business continuity and incident response. It should be used within the most security-conscious parts of the organization; from senior executive discussion to cybersecurity teams. The phrase refers to communicating outside of the usual communication system, such as a reserved channel or network.

Unlock Your Device with Your Face: 7 Best Facial Recognition Apps for Android and iOS [2023]

Facial Recognition Apps are slowly becoming the prevalent and essential biometric attendance method for corporate to small companies, thanks to their accuracy and highly regulated verification methods. Do you know that, four days after a new facial recognition system was tested, the Indian Police in New Delhi was able to locate up to 3,000 missing children? This modern facial recognition technology can only go so far regarding prowess.

Streamline your workflow with CourierJS: Our new client-side SDK

We are thrilled to announce the release of our first client-side SDK for Courier, written for JavaScript. This new addition expands our existing SDK offerings, which include Java, Python, Node, Go, Ruby, and PHP, and makes it even easier for developers to integrate Courier into their projects.

Mattermost Pro Tips: How to customize Mattermost notifications for optimal productivity

You’ve got a fresh cup of coffee on your desk, and you’re ready to dig into some focused work time. But before you can kick things off, you get a ping on your desktop. Then that little red number on your Mattermost desktop app crawls up and up and up. A question to answer on one thread, responses to read on another, a video to watch somewhere else… Before you know it, your coffee is cold, and you haven’t even started on the project you intended to work on.

The Changing Look of AGMs: Hybrid Meetings are Taking Over

Gathering diverse, international shareholders to meet traditionally involves travel time and a physical venue. The pandemic caused disruptions such as social distancing and travel restrictions that made it nearly impossible to run in-person AGMs. Many companies switched to virtual shareholder meetings in 2020 and 2021. The emergence of virtual AGMs, however, came with new meeting requirements that also changed the way companies engage with shareholders.

Infuse your presentation with the energy of a workshop

The word “workshop” sparks visions of creativity, collaboration, and energy — people rolling up their sleeves to build something great together. In contrast, “presentation” has completely different connotations, triggering groans and eyerolls as people imagine tired slide decks and endless droning.

Improving business outcomes through psychological safety - Interview with Will Leahy & Layla Kajer

This episode features an interview with Will Leahy, VP of People Development and Business Partners at Greenhouse; and Layla Kajer, Director of People Experience at Greenhouse. Will leads people development, focusing on optimizing performance, career growth, and driving culture. Layla spearheads people experience where she creates productive, connected, and empowering work environments for employees.

What is Workplace Chat and How to Choose the Right One for Your Business?

One of the secrets to a positive and healthy working environment is effective communication. With a happy, motivated, and strongly connected team, goals are easily achieved and projects move forward with less friction. Unfortunately, the reality today is that many modern workplaces experience poor communication. Misunderstandings, unclear requirements, and confusion with tasks are common in teams that lack harmony and proper ways of communication.