It’s been yet another eventful month, with a number of new and interesting apps making their entry onto the Freshdesk Marketplace. Here’s a quick look at the new additions.

No matter what size your company is, big data can make a significant impact on your customer service. And better customer service leads to happier customers and increased sales. In fact, increasing your customer retention by just 5% can result in a 25% increase1 in profits. But the problem is that even many of the largest businesses around aren’t using their data effectively.

Customer service support is shifting dramatically, from a single channel model to an omnichannel one. Today 90% of customers expect to be able to move seamlessly across service channels, including mobile, chat, and online. But the problem is companies are still struggling to do this well. 61% of customers have not been able to easily switch from one channel to another when interacting with customer service.

Let’s face it, nobody enjoys dealing with ticket escalations. When a ticket is escalated, it means there’s a problem that your ground-level employees can’t solve. The customer will have to wait, rather impatiently, for a solution; and if it escalates beyond that, it indicates a systemic issue that will require your developers to pull all-nighters. It’s an unpleasant situation all around!

When you talk about your business’s customer experience, it’s easy to get caught up in the bigger picture of what you want to achieve. Meaning, it’s easy to just imagine the ideal experience you want your customers to have, but not actually focus on what will help you achieve this.

Every company has its own unique audience — and should have a unique approach to customer engagement to match. After all, when it comes to creating great customer experiences and achieving high levels of satisfaction, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that’s guaranteed to work for every brand.

Measuring and analyzing your customer support team’s performance can be challenging. The quality of an interaction between two people is subjective, and given that customer interactions are ultimately what make up the majority of a support team’s work, standard metrics like costs and returns aren’t often the best way to gauge and improve quality.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has been a hot topic within the customer support community recently and there are many good reasons for that. By using AI intelligently (no pun intended) support teams can be more efficient and effective, and create a better experience for customers, all without sacrificing quality.

Imagine the benefit your business could achieve if every customer interaction was intelligent? Artificially intelligent? Yes. The era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has dawned upon us. From personal assistants on our smartphones to bring the keyword at boardroom meetings, AI is now ubiquitous.. But, what makes AI a beeline for personalized customer support?

The internet landscape is changing. Evolution is occurring, much like it does in the animal world. Customers become more active and interested in new areas of the internet and continue to require help. Subsequently, forced by outside influences to adapt, support people also evolve and learn new software in order to better serve their customers. One of these new customer-first skillsets is the ability to use omnichannel software and methodology in order to provide a better experience to customers.

Asking for help should be easy. And fast. Faster than typing out emails. Faster than opening chat windows and typing out the problem. And faster than opening an app and searching for the solution. Can your customers ask for help easily? And how fast can you deliver? Till recently, it was difficult to furnish this instant voice support in a scalable, accessible way. Then voice bots came along.

Live-chat is a stellar way to improve customer service and support success for any business. And increasingly, chatbots are becoming a way to automate vital business interactions with potential leads and customers any time of the day, even when workers aren’t present. Typically, to fill live-chat spots, you will need more manual labor. More employees and increasing overhead.

Digital transformation is more than just optimizing your existing modus operandi with new technology and tools – it’s about creating a sweeping change in the way that you do business. As technology has become omnipresent in consumers’ day to day lives, the way they interact with businesses needs to change to keep up.

When it comes to customer support, there are two different variations that work in conjunction to form a well-functioning support system. They are proactive support and reactive support. Reactive support is undertaken in response to an outside request. When customers fill out a support ticket or send in a question, answering that in a complete manner is reactive support.