The all-new Freshworks Marketplace is in full swing and in case you haven’t had a look at it yet, now would be the perfect time to check it out. Over the past month, we have been steadily adding more and more intuitive and easy-to-use apps to the Freshdesk Marketplace. From an app that drastically reduces the number of tickets you encounter to an app that helps you get up to date on the latest data protection and privacy protocol, we have you covered.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has amazing potential to drive customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is a huge priority for most businesses. It’s one of the key facets of customer retention, as it reduces customer churn. Reducing churn is desirable since it typically costs four times more to gain a new customer than to keep hold of an existing customer. You also have a 70% probability of making a sale to an existing customer, versus 20% to a new customer.

Customers expect a personalized experience from your company. And when they don’t receive it, roughly 71% of customers1 will express frustration with your business. So how do you create personalized offers that wow your customers and lead to improved customer loyalty and greater sales? By tapping into powerful customer service analytics. Advanced analytics allow you to gather more valuable customer information.

Advancements in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) have revolutionized the business sector. Automation allows for concise, timely, and accurate service, which is in demand from a society accustomed to instant gratification. The predictive power of artificial intelligence allows businesses to improve upon their service. The end result is a fast, reliable, and effective customer service department, powered by AI and backed up by human agents.

Many companies focus on customer-facing features and tools when selecting a helpdesk platform for their customer support team. There are good reasons for this, particularly when you need to build extensive options for customizing a strong multi-channel or omnichannel program.

Customer support teams are built on the basis of collaboration — we are the connectors between our customers and our team members and yet oftentimes support can feel segregated from the rest of the company. This feeling can have many causes: the usual perception of the team as a “cost center”, lack of understanding of the nature of the work that support does and, worst of all, the lack of connection and collaboration within the support team itself.

The digitally conscious customer of today needs immediate responses. A key factor in staying ahead of the competition is the ability to provide proactive customer support to your customers. Live chat support came to the rescue and enabled agents to respond to customers as swiftly as they could. But this was not good enough. It is almost impossible for live agents to be available all the time for the omnipresent customer.

Helpdesks are one of the most integral tools for delivering a better support experience for your customers due to their ability to organize and streamline communication. But that’s not the only factor which makes them important. They also reflect the brand and values of your company. Today, users look for personalized customer experiences.

When you are looking to build a community around your brand, you often ask yourself — what’s wrong with letting things run the way they are, right? Wrong! You can’t just let things run the way they are and expect your brand to become a hit. You need to constantly work towards building your brand’s authority and image. Building a community is one of the best ways to create a strong brand identity.

Chatbots are going head-to-head with human customer service. They can help you reduce customer service costs by up to 30%1 in some cases. But this certainly doesn’t mean that they are indispensable or so crucial, that they will make human interactions redundant. As a matter of fact, many consumers say that they actually prefer humans over bots.

Providing great customer service is the watershed between the success and failure of an organization. Delivering quality customer service involves a number of factors like maintaining a low first response time and having a vast self-service portal among others.

It’s been said that customer service is the new sales, and when it comes to upselling and customer retention this makes absolute sense. Your customer service officers are in contact with your customers every single day. They need to know the most frequently asked questions, the historical information of the customer, and the best upgrades they can offer to customers.

Omnichannel is the latest buzzword. Everywhere you turn, people are talking about it, with good reason. Today’s customers are present on multiple channels, and one of the best ways to stay relevant to them is to be available on all of these channels. To handle the volume of this ask, businesses are now taking an omnichannel approach to different functions such as marketing, customer service, sales, etc.