Employee training and development is an important contributor to any company’s growth. Over the past few years, small and large businesses have started investing more and more in employee training. This is because effective employee training leads to numerous benefits. Some of these benefits can be increased employee retention, employee satisfaction, increased productivity, and ultimately better ROI for the businesses.

Remote work has become more popular in recent years, with 2020 speeding up the transition drastically. Further, thanks to the emergence of countless digitized platforms and online collaboration tools, it’s now easier than ever to manage a remote team. Working remotely has actually been found to increase productivity by up to 13%, and we can expect remote teams to become more and more common in the near future. Here are some of the reasons remote work gains ground every year.

This series that began with Part 1 on why it’s more important than ever to revisit how to keep customer support teams engaged with each other, continued with Part 2 where we dove into tips for enabling collaboration and engagement among support team members and between agent and customer, and introduced solution tools that enable the most efficient customer support in a remote environment in Part 3, now concludes with Part 4 where we review more solution tools to empower customer support teams.

We’re excited to announce the release of GitHub Plugin version 2.0, which adds some new features that increase productivity and reduce the need to context switch between Mattermost and GitHub. As usual, our open source community members have played a key role in developing all of these features and I’d like to say “Thank You!” for their help. Our GitHub plugin is one of the most popular integrations on Mattermost and we use it every day as part of our development process.

Chatbots are no longer a new technology in customer service. Customers are using them to get support across a variety of industries, whether they need help changing a hotel reservation, paying a bill, or finding the perfect lipstick color. Business use of chatbots and conversational AI is only going in one direction.

The problem of too many redundant meetings isn't anything new. It is a trap many teams fall into, even in the office. It’s the trap of copious no-agenda, purpose-less meetings – and lots of them. But did you know that we’re actually having more meetings since going remote? According to a recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the average meeting count has gone from 5.9 meetings to 6.9. Yikes. Being remote, however, is helping us master meetings in a new way.