If you manage a Contact Center and work fully remote or hybrid, then you will have already learned that the typical setup of an in-person Contact Center just won’t cut it anymore. The biggest challenge facing most remote teams is communication, you don’t have everyone in the same room or even on the same time zone. When it comes to managing, motivating and monitoring a distributed Customer Support team, adopting a remote-first approach to communication is crucial.

Building community within teams has many perks. It enhances communication, knowledge sharing, productivity, and overall employee well being. This is particularly true for customer support teams, where fast paced environments, conflict resolution, and customer engagement shape day to day operations.

Discover the pros and cons of five top customer support tools. Learn how to optimize their performance by pairing them with an activity monitoring solution like Insightful, and deliver exceptional customer support.

For customer support teams, real time data can be a total game changer, as our recent post outlined. Unlike periodic reports Zendesk Explore, or business intelligence tools, real time dashboards have the power to let your team take meaningful, timely action on data that’s seconds or minutes old, rather than days or even weeks old. This can be transformative, speeding up response times, motivating your agents, improving service levels, and reducing day-to-day workload for managers.

Are there times when you feel like your Customer Service team is under appreciated for the work you do? Perhaps your team members have spoken openly about not getting the credit they deserve. Sadly, it’s not uncommon for Customer Service teams to feel like they’re working extremely hard without getting the same recognition that others parts of the business do. *Cough cough* Sales. *Cough cough* Marketing. *Cough*. On one level, you could write it off as paranoia.

As a Customer Support leader you know that reporting on your team's KPIs is a crucial part of maintaining excellent standards in customer service. For many Support teams, reporting usually takes the form of a weekly or monthly update, which helps you reflect on what is and isn't working, so you can focus your efforts in the future. But should your reporting go one step further? Should you also be utilizing the power of real-time data?

Having spoken one-to-one with what must be hundreds of Geckoboard customers over the years, it's safe to say; when it comes to aligning a team around KPIs - especially when it’s their first time doing this - building dashboards is often the easy part. How you and your team use them day-to-day; that’s often where things can become unstuck.

Jump to... What are performance snapshots? Four performance snapshot examples How to automate performance snapshots with Geckoboard It’s often challenging to keep agents and stakeholders in the loop with what’s happening in your Zendesk account.

For most Customer Support teams, keeping tabs on your Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is a huge priority. However, if you're using Zendesk, you might find that their standard reporting tools like Zendesk Explore don't always make it easy to see which tickets are about to breach their SLA, or how you are performing against your SLA targets in general.

Zendesk captures a ton of data about your customers and the support experience you provide. However, since Zendesk’s reporting tool (Zendesk Explore) is its own ecosystem, some organizations like to connect Zendesk to Power BI so they can combine Zendesk data with data from across their organization. If you use both tools, integrating Zendesk and Power BI is a solid plan for turning raw customer support data into actionable insights.