You decide to buy a phone. Do you go for the phone of your dreams even though it’s beyond your budget, or would you settle for a functional, but less-ostentatious one that fits into your budget? Do you wait for special offers so you can avail a discount, or get the device on credit? These are the kind of behavioral indicators that decide the types of customers and what aspect of a product/service appeals to them.

Two of the biggest customer support technology trends for 2019 are bots and omnichannel support. Bots are picking up traction as more companies are using them to help customers find information, to route queries to the right department, and to carry out transactions that don’t require a human agent.

In the past, support was just answering phone calls coming into a call bank. The customer didn’t expect anything other than getting the answer to their question, and as long as they did, they were satisfied. However, as support has grown more prolific, the bar for customer loyalty has become higher as well. Being able to measure and understand the quality of your support responses has also become more important.

Welcome to our monthly round-up, where we share with you some of the latest additions to the Freshdesk Marketplace. This month, we’re happy to announce that we now have 700+ apps on the Freshworks Marketplace across three products – Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshsales. There are more exciting updates coming your way, but let us start off by looking at the new apps that have entered the marketplace!

Every day, customers are comparing you to the best customer experiences they have, even if that’s Amazon and you’re a time-honored regional banking institution that has never shipped a book or a case of cereal in its 150-year history. Not fair but true all the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re good; you have to improve. No longer are most people willing to carve out time in their day for a trip to a brick-and-mortar trip just to do a simple transaction.

Learn about some great news app to help improve and extend your Zendesk experience.

Your new gadget didn’t arrive this morning from that big online retailer as promised, and you need to contact them. Where do you go first: a phone call? your laptop? Maybe less likely, text them? Ping them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram?

Customers shouldn’t need to know how your customer support channels work to get help. They don’t need to know that Twitter feeds into your help desk and that your chat channel offers self-service solutions using a friendly chatbot. Customers, in other words, aren’t interested in your omnichannel solutions. What customers need is to be able to get help easily, when they want it.

Landing new customers is a hell of a lot of work for B2B (business-to-business) software companies. Even the easy deals require extensive brand awareness efforts, targeted marketing, testimonials, sales conversations, proposals, and so much more. If there’s so much effort put in to acquiring a customer, then why do so many businesses stop caring once the deal is signed?