Check out these great new apps. They’ll help you make the most of Zendesk and provide a great experience for your customers.

Most companies now understand that customers demand service that is personalized, convenient, and efficient—and that ignoring those expectations imperils the bottom line. However, while focusing on the needs of external customers makes sound business sense, creating a rich employee experience can be just as important to a company’s long-term success.

Deciding whether or not to use or deploy a chatbot for your brand requires understanding each of the drawbacks and benefits of this new technology. It can be a tough decision to make. There are always new and shiny trends popping up every year in the customer service industry. You might be getting inundated with sales emails from companies promising to reduce your cost of service, increase your customer loyalty and differentiate your customer’s experience.

Time is everything these days. A photocopy shop in NYC has a sign on the counter: “The difficult we do right away; the impossible takes a little longer.” Taking your customer service online, using modern, cloud-based support software, brings the joke to reality: you can now offer customers a level of convenience and speed that is not possible without modern online customer service tools. This is the digital transformation many companies are making.

CIOs and other IT leaders have their work cut out for them—it’s not easy to strike a balance between maximizing the value of existing technology, minimizing costs, and investing in strategic tools for the future of the business. As companies compete for brand loyalty and invest more in providing better customer experiences, there’s a greater emphasis on IT leaders to manage the customer data siloed across numerous applications, systems, and engagement channels.

Welcome to the first app round-up for 2019. As you kickstart your new year, here are some of the latest apps in the Freshdesk Marketplace which you could help you enrich the customer support process for you, your agents and your customers!

Customers make decisions based on how easy companies make it to transact with them. From pre-purchase questions through payment and delivery of goods, your customers expect a seamless purchasing experience. That means your company must meet them on the channels they prefer, as well as move with customers from channel to channel.

Visionaries in the field of artificial intelligence in customer service see radical changes on the horizon, with a tipping point lying just a few years in the future. And if the prognostications of these experts—Zendesk partners Rick Nucci of Guru, Mike Murchison of Ada, and Mikhail Naumov of DigitalGenius—come to pass, AI will upend how customer service teams work in ways that will have far-reaching ramifications for companies across the globe.