In today’s digital world, almost everyone knows about voice commands thanks to Google Assistant and iPhone Siri. It’s becoming more and more common for people to call a friend, open an app, or search for a café using voice commands. In addition to phone-based voice assistants, Amazon has introduced an exclusive product named Alexa that can play music, do online shopping, initiate payment transaction and make your home smart solely based on your voice commands.

Global AI spending is exploding. According to current trends, it will go from $2 billion in 2018 to over $7.3 billion in just the next four years1. Many publications have proclaimed it as the “next big thing” in the business world. They seem to believe that it’s poised to change the way companies interact with customers altogether. They’re less clear, though, on how businesses can actually use it. But today, one of the best uses of AI is customer service.

Are the support team, website and Freshdesk portal ready to handle the customer influx of the holiday season? That’s the question we ask ourselves every year before the peak period starts. During the holiday season, the incoming traffic may increase by 10 times, whereas ticket volumes can increase by up to 50%, making the life of your agents exhausting and stressful.

Are support agents happy with Freshdesk Mint? This was the most pressing question we had on our minds when we introduced Freshdesk Mint a year back. Over months, we spoke to our customers to gather feedback on what people liked and disliked. We were delighted to learn that the overall feedback for Freshdesk Mint was very positive. But we didn’t just stop with customer interviews. Using Heap, an analytics tool, we analyzed product adoption to learn from our success and our mistakes.

Customer support can easily become a huge money pit instead of a tool for building revenue, no matter the industry you’re in. But if you’re a SaaS company, you know just how crucial it can be to keep costs down. Especially if you’re just getting started and your customer base isn’t large enough to support your operational costs just yet.

You might be familiar with some of the changes Freshworks has gone through in the last year. We rebranded the company1, introduced new products, and gave Freshdesk a new look. Although these developments have been a delight to our customers, we’ll be honest, the journey didn’t start easy for one team in particular within the company. Our customer support team.

In this month’s roundup, we are excited to announce that the Freshworks Marketplace has hit 500 apps! That’s right, we now have 500 apps across Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshsales. You can view the entire gallery of Marketplace apps, here. For now, here’s a look at just a few of the apps that joined the Freshdesk Marketplace this month, keep in mind this is just the tip of the iceberg!

It would be easy to think the benefits of AI are massively overhyped. Every day there’s another article extolling the future of robots answering customer questions and reducing the need for customer support representatives. But you could be forgiven for thinking this is all hype. So far, results have been less than impressive.

In the world of e-commerce customer support, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by tickets. And it can be a nightmare. Too many tickets + not enough agents to answer them = complete support overload. On average, internal support teams receive 492 tickets each month. That’s more than one hundred tickets each week, or ~16 tickets each day. And that’s just the average. Your brand might be receiving a much higher number.

Measuring the productivity of the customer support team in terms of the overall company profits might seem like mission impossible. But it isn’t. In the long run, your customer support team makes a huge impact on marketing your products. You cannot deny that customers return only to those brands or companies that solve their issues faster.