This year, the holiday season reminded us we have a healthy appetite, not just for food, but also for additions to the Zendesk Apps Marketplace. This month we added 14 new apps and integrations to the general marketplace and we hope you saved room for them.

With just a few hours left for the decade to end, you might be pondering over some of the biggest decisions you’ve had to make in the past 10 years. Whether you nailed those decisions or not, the following 10 Marketplace apps will surely set you on the path to success with your customers and agents alike.

Artificial intelligence has revolutionized customer support all over the world. Thanks to artificial intelligence, businesses have reaped the benefits of smart voice agents, instant call routing, automated email responses, and more. But with the continued popularity of social media as a channel of customer support, it only makes sense to use AI to optimize your support strategy. Here are three ways to reap the benefits of AI and automation in your social customer support –

Every business has to serve its customers – that is the basis on which a successful business runs. But it is also true that businesses have to serve their employees. If a company takes from their employees and gives nothing back, it’s going to leave behind a staff of embittered angry individuals with a sky-high turnover rate.

Better analysis on how to shape the business outcomes. Did you know the UK government plans to invest 17.3 million pounds for a university research on Artificial Intelligence (AI)? This action may boomerang 654 Billion pounds back into the country’s economy. That’s the potential grandeur of applying AI in different fields and industries of the world today! The UK government seems to have made the right move and at an opportune time too. AI is the intelligence exhibited by machines.

Customer service is constantly evolving, and the best customer service representatives (CSRs) are able to adjust their skillset to keep up. With these well-developed and specialized skill sets, these professionals are attractive to even the world’s largest tech companies. Here’s a look at the customer service representative skills you’ll need to get these companies’ attention.

The life of a support agent is no simple job. Each day they face a ton of queries varying from ‘how-to’ questions that only need a canned response, to complicated issues that require to be sorted out with the help of different teams. The complexity and volume of queries notwithstanding, customers are increasingly expecting immediate fixes to their problems, so much so that 53% of customers expect brands to reply to their queries within an hour of contact.

Hey, Can I have your undivided attention for a minute? Thank you! There is a question I need you to answer: ‘What is the average number of emails that hit your inbox every day?’ Pause for a couple of minutes and see if you can estimate how noisy and crowded modern inboxes can be. No idea? Let me help. One Hundred and Twenty-One. That’s the number of Emails an average office worker receives per day, in 2019.

We’ve all been there – a recent purchase arrived late, you got something completely different than what you ordered, or it came damaged. You’re not happy, and rightly so – you just spent some hard-earned cash on that new product. Time to go to the computer, write a frustration-fueled email and give them a piece of your mind – you’ll never shop from them again!