[In part I of this blog series we saw an overview of our DBaaS design. In this blog (part II) we discuss the automated MySQL primary failover design in some detail.] We use the hashicorp consul and a custom consul watcher service, along with the orchestrator service, to inject proxySQL route changes in the event of a MySQL primary failure in a shard. Consul cluster

In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about customer interactions, how to manage them, and how to perfect them. You’ll also find information like: By the end of the article, you’ll know everything you need to interact with customers and teach your teams how to master every customer interaction they have. Let’s get started.

‍Throughout the workweek or during the process of any project, even the best small teams can hit obstacles. Issues with miscommunications, unproductive meetings, too many emails, and not knowing what the other members of the team are doing can all work together to stall your team's productivity and efficiency. The term Team Efficiency refers to a team achieving maximum productivity with minimal wasted effort or expenses.

Picture the following scenario: you get your usual cup of coffee, are ready to start your workday, log into your team collaboration tool on your computer. Then you are immediately greeted by your colleague who sends you a cute kitty picture with a “good morning” message. What are the chances this is a hacker sneaking into your computer and stealing your data? Well, it turns out this is something very likely to happen if you don’t have a safe workspace for secure messaging.

Much like every other aspect of virtually running a business, technology has drastically changed customer service. There are constantly new channels for customers to reach out to businesses. An important addition to this growing list of channels is a customer service chatbot. In this blog, we talk about everything you need to know about a customer service chatbot.

Languages are complicated, and every language is complicated in different ways that can be hard to understand without learning every single one of them. Some languages form words from multiple characters while others have symbols that represent entire concepts. Some feature words without pluralization or gender and rely on context for that while others have two or even more genders for words. Some are very phonetic while others pronounce words seemingly at random (cough English, though cough).

Switching to new technology solutions is always challenging, especially when convincing people such as association board members to adopt the change. But with the right mindset, the transition can be effortless. When the software effectively patches the gaps in workflows, you can make things run much easier. Making a case for the implementation is just a matter of discussion that is supplemented with facts. Many business types and organizations can benefit equally from using board portal software.

If businesses were previously skeptical about the potential of chatbots in customer service, there is no longer any question about it. The pandemic has pushed businesses to mainstream AI and different types of chatbots for varied objectives. With evasive measures such as cost cuts, chatbots have not just helped businesses stay afloat but also garner the goodwill of customers and ROI.

“Customer needs serve as the ‘north star’ for most product leaders”, especially those who are always striving to leverage customer feedback to build the best products. An important part of this customer feedback naturally lands in support tools like Freshdesk, but your company actually has as many feedback channels as you have customer touchpoints and internal teams.

The conversation about how much we all dread meetings isn’t a new one. There are too many of them. Most of them are colossal wastes of time. Heck, one in three people admit that they’ve felt drowsy or even fallen asleep in a meeting. But, when that meeting is happening virtually and people are only dressed appropriately from the waist up? Well, it becomes even more challenging to keep participants engaged in the conversation.

When it comes to customer service scripts, practitioners are as divided as people are about pineapple on pizza. The benefits of using customer service scripts are manifold, but there are some serious downsides too, like sounding robotic or not displaying enough empathy. However, when used wisely, scripts can be very helpful to customer service representatives. In this blog, we cover everything you need to know about customer service scripts.

VCLB Ghent is a Belgian non-profit organization that serves pupils between the ages of 3 and 18 years old. Every two years, we offer students a free medical checkup. The organization also works with schools to support students that struggle with learning disabilities, behavioral problems, and other issues. As a multidisciplinary team, VCLB Ghent’s staff does contact tracing for schools in the event of an outbreak of a contagious disease, such as meningitis, hepatitis, or measles.

With the pandemic that rocked the world in 2020, a spotlight has been shone on healthcare systems and the challenges there are in running these institutions. Beyond the medical and research components, there are lots of supporting departments that are still needed to ensure hospitals and medical equipment are operating effectively.

Over the last 2 weeks the Teamwork Desk team have been gifting new features and enhancing current functionality to help you streamline your work and save you time. Here is an overview of the features released.

With the holiday season upon us, your customers and agents are probably taking some well-deserved time off. It might take a little extra planning to ensure your remaining support team can manage customer issues without any hassle. Thankfully, Freshdesk can help! Here are three features that we think you’ll find particularly helpful during the holidays.

OneDesk differentiates between tickets and tasks to help you better organize your work environment. Tickets and tasks can be made to behave virtually the same; whatever you can do with a task, you could also do with a ticket and vice-versa. They are both work items and have the same functionality. However, there is a best practice for using them in OneDesk.

Now the app fully supports RTL languages and, as first language using it, we’re introducing Arabic.

It does not matter if you are a tech-savvy young individual who cares about his privacy or a professional with a business that holds secrets of values, secure messaging has already become a no-brainer for everyone. We all are using Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Google Hangouts, and even Instagram. But are they all SSL encrypted ? Businesses in today’s world are facing unprecedented risks.

In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about customer onboarding. We’ll talk about: By the end of the article, you’ll be ready to start your customer onboarding process and ensure it stays as effective as possible. Let’s get started.

Australia’s largest footwear retailer uses Slack to provide faster customer resolution times and maintain a high customer satisfaction score

Every organization is unique. A customer service solution that works for one company may not work for another. Integrations help widen the scope of use cases that a customer service solution can handle, in addition to existing features. And Freshdesk has a Marketplace full of integration solutions to satisfy every customer need. Now let’s get a little more specific and ask a related question – what if your organization uses software that utilizes Microsoft SQL Server?

Cybersecurity has quickly become a top priority for many organizations this year. This difficult time has shown us that even the largest corporations are not immune to vicious cyberattacks. Many organizations suffered breaches and lapses in security as they struggled to find the right solutions for staying connected while protecting valuable and sensitive information in the early days of remote work.

I sometimes find myself wondering how we’ll remember 2020 when we reflect on it in the future. Will our dominant memories be anxiety and uncertainty over how long the pandemic would last? The grief of losing so many people to the virus? Or the frustrations of canceled plans and events?

In March of 2020, during the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, employees in just about every industry suddenly found themselves working remotely indefinitely. Telecommuting had long been seen as the future of work, but few could have predicted that this “brave new world” would have come along quite as soon as it did.

When they told us we would be working from home in March, we all thought it would be for a few days or maybe a few weeks. Tops. 2020 marked the end of a decade, and we had high hopes for how the year would fare. We know how that turned out. Despite adversity, it is amazing how we found ways to cope and strive forward. Above everything, that calls for a celebration—in a socially distanced manner, please!

Let’s be honest, we’d all appreciate a little less work during the holiday season. Luckily for you, with the right features in Freshdesk, you can easily reduce your workload and save a lot of time. Time you can spend singing Christmas carols and planning the perfect secret Santa gift! To help you get started, we’ve packaged our best agent productivity features in Christmas themes to help you get more done this holiday season.

If you’re running Mattermost self-managed editions, there are configuration options and features available to improve the Mattermost user experience. Here are our top ten recommendations to make your Mattermost end users happier and more productive. Your users will thank you! Mattermost gets massively better with every release, and upgrading only takes a few minutes.

There’s much excitement today as Element Matrix Services (EMS), our digital sovereign Matrix-hosting platform, is now providing hosting for a fully managed bridge for Telegram that supports both direct and group messaging.

In this article, we’ll go through the best 20 live chat software solutions for your company. We’ll rate them based on: We’ll also let you know the pros and cons of all tools so by the end of the article, you’ll know exactly which live chat tool you will require. Let’s get started.

With 2020 almost behind us, there are some exciting new additions for you to look forward to in Teamwork in 2021. Let’s take a look: Very soon you’ll see a brand new in-app Project Template Gallery where you can kick-off projects using ready-made templates, or create your own custom-built templates if you prefer. Here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect.

For the Courier Live on December 2nd, I teamed up with Nicolas Grenié, Developer Advocate at Typeform, to have some more #NoCode fun. This time, we learned how to use Courier and Typeform with Integromat, a no-code automation platform. We decided to put a twist on the classic Secret Santa gift exchange. People could enter the Secret Santa using a Typeform survey and receive a notification from Courier prompting them to record a short holiday greeting with VideoAsk.

At a conference in 1997, Steve Jobs famously said this in response to a provocative question from one of the audience members about the company’s strategy at the time: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around. “ Today, many companies have forgotten that the essence of running a business starts with the customer.

Mattermost v5.30 is generally available today; the release includes the following new features: Enterprise Edition All Editions

“Music is always fleeting. Bands break up, artists retire, sometimes with dignity and sometimes in disgrace. The string of reunions this past year has only shown that temporality of music.” Some get back together for the fans. Some because they “miss playing with the guys.”1 Whatever their reasons, we’ve all felt the excitement when our favorite band from the 80s or 90s [or whatever decade!] got back together, even if it was temporarily for a reunion tour.

Wow! Yesterday the EU published the Digital Markets Act, a legislative proposal seeking to protect the fundamental rights of users in the digital world. This proposal has the potential to be a major catalyst for the emergence of a unifying communications layer for the open web. Indeed the Digital Markets Act is pushing interoperability between messaging apps, which is a major win for consumers.

Considering leaving Slack’s silo for a more open and secure world? We hear you! Element Matrix Services (EMS), the high-performance Matrix hosting solution from Element, is releasing a new service to help organisations migrate from Slack to Element; the Slack Migration Wizard.

The COVID pandemic has pushed many companies to quickly digitize operations in order to support decentralized teams. Unfortunately, in the rush to provide these systems, many soon discovered that that ease of use, compatibility, and efficiency can come at a heavy cybersecurity cost.

The relationships with IT has historically been driven by top-down decisions about which technology teams can (or must) use. However, in this age of remote work, it’s crucial that employees have the technology they need to collaborate and execute from anywhere in the world. To discover what works in this new world of collaborative IT, we spoke to three experts at Distributed 2020: Chet Mandair, CIO of Guidewire; Gopi Parampalli, VP of IT at EA; and Keith Pemberton, Sr.

We’ve all been there. You’ve prepared for an amazing meeting with Miro. The ice-breaker was selectively chosen to get everyone engaged from the start. Each frame was created with painstaking attention. The breakouts organized for maximum collaboration. The board is a work of art fit for a Miroverse template. As you kick things off, you get a chat message asking for the link to the board. Another asking for access because they can view but not edit.

One of the most important things to understand about a digital transformation is that ultimately, you’re talking about exactly that: a transformation from where you are today to where you hope to be tomorrow. In order to get to that point, companies have to be willing to change. Not just for the sake of it, but because it makes the most sense at this particular moment given everything that you’ve set yourself up to accomplish.

TL;DR – Get started with Mattermost on Azure using the Mattermost on AKS quickstart from the Azure CNAB Quickstart Library. The quickstart provides a fast and simple way to get running with Mattermost, without the need to learn or install any new tooling. By using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), the infrastructure is fully managed for you, and the quickstart handles configuring networking and SSL certificates so you can instantly access the Mattermost application after installation.

Alan Duric is the co-founder and CTO/COO of Wire, a secure collaboration platform. He is an experienced entrepreneur with a strong background in real-time communications. He’s the co-founder and CTO of Telio Holding ASA that is listed on the Oslo stock exchange, and Camino Networks, which was acquired by Skype/eBay.

Raise your hand if you’re really looking forward to taking a few days off to relax and unwind. If you’re anything like us, you’re already anticipating closing your laptop for a few days, snoozing your notifications, and getting into deep relaxation mode. But as nice as it is to do all of those things, it can be stressful to think about the mountain of emails and notifications waiting for you when you get back. We’re here to tell you: there’s a better way!

This blog post is a part of Mattermost’s public disclosure of three serious vulnerabilities in Go’s encoding/xml related to tokenization round-trips. The public disclosure comes as a result of several months of work, including collaborating with the Go security team since August 2020 and with affected downstream project maintainers since earlier this month.

This article was originally writte by Morten Brogger, CEO at Wire, for Med-Tech Innovation 2020 saw companies across sectors forcibly thrown into digital change management. This ‘forced digitisation’ resulting from lockdowns throughout the world has dominated headlines for months. However, there’s another wave of digitisation afoot that hasn’t made as many headlines, though it is arguably more important - the digitisation of medicine.

There has never been so much talk about team collaboration software as nowadays. The world is witnessing a new working model and improving productivity while working remotely has become a priority for most companies. But among so many options, we noticed several teams looking for Slack alternatives. With this in mind, we decided to test the main team collaboration tools and help you make the most suitable choice for your company.

Australian knowledge workers give us a glimpse of the impact of technology in the workplace in 2020—and there’s no going back to the way it was before

If you want to design the perfect customer onboarding process, you need the right tools. In this article, we’ll show you the best customer onboarding software to help you gain loyal customers. We’ll compare the following: By the end of the article, you’ll know exactly which tools to use to design your customer onboarding system. Let’s get started.

This year has become the year of virtual meetings — where we all convene together to discuss business. An hour here, half an hour there. Sounds familiar, right? These meetings are a source of the occasional funny moment… “Oh wait, my microphone was still muted.” “I’m having connection problems.” (Sounding like a garbled, drive-through speaker.) “Please excuse my 5-year-old’s temper tantrum.”

In Part 1 of this series, we introduced ways that customer support can identify sales opportunities using ticket automation triggers in your TeamSupport B2B customer support solution. Ticket automation triggers allow you to set up multiple search parameters, identify certain keywords, and automatically take action, or multiple actions on a ticket, including sending alerts to specific team members when appropriate.

Infrastructure and IT are basic requirements for nearly all companies as we live in an increasingly distributed world. For companies that are trying to grow quickly, it can be difficult trying to hire for so many other key roles as well as build out their own IT department. This is where turning to a managed service provider can be a game-changer. By offloading infrastructure and IT strategies to another company, this frees a company up to focus on driving forward in their business goals.

This year, due to remote work and COVID-19, work holiday celebrations might look a little different than usual. Most companies can’t plan their traditional holiday party or organize holiday-themed in-person events. But just because you can’t connect in person doesn’t mean you can’t close the year with some team connection. For tips, we turned to our Professional Services and Customer Success teams.

Optimizing SQL queries is always fun—except when it isn’t. If you’re a MySQL veteran and have read the title, you already know where this is heading 😉. In that case, allow me to regale the uninitiated reader. This is the story of an (apparently) smart optimization to a SQL query that backfired spectacularly—and how we finally fixed it. It started off with a customer noticing that a SQL query was running slowly in their environment.

With regards to technology, one of the major mistakes that far too many business leaders make involves clinging to legacy applications purely out of a sense of familiarity. They think to themselves, “Why do I need to invest in something new?

It’s been a busy year for Element. At a glance, so far this year we’ve: As an open source project, we’ve always strived to default to transparency, working on features in the open with our vibrant open source community. Historically, most of this discussion has happened in our public repositories, like Element Web, or in rooms on Matrix. However, most of this discussion is quite granular.

The Australia-based technology company uses Slack channels, apps and automations to build a strong culture and efficient workflows.

Collaborating remotely has historically been a challenge — and now that so many more of us are home and interacting virtually, those challenges are more apparent than ever. Fortunately, Miro makes collaboration significantly more manageable. Simply put, collaboration is the act of working together to create something. It might be a website, a diagram of some kind, or a vision statement. The key is people coming together to work. But before Miro, there were other ways to collaborate online.

Gone are the days when customer support was just about resolving your customer’s issue. It has now become a key component of a brand’s overall customer experience and plays a vital role in differentiating it from the competition. 73% of customers fall in love with a brand and remain loyal because of friendly customer service reps, says a report by RightNow.

We’ve heard your feedback and are happy to announce that Mattermost will be introducing Collapsed Reply Threads in beta early next year! This feature is a top priority for our team and is the most voted feature request on our idea forum. Threads are core to the messaging experience in Mattermost. They allow users to organize conversations about various topics within a channel.

The internet is changing all aspects of business communication, and with more of us than ever working remotely, it’s a change that is accelerating. Messaging—the ability to synchronously communicate with teams, coordinating work and workflows—is at the center of this new mode of day-to-day business life. The importance of messaging tools—like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Mattermost—is well-known to those who have already made this shift.

Here at TeamSupport we talk a lot about tools you can use to gauge customer sentiment and measure the overall health of the relationship you have with each of your customers. Why is this important? Because of the high-value nature of B2B (business-to-business) customers, missing the signs that one may be unhappy or at risk of leaving can prove costly.

Like proud parents, we’re delighted to announce that Gitter now has true native connectivity with Matrix. It’s only been two months since Gitter joined Element, so already going native is pretty quick work. Matrix users now appear in Gitter like any other user, although with their Matrix ID and a Matrix flair (icon) next to their username. Likewise, Gitter users now appear as native within Matrix, but with their Gitter username, display name and avatar.

It’s the most wonderful time of the month: and by that we mean release time – Rocket.Chat 3.9 is here! To make sure you don’t miss out on anything, we listed the most important features and improvements of our newest version below. If you wish to view the original and full list, click here!

“Culture forms the bedrock of everything we do at Freshworks.” – Suman Gopalan, CHRO Freshworks When the pandemic broke out in March 2020, at Freshworks we were apprehensive about a lot of things, particularly about how we were going to collaborate across teams in different locations and get things done. Fast forward to September, we are quite proud of how far we have come, and of all the things we have been able to achieve.

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about why it’s important to make decisions that can positively impact your customer support department swiftly, and what the consequences are if you don’t. Even a big decision like changing your B2B customer support system can move quickly if you know where to start and how to evaluate the right solution providers.

If you were to survey the most productive teams, you’d find a common ingredient – efficient communication. That explains the rise of team collaboration tools in 2020 and mega deals happening in the industry, such as Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack. However, right after heavily adopting tools like Slack, companies might notice the downsides of such tools. We aren’t just talking about fearing that Slack will hand over your data to Salesforce.

Elsevier Technologies is a global information analytics business that helps scientists and clinicians to find new answers, reshape human knowledge, and tackle the most urgent social crises. For 140 years, they have partnered with the research world to curate and verify scientific knowledge. As one of the world’s foremost providers of scientific, technical, and medical information, Elsevier publishes more than 470,000 articles annually in over 2,500 journals.

The way we live and work has changed significantly in the last year. One aspect of our work lives that has taken a hit is the way we collaborate with our colleagues and clients. The process of reviewing content and providing feedback may have been done face-to-face in the past, but this won’t be possible in the near future.

Combination of no. 1 CRM platform with the most innovative enterprise communications platform creates the operating system for the new way to work

In early March of 2020 during the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, countless workers suddenly found themselves working remotely — some for the very first time. Businesses needed to quickly adapt to this uncertain “new normal” we were all a part of and for many, telework became an ideal “stop-gap” to continue operations in a way that bought time until everyone could return to the office again.

We released Zulip Server 3.3 today! This is a bug fix release, containing a few cherry-picked changes since Zulip Server 3.2.

In business and in life, making a decision is easy when you’re working with a true partner and together can weigh all the factors involved towards making the right decision. In a specific example, the same can be said when it comes to making decisions that impact your B2B customer support teams’ success. As a customer support leader, you have to make a million decisions a day, and many, if not most of them, involve helping to solve customer issues.