You've put in the work to build an excellent call center. You've hired for the right skills, given everyone the best possible training, started tracking your performance, and you've even created a wonderful workplace where your agents can work and collaborate. Then 2020 happened. The COVID-19 pandemic closed offices and sent employees home. As the days away from the office added up, returning to "business as usual" in your call center anytime soon seemed less and less likely.

Change management is a discipline that guides organizational improvement. It results in a permanent change as a result of observable shifts in behavior. It ensures that your organization learns and improves in a thorough, orderly and sustainable manner. Successful improvement projects require that individuals and groups are aligned, that they share a common vision, that they know how they will define success, and have a path to achieve it. Change management has three aspects.

The debate about the effects of the recent global pandemic and lockdown is ongoing. Experiences differ, but at the end of the day, we’re still all in the same boat – trying to navigate the new remote work reality. To understand how these events have impacted the industry and our clients, we ran a Work From Anywhere Survey. The results are in, and we’re ready to share the findings with you.

Since Shape Up came out, many people asked some version of this question: I understand you make bets six weeks at a time. But how do you plan in the longer term? Don’t you have some kind of a roadmap? The short answer is: no. We don’t have roadmaps. We think about what to do at the timescale larger than single bets, but we do it in a different way. No matter how you try to hedge it, a roadmap communicates a plan—a series of commitments—to other people.

Help your team thrive – win or lose.

If you’ve been collaborating with coworkers remotely, you’re likely familiar with project management systems centered around Kanban boards. After all, they’re one of the most efficient ways to organize your workflow. It’s the sheer efficiency that drove Chanty to develop its own native Kanban feature, but we can talk about that later.

It’s easy to think the hard work ends once you’ve landed a customer. In reality, the struggle to win your clients’ hearts is only just beginning. After you make a sale, your business needs to keep showing the customer that your product is valuable. Whether you succeed or not comes down to the team you have promoting your products and growing the customer relationship. That’s where a customer success manager comes in.

“There is only one boss. The Customer.” – Sam Walton Customer focus is not a buzzword that companies throw around to stay relevant in today’s hyper-competitive market. It is a lifetime promise to your customers. It may sound very simple but it involves modifications to your business strategy that places more importance on caring for your customers than simply outperforming your competitors.

Their answers will show you how to keep your top performers happy over the long haul.

Last week, we shared an introduction on how to use incoming webhooks to integrate with Mattermost. Here’s an example of how to use them in action.