Ask any business leader, and they’ll tell you that yes, of course, they want loyal customers. But the path from prospect to loyal customer is not a straight line. In fact, it’s fraught with twists and turns, and one wrong move could cause people—even repeat customers—to wander in another direction.

If you asked someone 30 years ago what customer relationship management (CRM) meant, you’d get a very different answer than if you asked that question today. Back then, says Jon Aniano, vice president of product at Zendesk, CRM was a process for tracking sales. It was simply a way for your sales team to get visibility into their sales pipeline and understand how the business might be doing over the next quarter, next month, next year.

Congrats — you have a product or service that people appreciate enough to pay for. But your offering, even if it’s the very best, is not enough to guarantee that your customers are going to keep on being your customers. In order to cultivate customer loyalty, an essential component of your success, you have to also cultivate solid relationships with your customers. A huge part of any relationship, of course, is communication.

Being confined in our homes has been an unfortunate reality for most of us these past few weeks. But why despair when you have apps that help you keep abreast of ticket status regardless of whether you have access to the internet or not, provide remote support to your customers at the touch of a button, and answer calls without disrupting your work.

With scattered teams across different locations becoming the new normal, project management tools are becoming essential for remote work. At Zoho Projects, we’re always looking for ways to simplify your project management experience. Et voilà! We’ve upgraded and refurbished our Gantt chart feature to include more capabilities, making it easier than ever to work with it. Here’s what you can do with our new Gantt interface.

At OneDesk we continue to work hard to bring new features to the OneDesk platform. We have many more updates planned, so keep your suggestions coming. This post will give you an overview of the features of this new release, but over the next couple of weeks we will be writing more in-depth articles on each of the major new features. So without further ado, here are the big new things in the March 2020 release of OneDesk.

Due to COVID-19, companies have found themselves in the middle of the world’s largest work-from-home experiment. Many hail remote work as a blessing, allowing employees to continue working while practicing social distancing during this uncertain time. Of course, even before coronavirus grabbed our attention, many companies were already adapting various telecommuting and remote work policies.

The past several weeks have been incredibly challenging, in so many ways. It’s been a tough transition, but I’m blown away by everyone’s ability to unite, lean in, and help everyone around them. CEO at Miro As more people are getting used to remote work, a lot of questions are coming up: How to bring teams together when there’s no physical office? How to make sure people feel productive and supported?

The world is going through a lot right now, with the current outbreak of the coronavirus. Lots of things changed in recent weeks, and most prominently, a lot of companies switched to working remotely. While remote work is far from a novelty, many companies are now giving it a go for the first time just now.

Work from home has us feeling isolated and stir-crazy. We hope you can nerd out and lose yourself in this month’s integration bonanza.