Welcome to yet another app round-up where we have put together some of the recently added Marketplace apps. We are on the road to reaching 800 apps across our three flagship products—Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshsales—by the end of this month. And very soon, you will be able to view and access Freshchat apps on the Marketplace. In the meantime, let’s take a look at the dozen-odd apps that have hit the Marketplace these past few weeks.

The year is halfway over, and we’ve been hard at work improving your experience with Projects. Say hello to an upgraded Zoho Projects that comes with new and enhanced features to give you a productivity boost. Read on to learn more! Lay it all out – Multiple layouts for projects

Last week we release the latest update to OneDesk. The big feature in this release is the Knowledgebase, and I have written a couple of articles covering it here and here. We also added a few smaller features which I would like to cover as well.

Every company dreams of amassing a huge fan base of intensely loyal customers, but true customer loyalty is hard to earn and doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and dedication. Many companies struggle to answer the question: What exactly does real customer loyalty look like? And the next logical question is: How can a business build customer loyalty?

Rocketium is a cloud-based software that lets users create, automate, and edit their own videos with text, images, voiceovers, footage, and motion graphics. When I added their brand’s email as an example in one of my articles, their CEO, Satej Sirur was kind enough to give us a thumbs up. Fast forward to today, here’s a detailed secret sauce interview on how customer support works at Rocketium, the tools they use, the strategies that have made them successful, and much more.

Please hold. There are 12 callers ahead of you. Your business is important to us. This scenario is still far too common in customer support, even in the B2B (business-to-business) industry where the average customer value is higher and business relationships matter more. Sometimes waiting on hold for a half hour may be because of understaffing. But, other times it’s simply due to an inefficient customer service team.

The OneDesk Knowledge Base is a ‘customer app’ that you can add to your website widget or place directly on your website, to provide a place for your customers to find answers to their questions. It works by allowing you to create items (which we will call “KB articles”) and publish them to this app.

The steady rise of customer expectations is central to every conversation about customer service. The most successful companies are taking ongoing and proactive steps to meet those expectations, which can vary by industry and demographic, through thoughtful omnichannel support offerings, empathetic agents, and great analytics.

Collaboration starts with ease of use, as the defining experience that makes users contribute to conversations, adopt the tool, return without being forced and use the application on all devices. This is what creates collaboration - and without ease of use, the statistics that show why collaboration tools deliver better productivity than email are void.