Automated phone technology, such as interactive voice response (IVR) menus, can save businesses time and money on customer support. These solutions route callers to the right people without the help of a human operator. Larger businesses should consider IVR menus to streamline the customer support experience. They should not replace account managers and instead are optimized for streamlining after hours and emergency support communication.

Customers are engaging with more connected devices than ever before—they’re getting around on smart electric scooters, slyly reading text messages on Apple Watches during meetings, and telling Amazon Alexa which Cardi B song to play next—all of which is part of a phenomenon known as the Internet of Things (IoT). And, this is only the tip of the hyper-connected iceberg. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that there will be 41.6 billion connected devices in 2025.

‘Tis the season to be flying. This year, the TSA expects a “record breaking holiday season.” Between Thanksgiving and New Years, tens of millions of people will be traveling across the United States, with over 41 million travelers crossing state lines in the Christmas season alone. With all the waiting, spending, and flying, traveling can be stressful.

OneDesk allows you to set up single sign-on (SSO) to permit your users to log in using their existing credentials. If the user does not exist, once they log in using SSO, OneDesk will create a user record for them. Since email addresses must be unique in OneDesk, it is important that you do not already have a customer record with the user’s email address or the sign on will fail.

As companies and teams become more and more distributed, communication only becomes more important. For organizations that deal with finance matters, this is only more true. There is no room for miscommunications and distractions when there are large amounts of money being transferred and worked with. One client came to us seeking a solution to their management of tickets, along with some sensitivity to permissions, communications, and the ability to track change.

Customization is one of the biggest challenges with help centers, whether it’s for a startup or a global enterprise. While they may have a help center and are already reaping business benefits from it, important details can fall through the cracks when customizing it, specifically when it comes to user experience (UX).

Looking into the crystal ball again - this time for 2020 - Wire highlights some of the trends we see will dominate the headlines for the first year of the new decade. There are some common underpinnings - most notably that data has now become the most valuable commodity and companies are increasingly running on data, becoming massively vulnerable to any interruption or loss. The second is mobile.

We released Zulip Server 2.1.1 today. This is a bug fix release, containing several cherry-picked changes since Zulip 2.1.1.

We released Zulip Server 2.0.8 today. This is a security release, containing a handful of cherry-picked changes since Zulip 2.0.7.

We're excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 2.1, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes. Zulip is the world’s most productive team chat software, used by thousands of teams as an alternative to Slack, HipChat, Mattermost and IRC. Zulip's unique topic-based threading combines the immediacy of chat with the asynchronous efficiency of email-style threading, and is 100% free and open source software.