Intercom has become an industry standard for talking to customers via live chat. In its 10 year history, Intercom set the bar for customer engagement with SaaS businesses pretty high. However, open source challengers are on the rise. The indisputable advantages of open source software over its proprietary counterparts have experts looking for open source alternatives to Intercom, too.

A customer service specialist is one of the people a customer will interact with when they make a purchase of a product or service from a company. The role requires many skills, but perhaps the most important are interpersonal skills and a thorough knowledge of the company’s customer care policies. In this article, we’ll look at what customer service and customer experience are, how they interact, and then go into more detail about the typical tasks of a customer service specialist.

The digital workplace is a phenomenon that has grown in leaps and bounds in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The adoption of technologies has increased and changed all aspects of our lives today, including how we work. However, today’s workplace is very different from the traditional workplace. For one thing, its definition is no longer limited to the physical sense.

When your team has different approaches to work-life balance, you’ll need a few tricks up your sleeve that satisfy both groups.

Hardware and asset management is not easy even in relatively small organizations with 20 or 30 employees. As the size of the organization increases, it becomes difficult to keep track of all the laptops, printers, and other hardware used by the employees. This is where a detailed hardware inventory of IT assets becomes useful. A hardware inventory can help you keep track of all devices and equipment owned or used by your organization.

From booking rep appointments to even boosting your ecommerce conversion rate, sales calls can massively impact the success of your business, which is why it’s so important to know how to measure sales productivity by the success of your calls. When the discussion of sales calls comes up, many people instantly think of cold calling (phoning prospective customers before they express any kind of interest in your product or service).

Conducting an impactful customer service performance review sets the stage not just for the evaluation and growth of your team members but can also identify larger trends within your support strategy. However, many pieces make up an individual’s customer support career development, and it can get difficult to track them regularly. You’ve got performance metrics to pay attention to, career growth, and paths of interest for your customer service representatives.

The process of looking for a suitable software to work with doesn’t involve its functionalities and integrations alone. It’s not limited to your company and your own needs, either. Finding a tool that does everything you want is the ultimate goal, but if the layout is confusing or if the learning curve is too steep, the dream can rapidly become a nightmare. For that reason, besides features and needs, you should also focus on the laws of UX.

Are you meeting, exceeding, or falling short of your stakeholders’ expectations? Because how you manage relationships between colleagues and collaborators matters. And your approach to stakeholder management does too. It’s no surprise that manager engagement drops as your team size and workload increase. If you’re juggling multiple projects, the struggle gets amplified. Meanwhile, the rise of remote work and cross-team collaboration forces teams to move and make decisions ASAP.