Before we rush headlong into yet another evolution of work, let’s make sure we’re set up to succeed.

It’s just a regular Tuesday morning, your customers are their usual selves and your helpdesk agents are going about their normal day. The sun is shining bright and the birds are chirping happily. Just as you were sipping your coffee, you thought that your day was going to be like any normal one. Fast forward five minutes: everything changed, and somehow it was not all that cheerful anymore. The phone lines are choking up, your Twitter is buzzing, and the birds’ chirps are drifting away.

As Head of Global Engagement Marketing at Asana, I have the pleasure and privilege of leading a team of fourteen mission-driven marketers across five countries. A big part of my role is focused on growing Asana Together, our global community of professionals who are passionate about project management, productivity, and collaboration.

Back in early 2018, I embarked on a side gig with a few partners - the idea was to make ridesharing socially engaging and fun. We made a ton of mistakes and never really got the product off the launchpad, however in retrospect, the biggest mistakes we made were wasting precious time in writing code for authentication and authorization as well as user notifications. We learned to focus on customer value the hard way.

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 4.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team collaboration tool with unique topic-based threading that combines the best of email and chat to make remote work productive and delightful. Fortune 500 companies, leading open source projects, and thousands of other organizations use Zulip every day.

We’re happy to bring you some good news along with this year’s Ramadan wishes. To all our readers, Eid Mubarak! or !عيد مبارك Now you can wish your team in Arabic too with Zoho Projects! That’s right, we’re launching the support for Arabic in our software, along with full RTL support. Be it with your teammates, clients, or other stakeholders, bridge the communication gap by conversing easily in your native language.

A call center phone policy is a document that aims to regulate a call center employee’s cell phone usage during work hours. An effective employee cell phone policy not only boosts agent productivity but also helps protect sensitive call center data. Here’s a call center phone policy that you can customize for your needs and include in your employee handbook: (Note: A downloadable version of this work policy is available at the bottom of the template.)

Outsourcing certain aspects of a project is a suitable option for companies looking to save money or scale up quickly. But you might be wondering, do I always need to outsource to a country located on the other side of the world? Can it be done closer to home? If you have similar questions, you’re in the right place. Yes, you can outsource your software development and other tasks to your neighboring country.

In 2020, Customer Support teams worked harder than ever before. Not only did most have to adapt to new ways of working but for many the pandemic lead to an increase in support requests. Geckoboard customer Ember described a situation where people were more readily available to contact Support but also expected agents to respond faster than usual. So how is the industry faring in 2021?

Businesses work hard to attract customers, and keeping them around takes just as much effort. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, half of customers say they would switch to a competitor after just one negative experience—that number grows to more than 80 percent after multiple bad experiences. A “bad experience” can happen at any touchpoint in the customer’s journey, from their first interaction all the way to final sale and beyond.