You decide to buy a phone. Do you go for the phone of your dreams even though it’s beyond your budget, or would you settle for a functional, but less-ostentatious one that fits into your budget? Do you wait for special offers so you can avail a discount, or get the device on credit? These are the kind of behavioral indicators that decide the types of customers and what aspect of a product/service appeals to them.

The disconnect between how many companies claim that they only hire the best and how they try to actually do that is perverse. A depressing number of job postings are barely more than a list of technology or process requirements paired with an arbitrary desire for years of irrelevance. That’s then fluffed up by a bunch of trite rah-rah bullshit about the supposed glory of hiring company. Ugh.

Two of the biggest customer support technology trends for 2019 are bots and omnichannel support. Bots are picking up traction as more companies are using them to help customers find information, to route queries to the right department, and to carry out transactions that don’t require a human agent.

One-on-one meetings are one of the best ways for managers to build a strong rapport with their teams and create a culture of trust. Unlike standups, status reports, and other types of meetings, one-on-ones are more flexible and create dedicated space for a manager to address an employee’s growth, long term plans and give personalized feedback. In our team, one-on-ones happen every week and last for an hour.

In the past, support was just answering phone calls coming into a call bank. The customer didn’t expect anything other than getting the answer to their question, and as long as they did, they were satisfied. However, as support has grown more prolific, the bar for customer loyalty has become higher as well. Being able to measure and understand the quality of your support responses has also become more important.

There’s an unfortunate pattern amongst the Silicon Valley set whenever a startup heralding from their midst is subjected to even mild scrutiny. It’s perhaps best illustrated in its archetype by this tweet from Paul Graham: In 2008, Facebook had a mere 100 million users. In 2018, they had over 2 BILLION users. The scope of a startup’s impact and influence is correlated to the amount of scrutiny it receives. This is a feature, not a bug!

I hear from people all the time who’ve been following this blog, read our books, been loving Rails, become impressed by a job post, or been inspired by a conference talk we’ve given. It’s intensely gratifying to hear how something you put into this world has had a chance to affect someone. Especially when the impact was large enough to open up a novel perspective or prompt real change. It warms.

Welcome to our monthly round-up, where we share with you some of the latest additions to the Freshdesk Marketplace. This month, we’re happy to announce that we now have 700+ apps on the Freshworks Marketplace across three products – Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshsales. There are more exciting updates coming your way, but let us start off by looking at the new apps that have entered the marketplace!

We all know that feeling – a new cloud tool, modern and shiny, that will help solve at least one of your problems. "Will this be adopted by the organization or is this just another grave-yard project from IT?" is another worry we are all too familiar with. In my daily work with customers I collect regular insights and decided to share some of my most vital learnings with you.

Following Wire’s recent success with government institutions in both US and Europe, Wire is now available via the UK's Crown Commercial Services G-cloud 11. This means that public sector customers in the UK will benefit from: Wire is the most secure collaboration platform. Government institutions will benefit from the most advanced security features - securing messages, communications, calls and files in all environments.