CIOs and other IT leaders have their work cut out for them—it’s not easy to strike a balance between maximizing the value of existing technology, minimizing costs, and investing in strategic tools for the future of the business. As companies compete for brand loyalty and invest more in providing better customer experiences, there’s a greater emphasis on IT leaders to manage the customer data siloed across numerous applications, systems, and engagement channels.

Time is everything these days. A photocopy shop in NYC has a sign on the counter: “The difficult we do right away; the impossible takes a little longer.” Taking your customer service online, using modern, cloud-based support software, brings the joke to reality: you can now offer customers a level of convenience and speed that is not possible without modern online customer service tools. This is the digital transformation many companies are making.

Too often, customers rush to the phone whenever an issue or question pops in to their mind. While having customer conversations is great, too much communication can be harmful and have a negative impact on your business. To alleviate some of this communication, more companies are leveraging an online customer portal to stop mundane conversations before they even begin.

Welcome to the first app round-up for 2019. As you kickstart your new year, here are some of the latest apps in the Freshdesk Marketplace which you could help you enrich the customer support process for you, your agents and your customers!

Customers make decisions based on how easy companies make it to transact with them. From pre-purchase questions through payment and delivery of goods, your customers expect a seamless purchasing experience. That means your company must meet them on the channels they prefer, as well as move with customers from channel to channel.

Visionaries in the field of artificial intelligence in customer service see radical changes on the horizon, with a tipping point lying just a few years in the future. And if the prognostications of these experts—Zendesk partners Rick Nucci of Guru, Mike Murchison of Ada, and Mikhail Naumov of DigitalGenius—come to pass, AI will upend how customer service teams work in ways that will have far-reaching ramifications for companies across the globe.

Artificial intelligence used to only exist in science fiction films. That’s no longer the case. Today, brands are using it to improve efficiency and productivity in all areas of business. In fact, 55% of established companies have either started making investments in artificial intelligence or are planning to do so by 2020. These investments can come in many forms, but one of the most effective is in using artificial intelligence to power chatbots.

Dear HipChat and Stride users, You only have a few weeks left to find a new home! But fear not, Riot is here, and moving across to one of our hosted Modular.im chat servers is easy with our dedicated HipChat migration tool.

Every task in your project has a life cycle—a series of stages it has to pass through from creation to completion. Manually moving tasks from one stage to another can be cumbersome, more so if many tasks in your project have a similar life cycle. Worse still, having to do it repeatedly can make even exciting tasks look mundane.

When evaluating software, it’s easy to fall back on what you’ve done in the past. Your work computer likely has Windows and the Office suite installed directly on the machine, so why shouldn’t you have software for sales, customer support, marketing, or other industries right alongside it?