Check out these great new apps. They’ll help you make the most of Zendesk and provide a great experience for your customers.

The term `persona` has become widely used in many fields and implemented for many purposes. It’s worthwhile to take time and look deeper at the difference between a `user persona` as defined in product development and UX, and `buyer persona` a term used for marketing. Although the two seem very close in meaning, there are in fact key differences. Understanding how these terms differ is crucial to finetuning your product strategy and avoiding mistakes.

Working in a remote team can be very challenging, especially if you’re trying to schedule a meeting with someone in a different time zone. As a distributed organization of 150+ people working from Europe, the United States and Australia, we know first-hand how painful this scheduling process can get, but we also understand that real-time communication is critical when you are building the next big thing.

Yesterday at 12:45pm central time, our ops team detected a dramatic spike in login requests to Basecamp. More than 30,000 login attempts were made in the hour that followed from a wide array of IP addresses. Our first line of defense was to block the offending addresses, but ultimately we needed to enable captcha to stop the attack.

Most companies now understand that customers demand service that is personalized, convenient, and efficient—and that ignoring those expectations imperils the bottom line. However, while focusing on the needs of external customers makes sound business sense, creating a rich employee experience can be just as important to a company’s long-term success.

We released Zulip Server 1.9.2 today. This is a bug fix release, containing a few dozen cherry-picked changes since 1.9.1.

Deciding whether or not to use or deploy a chatbot for your brand requires understanding each of the drawbacks and benefits of this new technology. It can be a tough decision to make. There are always new and shiny trends popping up every year in the customer service industry. You might be getting inundated with sales emails from companies promising to reduce your cost of service, increase your customer loyalty and differentiate your customer’s experience.

Business enterprises always find better ways for team communication and collaboration. Instead of writing heavy emails daily, chat simplifies team conversations and organizes team tasks more efficiently. Many chat apps for teams ensures a wide range of collaborative features for quick communication.

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.

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.