It’s been another exciting month here at the Freshdesk Marketplace and we’ve added 50+ apps to our directory this month alone! Here’s a quick look at some of the apps that were added to the Marketplace which could help boost agent (and admin) productivity.

This October will mark the one year anniversary of Freshdesk Mint. We rebuilt Freshdesk from the ground up a year ago to make it faster, easier and more intuitive to use. Our aim was to improve the overall experience we offered businesses so that they can support their customers more effectively.

It’s no secret that the customer experience (CX) has risen to the top priorities of most companies today. Businesses are putting a lot of effort into ensuring that their customers not only enjoy their experience with a company or service, but that they want to share that experience with others.

The #1 visual collaboration platform, RealtimeBoard, now supports the automated creation of mind maps.

For CIOs and IT teams, the debate over which secure enterprise messaging app to use is typically fought over the level of security on offer. However, for business users, the decision is often less clear, and typically the result of poor understanding. New research has highlighted that many people remain unclear over the level of protection offered by secure, end-to-end-encrypted (E2EE) messaging apps, when compared to basic services such as SMS text messaging (and even phone calls).

As customers trend towards becoming more self-sufficient, they’re becoming more accustomed to interacting with AI-powered tools for the support they need (especially with 75 percent of executives looking to actively implement AI in the next three years). The benefit of customers engaging with these tools means that agents can get involved with fewer support requests and focus their attention on the ones that truly need a human touch.

The answer is: “Yes, but it depends on the app being used!”. Public sector employees are no different to their private-sector counterparts in that they’re demanding more modern, mobile solutions for collaboration and communication. However, without clear direction from ICT leaders, many are becoming reliant on consumer-grade tools that put data, and digital compliance, at risk.

Any talk of security usually defaults to external threats. But what about threats from inside of your firewall? How often do you consider those? Of course, no one likes to think of their employees as untrustworthy, but the reality is that employees are responsible for 54% of data breaches. And while many of these threats are simply down to negligence (an employee being compromised by a phishing attack, for cexample), a large amount involved malicious intent.

Some businesses are hesitant to invest in customer service and see it essentially as a necessary (but annoying) expense. This is a mistake. Although building an excellent support team and providing them with the tools that will help them effectively assist your customers does require an investment, it’s an investment that can have significant returns, especially in the e-commerce business. In fact, when done correctly, excellent customer support can actually increase your revenue.

Happy agents, happy customers, right? That’s the premise that Zendesk was founded on, and over a decade later, our ease of use is still one of the top reasons that businesses love our customer service and engagement platform. Today we have news: We’re sharing that love with another—related—part of your business: the sales team. Zendesk announced today that we are acquiring Base.