We’ve spoken about the importance of secure client communications before. From an accidental leak of information, to a malicious cyber-attack, compromising client confidentiality can result in the sort of reputation damage that can be hard to come back from. But while organizations understand this, too often we find employees defaulting back to less secure communication methods. Why? It comes down to two key factors.

Design is one of those things that can be delightful when it’s well executed but absolutely infuriating when it’s badly done. The unfortunate reality is that we’re living in a world with bad design all around us. Just think of incomprehensible airport layouts or blister packaging.

With the growing trend of remote work, especially in digital industries, UX managers are faced with the necessity of managing distributed teams, adding to the already complex challenges of maintaining efficient development, selling the UX vision to the entire company and studying mysterious customers.

The promise of technological change in the future is ratcheting up consumer expectations with businesses. As a result, the bar for what defines quality customer service is continually raised. To respond to these ever-rising expectations, businesses require more flexibility and agility from their technology platforms than ever before.

Global AI spending is exploding. According to current trends, it will go from $2 billion in 2018 to over $7.3 billion in just the next four years1. Many publications have proclaimed it as the “next big thing” in the business world. They seem to believe that it’s poised to change the way companies interact with customers altogether. They’re less clear, though, on how businesses can actually use it. But today, one of the best uses of AI is customer service.

Today’s customers are moving and changing at an incredibly fast pace. They’re better connected and more informed, and they’re bringing higher expectations into their conversations with businesses as a result. It is tough for businesses to keep up with those expectations. Too often, companies are held back by proprietary technologies and old ways of thinking.

Think about how much valuable data is generated by just a handful of customer service requests. With this data, your business can learn more about why customers reach out for help—and more importantly—what your business can do to improve your customer experience.

Are the support team, website and Freshdesk portal ready to handle the customer influx of the holiday season? That’s the question we ask ourselves every year before the peak period starts. During the holiday season, the incoming traffic may increase by 10 times, whereas ticket volumes can increase by up to 50%, making the life of your agents exhausting and stressful.

Are support agents happy with Freshdesk Mint? This was the most pressing question we had on our minds when we introduced Freshdesk Mint a year back. Over months, we spoke to our customers to gather feedback on what people liked and disliked. We were delighted to learn that the overall feedback for Freshdesk Mint was very positive. But we didn’t just stop with customer interviews. Using Heap, an analytics tool, we analyzed product adoption to learn from our success and our mistakes.

There are A LOT of features available for companies to choose from when deciding what’s important in their Business to Business (B2B) customer support software solution. We made this list to help companies think about the key features these solutions offer and their value. Without further ado, here’s our list of 20 essential features in a B2B customer support system.