With all the uncertainty around COVID-19, we’re contingency planning, and we know you’re probably doing the same. We’ve compiled a list of our product features and ideas to help your team continue to work effectively. Best of all, most of these utilize tools that are already included in your subscription.

For a variety of reasons, be it a cultural shift in the workplace or a major event like COVID-19, more companies have employees working remotely with little to no in-person interaction. And, for every time there's a remote employee, there's also someone who's tasked with managing a remote team. So, how can you keep a support team happy and working together when they are 10, 100, or even 1,000 miles apart? Here are 7 tips for managing a remote customer support team…

Your account is locked. Please use the link to reset your password. It happens one day or the other. Every IT professional has experienced it sometimes. An employee tries to access her corporate e-mail account or business portal. She must present a report in a meeting starting in a few minutes. But her account is locked. She enters and reenters the password several times, tries all the numbers, combinations, and special characters, but still, the account is inaccessible.

With so many new customer communication channels opening for business, the classic contact center can seem kind of old school. Nobody wants to phone a business anymore, right? Wrong. In fact, 66% of customers still typically resolve their issues with a company via telephone, according to our latest Customer Experience Trends Report. While many support issues can be resolved via messaging, email, or self-service, sometimes it’s just easier and more efficient to pick up the phone.

Everything is moving along nicely with your company and then – out of nowhere – an emergency pops up. For some companies it could be their software is having login issues, but one emergency many companies are working through currently is the emerging concern and uncertainty created by the Coronavirus (COVID-19). Events around the world are being postponed or cancelled, and it’s fundamentally changing the way people work and interact with each other.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a powerful tool for any sales team; it saves them time and provides invaluable data insights for nurturing prospects until they become customers. But, surprisingly, it’s more common for sales reps to use Excel and email to store and manage prospect data than it is to use a CRM system. And for the teams that do use a CRM, few take full advantage of the tool.

Here’s something support leaders in the trenches know all too well: customer interactions are on the rise, which goes hand-in-hand with consumers’ expectations that the service they’ll receive will be stellar. That’s challenging enough for any business, but for companies in growth mode, those trends can lead to serious strain on support operations.

Have you ever heard someone say the price of growth is change? An old boss of mine used to say this regularly, and there’s a lot of truth to it. As your organization grows, it’s guaranteed to cause a lot of change. One place where this growth-fueled change often manifests itself is in how you support your customers. The last thing you want is to see your customer count skyrocket while your customer experience and customer satisfaction suffer.

For decades, outsourced customer support was considered an easy way for businesses to increase support bandwidth at a reduced cost. But in too many cases, the quality of service suffered as a result. As recently as 2018, a survey by Gladly found that 61% of customers felt like they were treated as nothing more than a case number.