It’s been yet another eventful month, with a number of new and interesting apps making their entry onto the Freshdesk Marketplace. Here’s a quick look at the new additions.

No matter what size your company is, big data can make a significant impact on your customer service. And better customer service leads to happier customers and increased sales. In fact, increasing your customer retention by just 5% can result in a 25% increase1 in profits. But the problem is that even many of the largest businesses around aren’t using their data effectively.

Customer service support is shifting dramatically, from a single channel model to an omnichannel one. Today 90% of customers expect to be able to move seamlessly across service channels, including mobile, chat, and online. But the problem is companies are still struggling to do this well. 61% of customers have not been able to easily switch from one channel to another when interacting with customer service.

Let’s face it, nobody enjoys dealing with ticket escalations. When a ticket is escalated, it means there’s a problem that your ground-level employees can’t solve. The customer will have to wait, rather impatiently, for a solution; and if it escalates beyond that, it indicates a systemic issue that will require your developers to pull all-nighters. It’s an unpleasant situation all around!

When you talk about your business’s customer experience, it’s easy to get caught up in the bigger picture of what you want to achieve. Meaning, it’s easy to just imagine the ideal experience you want your customers to have, but not actually focus on what will help you achieve this.

Every company has its own unique audience — and should have a unique approach to customer engagement to match. After all, when it comes to creating great customer experiences and achieving high levels of satisfaction, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that’s guaranteed to work for every brand.

In the past few years, companies have become significantly more interdependent—users share passwords, and systems use backend technologies operated by third parties. So when hackers breach a company’s security, they often gain access to a wider set of services and information than initially expected.