We’re closing out July with some great new apps.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is slowly becoming a part of our daily lives. Siri and Alexa are now household names, and their users have grown accustomed to how easy they make it to access information. And while these types of virtual assistants are primarily for personal use, AI also presents huge opportunities for businesses, particularly for customer service.

Dixons Carphone has said a huge data breach that took place last year involved 10 million customers, up from its original estimate of 1.2 million. Personal information, names, addresses and email addresses may have been accessed last year.

Like any other profession, a career in customer service comes with its own hurdles and challenges. With so much information out there and a steep learning curve, it is very normal for an individual, new to this space, to find customer service daunting in the beginning. This article is aimed at helping you get started in customer service by preparing you for the most common challenges you will face in support.

Riot.im Web 0.16 is here, and it lands some serious upgrades to core functionality, including: replies, a brand new composer and (at long last) full integration with Jitsi web conferencing!

When businesses are starting out, they prefer a shared mailbox for customer support. And it’s understandable because the volume of issues is quite low. But things change drastically when the business expands. When teams get bigger, there are inevitable trade-offs one of which is a cluttered and overflowing mailbox. This calls for a switch to a better process of handling customer issues or tickets. But how do you know when you are ready to switch from a shared mailbox to a helpdesk software?

Remote work model is the future of every industry and it has steadily increased in the last 20 years. But setting up remote work culture isn’t just about not having an office. It requires a lot of thought process to go into. You need to change the mindset that people can be equally productive even when working remotely. In fact, as per the survey report by Tinypulse, 91% of the respondents think they get more work done when working remotely.

If you had to choose one thing to improve your business, it should without a doubt be customer experience. That may strike you as odd, as the usual intuition of most businesses is to improve their product or find a way to be price competitive. But recent research has shown that customer service is likely to overtake both of those elements by 2020.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can have many different definitions, and can sometimes cause confusion. Does CRM include correspondence before a company becomes a customer, such as sales and marketing? Should CRM extend to all areas of a business, including internal IT teams who don’t interact with customers? Drawing the line of what is and isn’t part of the CRM experience can be difficult.