When it comes down to it, each employee at your company is working towards the same overarching goal: to serve your customers. However, because the roles they play in reaching that goal are extremely different, it’s easy for individual teams to feel disconnected from one another. This isn’t ideal.

Freshworks had a rocking year in 2018, and we are taking a moment to look back at what happened in a year that was filled with so much activity. There were product launches: Freshconnect and Freshping came alive this year, to much fanfare and excitement. Freshconnect is going to play a crucial role in our Freshworks 360 platform, and Freshping will help organisations prove their credibility to their customers free of cost.

A community forum is one part of a self-service portal where customers can interact with each other, as well as your team, and it’s the perfect place to allow your user community to take shape. Customers can ask questions and get answers quickly from other community members, or search for older posts to find previous answers or workarounds to their current question.

Time for our last round-up of the year! It’s been a landmark year for the Freshworks Marketplace, we’ve seen a huge influx of apps into the Marketplace. We’ve grown from 250 apps last December to 560 in early December 2018. There have been apps in huge demand like Trello and Atlassian Jira Plus as well as some innovative apps like BrightReps and Hugo which have integrated with Freshdesk to improve agent productivity as well as improve the quality of support.

Have you ever wondered why one support team gets back to you in no time and the other takes days before you hear back from them? The secret to getting back to customers quickly isn’t just typing faster or hiring more people, it’s about how you set up your workflow in your helpdesk. Let’s take an example of two different support teams here to understand it better.

It’s almost that time of the year again! The holiday season is here – and what is usually a season of cheer and happiness, can be a nightmare for customer support teams. A lot of industries see a huge influx of customers during the holiday season which directly results in a large number of customers needing support and expecting to have their issues resolved as quick as possible.

Every industry has its own version of the “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” scenario, and the Internet is no different. In this case, digital marketers and customer service professionals tend to clash over the question: does great user experience translate to great customer experience? Or is it the other way around?

Have you ever opened an email with a subject line written in all caps, and the first sentence sounded something like “I have never been so frustrated in my life as I am with [your product here]!!!”? If you have, you aren’t alone—many of us every day respond to angry customers and do our best to de-escalate the situation, gain back their trust, and help them use our products.

Just trust me. You’ve heard it before — maybe in a movie scene, or from a partner in crime, or an especially tough coach. Just-trust-me! In today’s marketplace, products may be a dime a dozen, but trust — well, that’s worth its weight in gold. In fact, statistics suggest that a landslide 83% of customers are more likely to recommend a trusted company to friends, and 82% will be more inclined to use that brand more often. It’s a relationship.

The basic goal of customer service is the same for every company, regardless of industry or business model: to provide customers and clients with the assistance and answers they need. That being said, the process of providing that assistance can look very different within different companies. This is especially true when comparing businesses operating on B2B and B2C models.

Choosing a customer support solution is an important decision. It can make or break your team’s ability to assist customers and have a major impact on the level of service you offer. And while there are plenty of great options available, most of them aren’t designed to be a one-size-fits-all solution. This means it takes some time and research to find one that’s right for your business’s needs.

How many of you measure the impact of support tickets on the company revenue? If you are like most companies that offer support, you measure the success of the support channels based on: the number of tickets they solve, the time it takes them to solve the ticket, client satisfaction.

Our support teams were one of the early adopters of Freshdesk’s new version — the Mint Experience. We caught up with Andy, our regional support manager, to talk about his experience with transitioning from the old Freshdesk UI to the Mint Experience. Here’s what he had to say.

If you keep up with recent trends in technology, then you’ve probably been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence (AI) lately. Artificial intelligence has many uses and is already seeing multiple cases of real-world applications. But that doesn’t tell you much about how your business can use it, or if it’s going to be something you need to adapt in the coming years. For instance, can it help you deliver a great customer experience?