As a field service provider, it is routine to receive calls for help from remote places. At Freshdesk, we see our customers responding to field service requests daily and delivering solutions in person when helpdesk agents can’t do the same remotely.

During the COVID-19 crisis, the spotlight is on the e-commerce and logistics industry when it comes to providing essential and non-essential goods for consumers. With the lockdowns across the world, these companies are critical to ensuring people are able to get the supplies they need to live on. So what are some of the responsibilities and challenges they face and how can they overcome them, when operating under the current circumstances? We caught up with Sriram Sridhar, the CEO of lateshipment.com.

With the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, work-life has slowed to a crawl in most parts of the world, and remote work is the new normal. For startups and small enterprises, there are some important decisions to be made to ensure business survival in the short term. To aid that decision, here are a few tips that could prove useful.

In the wake of remote work becoming the new normal, businesses today have newfound gratitude for their IT teams. IT admins have been working tirelessly to make sure you have a seamless work-from-home experience by giving you the best technology, warding off bad actors from getting their hands on your company’s data, and onboarding or offboarding employees. In this interview, Prasad, the Chief Information Officer at Freshworks shares what goes on behind the scenes of our IT team.

Customer service is arguably more important than ever before. Support has emerged as a critical differentiator that now directly impacts loyalty, spending, and growing your business.

Whenever an organization decides to implement a field service solution, its immediate focus will be to remain competitive and manage their long term strategic goals. During the implementation phase, there will be multiple challenges that will make these organizations lose focus as such implementations will bring out their deficiencies in preparation, reveal process gaps and also question some of the business practices of the organization.

At Freshworks, our mission has been to help customer support teams deliver “moments of wow”, thereby enabling every business to create customers-for-life. It is the foundation for everything we do here at Freshworks. And we strive every day to deliver on that promise by continually improving our product and the customer experience.

Many of us are now working from home for the first time. In light of the global pandemic, companies have handed out laptops, closed down their offices and transitioned to being fully remote. It’s certainly not the ideal way to dip a toe into the remote workforce. However, for those of us that are lucky enough to have the opportunity, working from home means we can continue to support our customers and earn a living.

All of us are in the expectations business now, and with customer expectations reaching an all-time high, it’s up to companies to re-invent the wheel to stay relevant and engaged. But how do you identify the right channels to engage with your customers and how do you nail it the first time? That is always the burning question!

Managing a team remotely comes with its own set of pros and cons. If you’re managing a remote team for the first time, it’s easy to focus on the cons rather than the pros. You’re probably having a tough time staying on top of what everyone on your team is working on. In tandem, you’re most likely doing all you can to make sure that your team has everything they need to work conveniently.

We all know that knowledge is power. Having a colleague around, whose shoulder we could tap on and ask for help, is also something that is very powerful. However, the whole tap on the shoulder for help option hasn’t been available since most of us shifted to a work-from-home setup – the best alternative we have is reaching out to a teammate on our internal collaboration tools.

To deliver the perfect customer experience, activities such as creating efficient processes and workflows, quality management, planning shift schedules, etc. are absolutely critical. These come under the umbrella of customer service operations, a core capability that helps scale and improve the level of customer support offered by your company. So who ensures support operation tasks are ideated and executed well so that your customer service standards do not drop?

Have you ever wondered what keeps you motivated at work? Is it a word of appreciation from a colleague? Healthy competition between you and your teammates? Or a coffee-break that you spend catching up on a game or just getting a breather? Motivating factors like these work best in an office environment. However, things are different when you’re working from home.

When you order something on e-commerce sites like Amazon or order food online, tracking your delivery is very seamless. It shows they have a field service management software in place, enabling you to track everything within your app. Reaching out to field service technicians like electricians and plumbers also involves managing and planning field service.

Even with the world in a state of flux, businesses have to continue serving customers, and support teams have to adapt to their new environment. But making the transition from working together in the office to remote support can be a tricky affair. We understand completely because we at Freshworks are in the same boat.

For companies in competitive markets, customer support is a key differentiator. In fact, it can be one of the key reasons a customer decides to renew or churn. But with customer expectations higher than ever, and modern support no longer involving only simple, repeated questions, your front line is often dealing with a high volume of tickets across multiple channels that involve product and process complexity.

As organizations continue to settle into working remotely due to the ongoing crisis, customer service is under strain to deal with the rising volume of inquiries. Understandably, customers are looking for information on how the current situation affects the products and services they rely on. So how can self-service help companies reduce the burden on their agents and employees? To understand that, we had a conversation with Mr. Sagi Eliyahu, the CEO of KMS lighthouse.