It’s just a regular Tuesday morning, your customers are their usual selves and your helpdesk agents are going about their normal day. The sun is shining bright and the birds are chirping happily. Just as you were sipping your coffee, you thought that your day was going to be like any normal one. Fast forward five minutes: everything changed, and somehow it was not all that cheerful anymore. The phone lines are choking up, your Twitter is buzzing, and the birds’ chirps are drifting away.

Back in early 2018, I embarked on a side gig with a few partners - the idea was to make ridesharing socially engaging and fun. We made a ton of mistakes and never really got the product off the launchpad, however in retrospect, the biggest mistakes we made were wasting precious time in writing code for authentication and authorization as well as user notifications. We learned to focus on customer value the hard way.

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 4.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team collaboration tool with unique topic-based threading that combines the best of email and chat to make remote work productive and delightful. Fortune 500 companies, leading open source projects, and thousands of other organizations use Zulip every day.

Businesses work hard to attract customers, and keeping them around takes just as much effort. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, half of customers say they would switch to a competitor after just one negative experience—that number grows to more than 80 percent after multiple bad experiences. A “bad experience” can happen at any touchpoint in the customer’s journey, from their first interaction all the way to final sale and beyond.

Looking to add some pizzazz to those oh-so dull meetings? As a workshop designer with over 20 years of experience working in Silicon Valley, I’ve made it my business to lead engaging meetings – whether they be remote, in-person, or a hybrid of the two. What have I learned about adding fun to functional meetings? Tune in to the 30-minute LinkedIn Live conversation I had with Miro Customer Education Manager Jen Clark for my top tips – or just keep reading this article!

In the first article in this series, you learned how to set up your developer environment, the first step toward creating your very own Mattermost plugins. Take my word for it: Your first attempts at writing Mattermost plugins can be quite confusing. Where do you start? What do you have to do to get your first plugin up and running? At the end of this series, you’ll be well on your way to writing your own plugin.