Shadow IT is when employees use unapproved software, apps, and devices to do their jobs. Typically, employees have good intentions and may turn to various ad-hoc services to get their work done because they don’t believe their employer provides them with a good solution. Since the 2020 Coronavirus outbreak, surveys of IT professionals have revealed that the rise in employees working from home has generated a surge in this practice.

While the general use of customer relationship management software (CRM) has become the industry standard, it hasn’t always been this way. Over time, as customers have come to expect a more efficient experience, companies have turned to various ad hoc solutions to manage their customer service offering. Now, it’s not enough to know just a few things about your customers.

Most companies realize that providing robust self-service options to their customers no longer falls into the “nice to have” category—yet creating and maintaining self-service that keeps up with ever-changing customer preferences and business needs can seem daunting. But as Trustpilot has discovered, making content easily accessible, improving agent efficiency, and harnessing actionable analytics can lead to the kind of self-service that drives scalability.

How well do you really know your customers? In a B2C (business-to-consumer) environment, it is very rare to know your customers since the focus on each interaction is generally on resolving one issue or ticket at a time. Often, the very first contact the company ever has with a customer in that environment may be through a call center, where they have a simple request like asking for an update on their order.

Hi all, It's almost four years since we launched Riot, and it's been a crazy journey - going from a relatively bare bones Matrix app through to today's all-singing, all-dancing encrypted-by-default collaboration tool used by folks ranging from Mozilla to the French Government and beyond. However, as some may know, we’ve had a few problems with the name Riot over the years.

Hey lovely Riot folks, Welcome to the Riot Web 1.6.6 update. This is a relatively incremental release, but we do have a few feature updates alongside all the normal bug and performance fixes.

World Productivity Day is June 20th. Usually, we’d be gearing up to share tips and best practices on how to be your most productive self with Asana. But with the various challenges teams have experienced in 2020, our definition and expectations of productivity have changed. This year, instead of focusing on individual productivity, we want to help you center on connecting and collaborating with your team in order to be at your most effective—together.

Uncomplicating the customer experience can be especially challenging for companies with complex ecosystems: think of buyers and sellers within marketplaces like eBay or Reverb, or the web of interconnected business owners, drivers, and customers on the receiving end of food or furniture deliveries.

The COVID -19 pandemic has overstretched customer support teams across all industries. Many organizations faced a massive influx of customer requests for help, and in most cases, they were not resourced to respond appropriately. Now more than ever businesses need a customer engagement platform that enables their customer support teams to do more with less.

Conversational AI technology is going to be transformational as the possibilities seem to be growing with the spurt in the reach of digital devices, soon augmented with AI-enabled conversational interfaces. From fetching data to answering questions, conversational AI can mimic all that a human agent does but in quicker time, giving users immediate access to information or providing immediate responses.