I’ll be shocked if you’re shocked: Building social connection in a remote team is the hardest part of managing a remote team. According to a survey we ran this past fall with 297 remote managers and employees, “fostering a sense of connection without a shared location” was seen as the #1 most difficult part of being a remote manager – and the #1 most difficult part of working remotely, in general.

Seeing a business grow in front of your eyes is exciting. You’ve got a product or service people love, and you’re getting new customers all the time. However, with this excitement often comes growing pains. Five customer support agents may no longer be enough, and it’s time to expand the team to double digits to meet the demand of tickets and phone calls.

As Facebook announces the rebranding of WhatsApp and Instagram, the risks businesses are taking when using WhatsApp for work become clearer. Your mined corporate data places you as an advertising target. We all kind of know it already - and the answers as to 'why?' range from "this is what our customers want to use" to "it is just more fun/easy" and even "if it breaks, we'll fix it". We've heard them all.

Your customers expect you to understand what they want. Not only this, they expect you to know when they want and how they want it. Today, the modern company has no reason for not being able to deliver on these demands. The reason? Data. Data is everywhere, and businesses are well placed to utilize this to improve the customer experience and smash their KPIs. Over 40% of marketers plan to expand their data-driven budgets, and that’s why it’s essential to adopt a data-driven strategy.

The current business infrastructure highlights the progress of mankind. We no longer need to be in the same room with other people to collaborate. People can work from anywhere in the world, given that that place has internet and electricity. Incidentally, nearly four million Americans found their favorite workplace — their own homes. At the very core of this phenomenon are the gig economy and technological progress.

It’s well known that if someone is an excellent fit for a support role, they are empathetic and kind to those around them. As empathetic people, support employees tend to take on the emotions of all of the customers1 that they talk to. Not only that, but as people trained in detecting and responding effectively to emotions, support people may even be prone to their own feelings being deeper and more intensified2.

While one minute doesn’t seem like a lot, when it comes to solving problems – conversations with support agents can feel long and drawn out. This can be particularly frustrating when the issues are trivial in nature. There are many situations where customers spend 5-10 minutes on the phone just to find out basic information, such as learning a product’s return policy.

Maintenance is a concept that is common to nearly every industry and business. While regular maintenance can be driven by the company itself, often times businesses rely on their customers to come forward with any degradations that they come up against. Audiovisual companies are no exception. One such company came to us with a set of requirements for their maintenance and upkeep of equipment that they needed to track and manage. In order to do this, we agreed that a ticketing system was the way to go.