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.

We’re welcoming the new year with some great new apps to help you make the most of Zendesk!

It’s been said that your name is your favorite word. Likewise, a brand’s name is its favorite word. Pair their name with their logo, and it’s a self-love fest. You can see this play out when you order a physical product from an online store. The shipping box is often branded. Sometimes the tape is even branded. Then once you tear into it, the internal packaging is branded. Then the item, too — often in multiple places. Name, logo, name, logo, name, logo.

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.

Over the last month we’ve made massive progress on implementing the new design of Riot which we previewed back in May (the work ended up getting stuck behind all the performance and encryption improvements we’ve been working on).

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.

As a general rule, nobody at Basecamp really knows where anyone else is at any given moment. Are they working? Dunno. Are they taking a break? Dunno. Are they at lunch? Dunno. Are they picking up their kid from school? Dunno. Don’t care.

Last year, we highlighted some of the key customer service trends to watch in 2018 and many of them came to fruition. The shift in perception of AI and automation was arguably the most significant. Once a thought of the distant future, many companies began adding these concepts to their workflows and roadmaps. Once again, for the third year in a row, here are 7 customer service trends to watch in 2019…

The fundamental principles that define effective customer service apply across all industries and business types. But certain distinctive characteristics of the business-to-business (B2B) environment can have a huge influence on your approach to training customer service staff.

To develop products in the right direction, we need to research the experiences of our users, discover their needs and unpack the insights. As product managers, designers and researchers, we have a large toolset to discover what our users want and how it corresponds with business needs. But how should we figure out what matters the most? This is where a thoughtful UX survey can be useful. Here are some steps that can help you get the most out of a survey.