Whether it’s the ever-present threat of a cyber-attack, or the need to meet your data privacy obligations under GDPR, organizations are under growing pressure to protect their IT infrastructure and ensure that the tools they use are fit for purpose. One of the most robust ways of achieving this is to run regular audits.

Have you ever overheard people having heated discussions about the differences between help desks, service desks, and IT service management (ITSM)? Surprisingly, we have. Some argue that help desk is an outdated term referring to an IT-centric support capability born in the late 1980s (think mainframes), with little attention to the end user. They may say service desk was coined to describe a new focus on serving end-users in a timely manner.

We are happy to announce our participation in Season of Docs 2019! This is the inauguration year for the exciting new program. Season of Docs is Google’s annual program that fosters collaboration between open source projects and technical writers. Season of Docs is a unique program that pairs technical writers with open source mentors to introduce the technical writer to an open source community and provide guidance while the writer works on a real world open source project.

Customer support teams are built on the basis of collaboration — we are the connectors between our customers and our team members and yet oftentimes support can feel segregated from the rest of the company. This feeling can have many causes: the usual perception of the team as a “cost center”, lack of understanding of the nature of the work that support does and, worst of all, the lack of connection and collaboration within the support team itself.

The digitally conscious customer of today needs immediate responses. A key factor in staying ahead of the competition is the ability to provide proactive customer support to your customers. Live chat support came to the rescue and enabled agents to respond to customers as swiftly as they could. But this was not good enough. It is almost impossible for live agents to be available all the time for the omnipresent customer.

If you’ve ever worked in or been a part of the customer support industry, you’ve likely seen or directly experienced “contents” or “games” like the scenarios listed above. The more formal definition – gamification – is essentially a tactic used by the customer support industry to incentivize agents to reach specific (yet often arbitrary) goals put in place by leadership.