The end of the year marks a good time to reflect on the passed year and the achievements made by the team. 2018 was, in many ways, a landmark year for Wire. From a product perspective we launched Wire Pro, our business product, in early 2018 and later added Wire Red, our unique crisis collaboration tool, to our product line. That in itself was a big milestone for us. We can now see business’ over five continents using our products.

User research plays a critical function when you are building tech products and services. This practice helps teams understand the user’s perspective, including their unmet needs, delights, and pain points, but also how they connect to the brand and product in an emotional way. User researchers also serve as a bridge between customers or users and the product, engineering, and company leadership teams.

Offering omnichannel customer service is the core of any organization’s support strategy. But, in some cases it’s not possible for agents to do everything, and it’s critical that there is a plan in place for assigning agents to channels. There are two methodologies for channel assignment: a shared agent model and a dedicated one. In a shared model, agents handle some or all channels simultaneously. In a dedicated model, agents are focused on a single channel.

Messaging Layer Security (MLS) is a new end-to-end encrypted protocol that is developed by an IETF workgroup. Wire initiated the idea, along with Mozilla and Cisco, in 2016 with other contributors joining the efforts later: the University of Oxford, Facebook, INRIA, Google, Twitter. MLS’s major goals are to make end-to-end encrypted messaging in (large) groups efficient and more secure and to become an open standard.

The warnings say robots are coming for our jobs, but it’s more accurate to say they—AI-supported automation, that is—are taking over tasks that should be automated anyway. Taking the rote functions out of a customer service agent’s job is the perfect way to leverage AI, but support roles must evolve parallel with the technology.

Have you ever opened an email with a subject line written in all caps, and the first sentence sounded something like “I have never been so frustrated in my life as I am with [your product here]!!!”? If you have, you aren’t alone—many of us every day respond to angry customers and do our best to de-escalate the situation, gain back their trust, and help them use our products.

Just trust me. You’ve heard it before — maybe in a movie scene, or from a partner in crime, or an especially tough coach. Just-trust-me! In today’s marketplace, products may be a dime a dozen, but trust — well, that’s worth its weight in gold. In fact, statistics suggest that a landslide 83% of customers are more likely to recommend a trusted company to friends, and 82% will be more inclined to use that brand more often. It’s a relationship.

We try hard to write good policies at Basecamp. Make them plain and easy to understand. Without out all the dreaded legalese. By humans, for humans. I particularly like our refund policy and our Until The End of The Internet policy. But I’m sure we don’t always succeed. And sometimes our policies may decay over time. Terms that are or become unreasonable linger on. Ugh.

Feedback in business is crucial to growing and improving. It’s beneficial for any business to take a closer look at what is working and what could use improvement on a regular basis. But how do you do that? Where do you start?

Today we are excited to share a guest post by Kyle Chipman, who coordinates process and brand content management at Chipman Design Architecture, a leading architecture and interior design firm. As one of the early adopters of RealtimeBoard, Kyle shared some of the techniques that help him reduce the time his team spends on figuring out a seating plan at the office from a couple of weeks to less than two hours.