Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Our customers are always looking for ways to work faster and more effectively inside Mattermost. As a remote-first company, we spend most of our time collaborating inside Mattermost, and we’d like to think we’ve learned a thing or two about how to use Mattermost productively over the years. Here are some of our favorite tips and tricks for getting things done on Mattermost. We hope these examples help your team achieve similar productivity gains.

In Part 1 of this blog series, we introduces why it’s more important than ever to revisit how to keep customer support teams engaged with each other and what tools will help enable collaboration and keep agents motivated and excited about providing excellent support to their customers. Now in Part 2, we dive into tips for enabling collaboration and engagement among support team members.

The new rules for customer service outsourcing in a changing world Customer service teams have seen an unprecedented level of disruption this year. Some have had surges in ticket volume, while others have seen business plummet. Agents have to do more with less, all while they’re adjusting to working from home. Regardless of your specific situation, you may be considering customer service outsourcing as a potential solution.

2020 is a uniquely transformative year. Prompted by a global pandemic, we’ve been forced to change many things about how we live, work and relate. For most businesses, this means a rapid and comprehensive shift toward remote work. While more than half of all employees participated in a rapid transition to remote work, it’s clear that this is more than just a temporary change.

Many companies are very skeptical about remote work – most do not understand how to control employees at a distance and at the same time maintain a productive working rhythm. In 2009, IBM devised a policy to allow 40 percent of its employees worldwide to work remotely. But in 2017, as the company’s revenue start slumping, the management pulled back its decades-old remote work policy. IBM said that the marginalized feel makes remote employees less loyal.

Change is certainly tough on any organization — the scope, scale or specific nature of that change doesn’t actually matter. Some changes are major — like with digital transformation initiatives. When an organization decides that they are investing in a new information management system, for example, it can represent a change to the fundamental way people work — a positive change, but one that requires an adjustment, nonetheless.

“Right now, you as leaders have only one option: lead your way out of this challenge.” That’s what Mike Caracalas, leadership coach, executive consultant, and author of Ten Strategies to Get Better Results with People advised when we sat down with him last Spring. At that time, companies were scrambling to get their employees adapted to the remote work environments. It was new, exciting in both good and challenging ways.

Engineering and operations leads from Vodafone, Solarisbank and Veepee share insights for developing a DevOps culture

At Asana, we’re big fans of reducing work about work—that pesky 60% of our workday that we spend on rote or duplicative tasks. Think of every time you’ve searched a document for a specific data point, spent precious time chasing for the right stakeholder or approver, or sat through a status meeting that could have been a written report. For team leads, reporting on work and sharing progress metrics is just another facet of work about work.

A knowledge base is a self-service centralized repository of readily available information about your business, its products or services, and industry-relevant topics. From the customer’s perspective, an external (or public) knowledge base is a go-to resource for them to learn everything they want about your company. For instance, your external knowledge base may incorporate FAQs, getting-started guides, how-to articles, feature updates, and so on meant for instant self-help.