With the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, work-life has slowed to a crawl in most parts of the world, and remote work is the new normal. For startups and small enterprises, there are some important decisions to be made to ensure business survival in the short term. To aid that decision, here are a few tips that could prove useful.

Customer service is arguably more important than ever before. Support has emerged as a critical differentiator that now directly impacts loyalty, spending, and growing your business.

Whenever an organization decides to implement a field service solution, its immediate focus will be to remain competitive and manage their long term strategic goals. During the implementation phase, there will be multiple challenges that will make these organizations lose focus as such implementations will bring out their deficiencies in preparation, reveal process gaps and also question some of the business practices of the organization.

At Freshworks, our mission has been to help customer support teams deliver “moments of wow”, thereby enabling every business to create customers-for-life. It is the foundation for everything we do here at Freshworks. And we strive every day to deliver on that promise by continually improving our product and the customer experience.

Many of us are now working from home for the first time. In light of the global pandemic, companies have handed out laptops, closed down their offices and transitioned to being fully remote. It’s certainly not the ideal way to dip a toe into the remote workforce. However, for those of us that are lucky enough to have the opportunity, working from home means we can continue to support our customers and earn a living.

Managing a team remotely comes with its own set of pros and cons. If you’re managing a remote team for the first time, it’s easy to focus on the cons rather than the pros. You’re probably having a tough time staying on top of what everyone on your team is working on. In tandem, you’re most likely doing all you can to make sure that your team has everything they need to work conveniently.

All of us are in the expectations business now, and with customer expectations reaching an all-time high, it’s up to companies to re-invent the wheel to stay relevant and engaged. But how do you identify the right channels to engage with your customers and how do you nail it the first time? That is always the burning question!

We all know that knowledge is power. Having a colleague around, whose shoulder we could tap on and ask for help, is also something that is very powerful. However, the whole tap on the shoulder for help option hasn’t been available since most of us shifted to a work-from-home setup – the best alternative we have is reaching out to a teammate on our internal collaboration tools.

To deliver the perfect customer experience, activities such as creating efficient processes and workflows, quality management, planning shift schedules, etc. are absolutely critical. These come under the umbrella of customer service operations, a core capability that helps scale and improve the level of customer support offered by your company. So who ensures support operation tasks are ideated and executed well so that your customer service standards do not drop?

Have you ever wondered what keeps you motivated at work? Is it a word of appreciation from a colleague? Healthy competition between you and your teammates? Or a coffee-break that you spend catching up on a game or just getting a breather? Motivating factors like these work best in an office environment. However, things are different when you’re working from home.