A few years ago, I thought design meant how good something looks. Whether it’s the streaming app that I use to binge watch my favorite TV shows, or the E-commerce website where I get the best deals, how good the interface looks seemed to drive my choices. But today I can tell you—I’ve never been more wrong. As I interacted with more and more products for my day-to-day tasks, I realized that aesthetics isn’t the only factor contributing to the end user experience.

It’s the whisper on every store owner’s lips, and the shout rising from every eager shopaholic across the country: the Black Friday weekend is coming. November 23rd is fast approaching, with Cyber Monday hot on its heels. Last year consumers spent $19 billion over the Black Friday weekend. And on Cyber Monday alone online spending reached a record breaking $6.59 billion.

The Freshworks Marketplace continues to grow from strength to strength, we’ve added close to 30 new apps and integrations to the platform with more being added on almost a daily basis. Here’s a quick look at some of the apps that were added to the Freshdesk Marketplace in the past month.

Every business has their own unique mission and vision and a unique set of products or services. But they all share one common goal: drive more sales. And this is a goal that requires effort from every department and team within a company. Even employees that don’t directly sell to customers have an impact on this goal.

As Freshdesk users, you constantly provide us with great feedback as our product evolves. Your feedback influences every decision we make as a product team. We recently visited some of our most popular feature requests and we’re excited to be introducing features that many of you had been waiting for. Starting from setting up your account, supervising your team every day, to scaling your support team, working with Freshdesk becomes easier with these feature additions.

In today’s digital world, almost everyone knows about voice commands thanks to Google Assistant and iPhone Siri. It’s becoming more and more common for people to call a friend, open an app, or search for a café using voice commands. In addition to phone-based voice assistants, Amazon has introduced an exclusive product named Alexa that can play music, do online shopping, initiate payment transaction and make your home smart solely based on your voice commands.

Global AI spending is exploding. According to current trends, it will go from $2 billion in 2018 to over $7.3 billion in just the next four years1. Many publications have proclaimed it as the “next big thing” in the business world. They seem to believe that it’s poised to change the way companies interact with customers altogether. They’re less clear, though, on how businesses can actually use it. But today, one of the best uses of AI is customer service.

Are the support team, website and Freshdesk portal ready to handle the customer influx of the holiday season? That’s the question we ask ourselves every year before the peak period starts. During the holiday season, the incoming traffic may increase by 10 times, whereas ticket volumes can increase by up to 50%, making the life of your agents exhausting and stressful.

Are support agents happy with Freshdesk Mint? This was the most pressing question we had on our minds when we introduced Freshdesk Mint a year back. Over months, we spoke to our customers to gather feedback on what people liked and disliked. We were delighted to learn that the overall feedback for Freshdesk Mint was very positive. But we didn’t just stop with customer interviews. Using Heap, an analytics tool, we analyzed product adoption to learn from our success and our mistakes.

Customer support can easily become a huge money pit instead of a tool for building revenue, no matter the industry you’re in. But if you’re a SaaS company, you know just how crucial it can be to keep costs down. Especially if you’re just getting started and your customer base isn’t large enough to support your operational costs just yet.