Think of an example of poor customer service you have received recently. You may have shared the experience with a friend or colleague as a warning or funny story, who may have passed this on to another in turn. This “Chinese Whispers” effect is dangerous, as word-of-mouth marketing remains a cornerstone of lead generation for many organisations.

It’s 3 a.m. and you’re up again tossing and turning, a stampede of wild thoughts running through your head about your latest work issue. Maybe it’s a project gone south, a recurring problem rearing its head again, or a difficult relationship with a coworker. Either way, it’s up to you to calm your mind, talk yourself through your worries, and get a good night’s sleep.

No project manager is an island. A project is a collaborative effort. Even though you’re in charge of managing it, in order for the project to be successful you still need to rely on, work with, and report back to other people. Throughout this guide, we’ve been talking a lot about the various people involved in taking a project from idea to execution: your team, other departments within the organization, leadership, clients, and more. These people are your project’s stakeholders.

Reducing the time it takes to resolve a customer issue makes everyone happier. Getting there, especially if you’re aiming to shave minutes off your average service time, requires a smart and laser-like focus in helping customer support reps to be more productive.

A quality customer experience requires a dedicated sales team and support team. Sales reps start conversations with leads, and support reps continue those conversations once those leads become customers. But considering the way in which the former group passes the torch to the latter, it’s worth asking: Why aren’t more sales reps and support agents having conversations with one another?

As you embark on a new decade, you might want to take some of these apps along in your quest to wow your customers. These apps will not only ease your workflow to let you focus on what matters the most — customer experience — but also help you get more efficient at your job.

Recently, working remotely has grown dramatically in popularity primarily because it gives workers a lot more freedom and saves companies money. However, is this just a trend that will soon dissipate, or is it here to stay? The numbers speak for themselves. Remote work will soon become the new norm, as per a report from GetApp the number of people working remotely on a weekly basis has grown by nearly 400% in the last decade.

Mailchimp is an end to end marketing platform that started as an email marketing tool alternative to the expensive email software in the early 2000s. The goal was to provide small businesses access to technological resources and tools to grow like their larger counterparts. Today, it has evolved into a robust customer relationship management system that understands patterns in customer data and uses that insight to target the appropriate audience.

There is no shortage of software positioned as being staples for the everyday business professional. From accounting to procurement to reporting, businesses need a variety of software to keep themselves running. Not only is it difficult sourcing all of the tools needed to cover all aspects of their operations due to the sheer number of options, but it is also difficult getting all of these pieces working together seamlessly.