If you find yourself in the position of needing to expand your support team, one important factor will be whether you want your agents to work from a central location or a dispersed workforce. Both options will have pluses and minuses, so there’s no answer that will apply to everyone. Rather, it depends on the specifics of your organization: Do you need to provide 24/7 support? Do you anticipate random spikes in support request volume?

Freshworks, the global leader in customer engagement cloud software, today announced the launch of Freshconnect, a new contextual collaboration solution for support and sales teams. Immediately available to Freshdesk and Freshsales users, the new collaboration tool makes it easy for customer-facing and internal teams to work more efficiently with each other on customer issues and sales deals.

Providing good customer support is a team game. Large or small, established enterprise or scrappy startup, support agents need to collaborate and work together to get answers. For example, customers often contact e-commerce vendors to check where their packages are. Support agents do not always have enough context to get this answer immediately. These agents check with their Inventory team to see what was ordered by the customer.

When it comes to the customer service industry, one of the most useful tools a support agent can have at their fingertips is a good customer service software. Now, the most obvious reason for this is how a helpdesk software improves an agent’s efficiency. This is because the software organizes the tickets an agent receives and expedites the response process. One of the most obvious advantages gained by using a customer support software is the ease with which you can track the status of a ticket.

Living in an era where there’s seemingly a statistic for everything, it can be difficult to truly understand the real value of each data point. You may look at your email count for the day, see it’s in the triple digits, and say “wow, I’ve had a busy day”. But on closer examination, half of the emails are holiday junk and a quarter are from a vendor who can’t get meeting invites right, leaving only the usual amount of “real” emails in your inbox.

Technological advancements have created new ways to optimize customer service and increase sales. One of the most exciting developments over the past decade has been the live chat feature that has become a staple for most websites. With this feature, customers can ask questions before buying or get assistance with a product without the frustration of long wait times.

Working with distributed teams adds an additional layer of complexity for a manager. Keeping your remote team involved can be challenging. To be successful, many of us are constantly looking for new ways to engage remote employees. One of the best solutions? Try introducing team-building activities.