With just a few hours left for the decade to end, you might be pondering over some of the biggest decisions you’ve had to make in the past 10 years. Whether you nailed those decisions or not, the following 10 Marketplace apps will surely set you on the path to success with your customers and agents alike.

Artificial intelligence has revolutionized customer support all over the world. Thanks to artificial intelligence, businesses have reaped the benefits of smart voice agents, instant call routing, automated email responses, and more. But with the continued popularity of social media as a channel of customer support, it only makes sense to use AI to optimize your support strategy. Here are three ways to reap the benefits of AI and automation in your social customer support –

Every business has to serve its customers – that is the basis on which a successful business runs. But it is also true that businesses have to serve their employees. If a company takes from their employees and gives nothing back, it’s going to leave behind a staff of embittered angry individuals with a sky-high turnover rate.

The life of a support agent is no simple job. Each day they face a ton of queries varying from ‘how-to’ questions that only need a canned response, to complicated issues that require to be sorted out with the help of different teams. The complexity and volume of queries notwithstanding, customers are increasingly expecting immediate fixes to their problems, so much so that 53% of customers expect brands to reply to their queries within an hour of contact.

We’ve all been there – a recent purchase arrived late, you got something completely different than what you ordered, or it came damaged. You’re not happy, and rightly so – you just spent some hard-earned cash on that new product. Time to go to the computer, write a frustration-fueled email and give them a piece of your mind – you’ll never shop from them again!

It’s no secret that how well you serve customers will define your company’s long term success. In fact, great customer service leads to better customer loyalty, higher revenue, and lower costs. But if you have to focus on the customer and become a service-oriented organization, it’s not merely enough to attain a passable grade. You have to strive for service excellence to reap its benefits.

If you’ve spent more than a week in the business world, you’ve no doubt heard the term ROI, or return on investment. Essentially, it’s a way to measure the value, or impact, of money spent. With the need for making data-driven decisions a cornerstone of successful businesses, tracking the ROI identifies unsuccessful strategies and validates successful ones. For most business units measuring ROI can be straightforward.

Managing remote field teams from your desk as a helpdesk agent or service dispatcher can be hard. Communication can be difficult between teams, misunderstandings are common and getting everyone – both helpdesk agents and field technicians – on the same page regarding customer issues can be very hard. When we studied field service providers and their workflows, we found that they often ran into these three problems.

When you think of companies that offer great customer service, the best examples are not one-off moments of companies going out of the way to delight a customer. Instead, the best examples of customer-focused brands are those that have carved a name for themselves by caring genuinely for their customers and consistently putting their customers first. Sales and marketing efforts can help your company onboard customers.

Outsourcing customer service can help you save money, scale your team fast, and provide round-the-clock assistance to your customers. However, building and managing a team of remote customer service representatives has its own unique challenges, and it’s important to do it right. Here are five best practices that you should keep in mind – #1 Hire the Right People You already know that a great customer service representative must be patient, empathetic, and likable.