Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

It’s no secret that when it comes to volume, text has given way to visual content on social media platforms. Primarily visual social networks such as Instagram and YouTube continue to acquire more daily users1. These users are collectively uploading billions of visual content every day. Moreover, social networks with algorithmic feeds, such as Facebook and Twitter, have been prioritizing visual content over text-only content, which in turn earns image-based posts higher engagement.

Customers are growing increasingly savvy and as they do, their needs are changing. What you provide your customer with will obviously have to account for this change, and evolve accordingly. In fact, if you don’t make changes, your customers may end up leaving, especially considering your competitors do make changes to their support strategy to address the changing tides. Some of these factors are fairly small and make use of existing tools.

You decide to buy a phone. Do you go for the phone of your dreams even though it’s beyond your budget, or would you settle for a functional, but less-ostentatious one that fits into your budget? Do you wait for special offers so you can avail a discount, or get the device on credit? These are the kind of behavioral indicators that decide the types of customers and what aspect of a product/service appeals to them.

Two of the biggest customer support technology trends for 2019 are bots and omnichannel support. Bots are picking up traction as more companies are using them to help customers find information, to route queries to the right department, and to carry out transactions that don’t require a human agent.

In the past, support was just answering phone calls coming into a call bank. The customer didn’t expect anything other than getting the answer to their question, and as long as they did, they were satisfied. However, as support has grown more prolific, the bar for customer loyalty has become higher as well. Being able to measure and understand the quality of your support responses has also become more important.

Welcome to our monthly round-up, where we share with you some of the latest additions to the Freshdesk Marketplace. This month, we’re happy to announce that we now have 700+ apps on the Freshworks Marketplace across three products – Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshsales. There are more exciting updates coming your way, but let us start off by looking at the new apps that have entered the marketplace!

Your new gadget didn’t arrive this morning from that big online retailer as promised, and you need to contact them. Where do you go first: a phone call? your laptop? Maybe less likely, text them? Ping them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram?

Customers shouldn’t need to know how your customer support channels work to get help. They don’t need to know that Twitter feeds into your help desk and that your chat channel offers self-service solutions using a friendly chatbot. Customers, in other words, aren’t interested in your omnichannel solutions. What customers need is to be able to get help easily, when they want it.

Consider all the different ways humans have come to rely on machines to expand their abilities. From calculators to cell phones, industrialization to robotics, humans have been able to achieve more than they ever have before, due to adopting machines. Machine learning is the next frontier in using machines to work more efficiently. And it’s particularly helpful in optimizing customer support. What is machine learning?