Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Any type of career a person chooses will require developing a relevant skill set. Sometimes it’s largely a matter of gaining a pertinent body of knowledge—doctors need to learn as much about the health and medical fields as possible, for instance. People who choose to work in customer-facing roles have to learn a set of skills that are as much about honing personality traits as learning facts. Working with customers can be immensely rewarding for people who enjoy helping others.

When someone tells you they spent hours on the phone with customer service, it’s usually a horror story. We all know the tropes of the genre—torturously long waits, endless transfers, inescapable hold music... But at Zendesk, some of our support agents take pride in their longest customer calls.

As of October 15, 2020, Mattermost Extended Support Release (ESR) version 5.19 is no longer supported. If any of your servers are not on ESR 5.25 or later, upgrading immediately is required. With our simple upgrade steps, it takes only a few minutes. Extended Support Releases are releases that will receive backports for high severity or high-impact security fixes for the length of their lifecycle.

This article is all about knowledge bases, what they are, and what you can learn from the best ones. By the end of the article, you will know what the best knowledge base examples are, what makes them great, and how to get started. Let’s dive in.

In the past six months, the world—and work—has changed dramatically. Priorities have shifted, teams that once sat together everyday are distributed, and ways of operating are different. As an organization, how do you maintain alignment between people and teams in this new environment? How do you sustain clarity about what your goals are and how to achieve them? Objectives and key results (OKRs) are one way of creating clarity in an organization.

High performing customer experience teams are more than twice as likely as underperforming teams to be taking an omnichannel approach, according to Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report, 2020. Yet Zendesk findings also revealed that only 35 percent of Benchmark companies have an omnichannel strategy in place. This gap represents a sweet spot where businesses can rise above their competition and differentiate on the basis of customer experience.

The sheer volume of information being created on a daily basis by the average business is staggering. In fact, it’s been estimated that more data has been created in the last two years alone than in the entirety of human history leading up to that point.

A contact center and a call center are essentially the same thing, right? Well, yes and no. Call centers only field phone calls, whereas a contact center offers a variety of other ways for customers to reach out for support: email, chat, self-service, messaging apps, and social media. Why is it important to understand the difference? While a call center might work for your business, chances are your customers will be better served via a contact center.

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase customer value? You might think about money—giving customers a good price for a quality product. And 20 years ago, you’d have been right. But today, customer value encompasses much more. Today’s buyers don’t just care about a product’s price or even its quality. They also prioritize brand experiences.

The main focus of B2B companies is to offer unmatched support to their customers. Failing to do so will increase the likeliness of customer churn and also damage their reputation.That’s why an increasing number of businesses are leveraging AI every year to enhance their brand and provide a level of support required to stay competitive. In Part 1 of this series we introduced the first two of five ways AI is impacting the B2B customer support sector. Here are next three ways.