CES has always been at the forefront of revolutionary technology and this year marked the event's 50th anniversary. In 1969, ARPANET, a forerunner of the internet made its initial appearance at the event along with the first personal computer and BETA VCR. Keeping with this tradition, this year was no exception for innovation, especially in the IoT domain.

Excelling in customer support of any kind requires an entire toolkit of skills. Not only must service agents and technicians know the product inside out, they must also have the people skills necessary to understand customer needs, and elicit their trust in helping to find a resolution and fulfill those needs.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is making it a very exciting time to be alive. At the time of writing, we’re witnessing IoT rapidly transform the world around us and fundamentally change the way we interact with it. It’s changing everything from the homes we live in, to the cities around us, to the SMBs that serve as the backbone of our economy.

Being a developer isn’t easy. Of course, what snags, pitfalls, and cons there are to the trade fall very much into the #FirstWorldProblems bucket, but that doesn’t mean working on any given project can’t drive you to the brink of desperation and despair.

In today’s globalized world, changing demographics have led to a greater diversity of languages being adopted within many countries. 

At AppHelp, we thrive on creating show-stopping customer support technology for some of the world’s best-known brands, and we know that none of it would be possible without the people that make up the AppHelp team.

Change is occurring at a phenomenal pace in the telecommunications industry. 

UBER started as a simple idea. Press a button and a car comes to pick you up. The technology simply allows one human- the driver to help another- the passenger.

Technology is evolving at an incredible pace. Just take a look at this 1991 RadioShack ad in which every piece of featured technology can now be replaced with just your smartphone. 

On June 6th, 7th and 8th, over 500 delegates including service providers, vendors, regulators and press convened in Toronto to discuss and debate the key issues impacting the Canadian telecoms sector.

Two of the top ten IT challenges facing SMBs today are; budget constraints and app and data integration, according to SMB IT Market Research and Industry Analyst firm, Techaisle.com. 

As a follow-up to one of our most-read blog posts of all-time: 3 Pro Tips for Effective Live Chat Tech Support, we wanted to share some of our tips for providing phone support experiences that live up to the call of duty.

Our current interns, Jesse and Riley, are coming to the end of their four month work term here at AppHelp.

In today’s subscription-based economy, service providers are focusing more than ever on minimizing churn rates and increasing adoption of their products.

The demand for Office 365™ among SMBs moving to the cloud continues to rise with over 50,000 new small and medium-sized businesses signing up every month!

When AppHelp was founded in 1997, most small and medium-sized businesses didn’t have easy access to the Internet, and their business technology consisted of cash registers or phone systems. 

The need to provide excellent customer experiences has indisputably never been as important as it is in today’s consumer-driven world.

AppHelp is on the lookout for a highly passionate and creative UX/UI Designer to join our growing team!

In order for businesses to enthusiastically adopt service providers’ SaaS offerings, the right amount of human assistance is required at multiple points along their journey to the cloud.

At AppHelp, we deliver hundreds of amazing support experiences to technology users every day. 

Staches are fun but muscles are better.

Three months and thousands of support calls later, this summer’s Windows 10 rollout offers some simple lessons on how organizations can head off most OS upgrade issues.

An amazing user experience (UX) is an integral part of any successful tech product.  UX design done right delivers optimal experiences at every touch-point, from marketing to sale, to device setup to use.

I’ve been to several IoT conferences and after a while, the predictions about how many billions of connected devices will be on the market by 2020, or how the time is now to start monetizing on the IoT opportunity, can get redundant. 

Tablets, Smartphones and Talking Barbies…Oh My!

The quality of support an IoT device owner receives when technical issues arise is arguably as important as the User Experience (UX) when the device is running as it should.

The one product all IoT device makers provide is really a service. It is the experience customers receive from their purchase both when the product works and when it doesn’t.

Internet-connected devices have been around for decades now and that connection has shifted from wired connected devices to wireless enabled devices.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
– Jorge Luis Borges

We recently ended the Reveal service that we first launched as a private beta just under 2 years ago.

Internet security has been an integral part of our history and our culture at AppHelp, so it was a real treat for me to attend the RSA Conference last month, the world’s largest info security event.

How big are the problems in an enterprise knowledge base?

We all have different tolerances for neatness and order. There are the obsessive cleaners, those who thrive in a bit of chaos and disorder, others that hoard.

Enterprise communication, collaboration and knowledge management markets are being deeply reshaped by consumer experiences.

I originally published this essay on Medium and have made slight updates to it here. It was intended as a written version of the talk I gave at the University of Waterloo for students picking a company for their next internship.

Migration = Migraines.

Search engines and social tools have transformed how we access, share, discover and judge information. 

Connecting customers and businesses with mobile messaging creates experiences that are human and effective.

If you are in the tech support industry, chances are you’ve attended a conference, webcast or read a whitepaper talking about how the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) will impact (and complicate) customer service delivery.

AppHelp just hosted its 8th internal hackathon – where ideas were coded into reality.

When you’re solving new, complex problems, it’s critical to get the right people working on issues together in order to get to the right resolution faster.

In the midst of the tumultuous process of filling out job applications and going to interviews, I shaped together what I wanted to gain from my first work internship. 

Our Social Apptivism event is just around the corner!

For this customer showcase, we interviewed Josh Robbins, an independent HIV social media activist and blogger from Nashville who used our SupportKit-powered “Ethanifier” code to create the ASK HIV app.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work for different types of companies: a financial institution, a large publishing company and an insurance company. Each of them had a different perspective on IT.

We live in a world where people love to share. Everything. Ultrasound pictures, bathroom selfies- the fact that they’re eating a bacon sandwich right now. 

As a software engineering student, interning at AppHelp has been a great experience both for my professional development as much as my personal growth.

The rising complexity of interconnected technology environments in the multi-vendor landscape is a tough challenge for tech support teams.

This November marks the 4th year in which AppHelp will have a motivated and extremely “stacherrific” group of individuals raising funds for Movember.

Knowledge is power and from November 4 to 7, a tidal wave of knowledge is going to be shared at the KM World conference, which will be held at the Grand Hyatt in Washington DC.

Who’s Ethan?

More than half of knowledge management programs fail.

Controlling your support costs while maximizing customer satisfaction sounds like a trade-off, but it doesn’t have to be.

How you hire technical support agents speaks volumes about your customer service and your brand.

If you’re an Instagram user, you’ve probably seen a post tagged #ootd (outfit of the day) come across your feed.

When it comes to solving complex issues, live chat support with remote take-over has many advantages over the phone. Yet many companies still struggle to make it perform to its full potential.

I released Mugshots, my first iPhone app in January 2009, less than 6 months after the app store’s debut and months before the iPhone was even officially available in Canada. With its primitive feature set and plain design, my app earned over 200$ from sales to curious iPhone users.

With so many tech products in today’s homes that are increasingly interconnected —and not just in geek households- consumers are facing a whole new set of challenges. As a result, an increasing number of support calls stem from the complex relationships between multiple devices and services. 

Recommendation engines have become so popular we now use them every day, from book shopping to picking a movie to online dating. However, the science is still in its infancy and a lot of fine-tuning still needs to be done.

Named the most innovative smartphone of 2014, Amazon’s Fire Phone has a host of neat features that are paving the way for how people interact with their phones. More importantly, the level of service people will come to expect from their technology. With this in mind, we built Ringo – an Amazon Mayday for mobile apps.

Hackathons are not just about team-building, fun and free gourmet food. They’re a great way to push one’s limits and innovate off the beaten path.

What happens when your customers are all over the world and use a variety of different mobile phones, tablets and platforms?

Our new Reveal solution captures support agents’ web searches in Google and provides them with the most trusted  solutions to the tech support problems they’re trying to solve.  It does this by leveraging the experiences of  other agents who have already searched the web to solve similar problems.  One of the first challenges we faced with Reveal was that support agents use the web for things other than tech support as well.

Our research shows that tech support agents are increasingly peeking outside the company’s knowledge base. That’s a good thing for their customers who face a growing range of technology problems.

Google is a giant, but it’s a general-purpose giant. Several companies –including AppHelp– are providing better targeted results by developing vertical semantic search engines.

After-sales support has long been thought of as the poor cousin of sales, but building a loyal customer base can really pay off.

Welcome to our new AppHelp blog, a new space to discuss the ever-growing impact of technology support on the Customer Experience. I’d like start the conversation with a personal story that demonstrates exactly what AppHelp is all about: helping our customers deliver exceptional product support.