With more and more people encouraged or required to work from home these days, we reached out to some of our remote-work veterans for their insights on staying productive within their domestic domiciles. Q: What are your essential tools for communication, collaboration, and outreach (phone, email, Teams, WebEx, etc.) Brandon Black, Vice President and GM of Supply Chain: Staying connected with your team and customers alike is essential when working from home.

According to research by small business marketing platform, FiveStars, customer visits to local businesses in the U.S. and Canada dropped by 70 percent between March 8 and April 12. It doesn’t take a statistician to realize that losing that many customers in one month represents a serious blow. But not every mom and pop shop is collapsing. With a significant amount of determination, creativity, and reskilling, some small businesses have found unique ways to reach their customers despite the chaos.

With every personality assessment I’ve taken, it turns out I’m a scary amount extrovert. I enjoy being around people, I de-stress by being with people, and I rarely spend time alone. My work environment changed drastically amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, where I found myself working from home entirely and my social life becoming non-existent (hooray social distancing!). In the time I’ve spent alone, here are a few things that have helped me stay sane while working remotely.

Software developers, students, and a few sea creatures have spoken. GitKraken is the most popular Git GUI in the world—named the most used graphical user interface for Git in the 2020 State of the Software Development Report. You might, however, be on the fence; maybe you’re Git-curious, but not sure whether to ‘commit’ (sorry) to a GUI. After all, there are several out there. Which one should you choose?

For many companies, Elastic included, wikis developed with Confluence are a critical source of content, procedures, policies, and plenty of other important info, spanning teams across the entire organization. But sometimes finding a particular nugget of information can be tricky, especially when you’re not exactly sure where that information was located. Was it in the wiki? In a Word doc? In Salesforce? A GitHub issue? Somewhere else?

In the middle of January 2020, I got a notification about the upcoming Mattermost hackathon that was being hosted on the HackerEarth platform. I checked out the hackathon page but I forgot about it the next day when I went to work. One morning, I was surfing the internet sipping my coffee and landed on a website that discussed why employee churn rate is high in organizations.

Most of us here at BugSplat spend the majority of our day at our computer. If you are reading this post, there's a good chance that you probably do too. And, like us, you probably expect that computers are just supposed to work for you. However, in my experience, this close relationship we share with our machines just expands the realm of possible annoyances we encounter day-in and day-out.

Contact or Call... Center or Centre... Call them what you will, but, wow, we’re calling them and we’re counting on them now more than ever! The dramatic shift to remote everything has flooded Contact Centers with more calls, while also requiring providers to adopt remote, distributed architectures.