Customer Service Trends to Look Out For
While things have drastically improved for businesses around the world regarding the pandemic, many of the customer service alterations made over the past two years will be here to stay in the long term.
Large investments have been made to make customer service platforms more automated for customers, allowing organisations to reserve agents for more important issues.
Discussed below are some of the main customer service trends to look out for over the next few months as activity levels continue to get back to pre-pandemic levels.
Self Service
Before a customer even needs to get assistance from any agent, self service tools should be provided where possible.
Portals allowing customers to easily address their own queries could greatly alleviate pressure on customer service staff. This’ll also save time for the customer and streamline simple processes, allowing agents to focus on more pressing issues.
Self service solutions are becoming the preferred method for customer service. Not only do these service portals provide customers with a faster solution to their queries, but it also means that customers will ultimately be less frustrated as they aren’t being left on hold, transferred or waiting for agents to fix simple issues.
Video Support
Face-to-face video support options are becoming a more common channel being used to provide a high level of customer service.
Video support is typically a premium form of customer service that comes with enterprise level service accounts.
With tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams becoming more familiar to the general population on desktop and mobile, the ability to have a one-to-one video call can help provide the most comprehensive service possible, especially with screensharing being an option.
Simple video tutorials being made available on your organisation’s website covering a broad range of support topics is another great way of ensuring simple enquiries can be answered without the need for human interaction.
Chatbots
As discussed in a previous blog post, chatbots have become one of the primary methods a brand interacts with a customer for standard support or simple queries. Chatbots are great at handling customer inquiries without the need for a human rep
It’s important to not rely on chatbots, as they’re often quite limited in their capabilities. Providing an option to escalate a query to a human agent should always be provided.
Not only can chatbots be enabled on a brand’s website, but they can also be enabled on social media and messaging services such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Twitter.
Research indicates that nearly 40% of internet users worldwide prefer interacting with chatbots over online reps.
Single Customer View
With a Single Customer View, your organisation’s customer service department can get a far better idea of who the customer is they’re interacting with. A Single Customer View allows your organisation to see variables like demographics, past orders, average purchase value, location, for every individual customer, at a glance.
Customer service agents that are able to have easy access to all previous customer interaction data will be better equipped to deal with any new problems they may face.
A one size fits all approach to customer service isn’t as effective as it used to be. Customers expect organisations to provide a more personalised experience when interacting with agents.
A Single Customer View makes it even easier for organisations to provide a personalised experience for customers.
Are you interested in improving your customer service solutions? If so, make sure to contact us today on +353 1 8041298, or click on the link below to be brought to our contact form!
