Now that the most of you are back from vacations from exotic and other jealousy-inducing places, it’s time to get back to impressing customers. But what should you look out for? Is 2014 that much different from 2013? Here’s what we think 2014 will look like for supporting your customers based on our internal trends survey.
- Increased demand for multi-channel and self-service channel support. You really have to be locked and loaded for this trend. Not only are customers actively looking for access to these channels but they’re also demanding consistency across these channels. Making it more difficult (and also where you can impress) is that customers are sometimes expecting unification of channels. They might email you to start a conversation but send you a tweet midway through. Just be ready for it in 2014.
- Customers might expect you to proactively notify them before problems arise. It’s natural for you to know more about your business than your customers do. If something breaks or goes wrong, you should be inclined to support customers in an outbound format. An extension of this trend is the potential to personalize outbound support messages based on your customers’ data.
- Knowing more about your customers turns support from the act of replying to the act of collaborating. More than 65% of customers with support issues are already finding solutions on their own. The role of support agents should no longer be confined to “handling” or “replying” to customer concerns. As helpdesk applications evolve to become smarter, the role of the agent should be to use that knowledge to collaborate with customers. This involves using customer data and user generated content together, provide more natural conversations, add more agility to fulfilling customer demands, and leveraging social tools more effectively.
- Support agents are not only demanding better experiences themselves but also better customer experiences. Agents who are used to disconnected and over complex tools have already demanded their solutions be more usable, intuitive, and attractive. They’re now doing the same for customers they support. Expect customer service leaders and managers to demand simplifying end user experiences by eliminating extraneous protocols such as asking for passwords and logins. This makes support agents’ lives easier and also improves service interactions.
- Good support needs good data at the right times. Providing customer service agents with up-to-date customer data is still not a high priority in many organizations. Unfortunately, this seriously dampens the ability to give reliable and consistent service. Customers who contact you a lot might receive better service while quieter customers often have longer wait times due to the inability to find data. Make this a priority in 2014.
- Customers are becoming more mobile. So should you. Prep your customer service agents to become more capable in a mobile environment. Adding value to customers in a mobile environment with personalized user experiences is going to be huge in 2014.