Customer service is no longer considered as a cost centre, but rather an engine for business growth.It goes on to describe in what ways shifts in technology are influencing customer service, how AI can help with common customer queries, the need for automation, and the importance of structured data. It ends by offering advice to companies regarding how they can embrace these trends to stay ahead in 2024.
Today’s customer use the interned and the FAQs to solve a problem or learn about a new product by themselves before even calling a support professional. Every year, you will come across more than a dozen online resources to learn everything.
AI-Driven Automation
Customer support teams can enhance their efforts using AI to scale up support, answer straightforward queries, free up agents to handle more complex issues, and even ‘learn’ from existing data to create new insights, helping businesses maximise customer support with previously undreamed-of efficiency.
This is even leading 65 per cent of C-level support execs to re-evaluate their existing tech stacks for new tools, platforms and software.
A lot of customers nowadays prefer to use self-service tools, like a chatbot or virtual assistant, to book and track appointments in a local messaging app of their choice. Thanks to the use of video-based communication, support services have also improved, as customer satisfaction levels have gone up. As more and more companies recognised the potential of catering to a global audience, providing multilingual customer support has become a necessity. It is a great way of building trust, expanding revenue streams and improving brand associations – and managing all of this complexity using AI has become indispensable. Brands now have the capability to triage enquires based on severity and prioritise the ones that need urgent attention by automatically routing them to agents for processing.
Self-Service
Now, customers expect and like brands that provide more self-service options, so that customers can solve problems for themselves, freeing up the support agents for more difficult requests.
Lower complexity questions (such as enquiries about login or payment) can be delegated to effective self-service tools. Increase the uplift of channels that help you get closer to customers in a higher value journey, like proactive outbound calls to high value customers.
Make self-service more accessible to customers by pinpointing customer issues through analytics tools, survey information, and social media. Then group the help topics and build search capabilities with tags or keywords so that the search engine can anticipate users’ search queries and display results.
Adding video support to your services will give your customers the possibility to see and hear you in person, so to say. This can also prevent common misunderstandings among parties particularly for technical companies that work in industries where a product demonstration or a troubleshooting session can be performed by your customers via video calling.
AR & VR
When it comes to increasing brand loyalty and facilitating customers’ experience to the full, nothing beats the immersive customer experience. Indeed, the greatest way your business can promote and support its customers in 2024 is by way of featuring them in personalised virtual interactions.
your team won’t only be able to create memorable experiences for your customers, they can be ready to deal with customer feedback when a problem arises. This can be achieved through automated quality assurance solutions such as Zendesk QA (previously Klaus). Through Zendesk QA you’ll be able to collect customer feedback while they’re interacting with your business and receive reports on any issues that need to be addressed.
The third trend that’s worth watching for 2024 is this: create a space of empathy and emotional intelligence of all the customers in your team. In this way, you will train employees to use the tools they need to deal with difficult situations.
Also, teach them the process on how to take their jobs effectively. On the other hand, encourage your staff members to attend conferences or any events related to CX that could boost their capacity and promote knowledge sharing or exchange.
Human Touch
Within that day, they must have collected complaints from each other. Yes, three cheers for artificial intelligence and the enhanced power of self-service, but what these announcements do not dwell on is the fact that empathy must lie beneath any effective response to a customer’s complaint. As such, enhancing empathetic skills for support staff must be one of 2024’s leading trends for better customer engagement.
Expectation of customised mobile experience is growing See successful companies are continuously striving to extend mobile customer support in both web and app to make it more personalised for the humanised support including video calls for one-to-one personalised conversation and more customised ways to tackle the problem which increases the value of communication and enhance the efficiency of solving the problem.
A further trend we can follow is focused on proactive customer support. With predictive analytics enabling companies to anticipate problems in advance, businesses can nip bad experiences in the bud and prevent customers from getting annoyed – an approach which is perfectly calibrated to engender greater customer satisfaction in the long term. Chatbots and other automated solutions can also reduce response times in the first place, so that agents no longer have to wait until the queue has reduced before tackling more in-depth and complex customer queries. When businesses use digital tools to respond instantly and appear to maintain superior standards, they’re setting themselves up for success.
