Customer service trends that winning organizations should follow
Staying alert to the latest customer service trends ensures your organization is ready to meet changing customer expectations.
Customer loyalty is eroding due to the COVID-19 pandemic, social impact, and the ease of brand switching. More than ever, organizations need to understand changes in the customer service experience to increase customer satisfaction and meet growing customer demands.
A 2023 Gartner study found that 58% of leaders ranked business growth as one of their most important goals. Customer service is an essential component of this strategy. Good customer service can increase brand loyalty, while bad customer service can harm customer retention. Delivering a great customer experience is the best way to maintain your organization’s competitive advantage.
7 new customer service trends your organization should prioritize
Great customer service requires an organization to meet customer needs and expectations wherever they occur.
1. Increasing importance of omnichannel support
Customer engagement continues to occur across multiple channels. Therefore, customer success requires your customer support team to interact with customers through call centers, text messaging, social media, and email. Organizations must allocate appropriate resources to each channel based on customer preferences.
2. Shift to self-service
By building content libraries and knowledge bases, organizations are increasingly seeing customers prefer self-service options over interacting with support representatives. Some customers want human interaction through a phone call or message, while others prefer to solve problems on their own if possible.
3. The emergence of artificial intelligence
New technologies will drive the future of customer service. Using artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to change the way every department in an organization operates, but this change may be most powerful in customer support. For example, organizations are now infusing chatbots (or bots) with generative AI to increase the success rate of interactions.
Additionally, organizations can use machine learning to better analyze historical data about customer issues to create more valuable FAQs, improve call scripts, and identify new issues that organizations can proactively address. Machine learning helps create smarter workflows, so customer service representatives can better leverage technology to resolve customer issues more efficiently.
4. Use simple automation
Instead of requiring customers to speak to a customer service agent, many customer service tasks can and should be automated. For example, a simple chatbot can often simplify the process of returning defective products. Alternatively, customers can fill out a form that asks a few questions and returns answers such as a price quote or request for additional information. These simple automations save time while responding to your customers’ needs. No need to call customer support or wait for a representative.
5. The growth of messaging-based customer service
In the 2010s, customers gathered on social media to post questions or concerns and communicate with an organization’s customer service representatives. The rise of messaging apps like WhatsApp and SMS-based customer service is the next step in advancements for consumers interested in asynchronous communication with their organizations. While some customers always prefer to speak on the phone with a live representative from your customer service team, many more customers text or message your support team as their preferred method of interacting with your organization.
Most organizations need to build an infrastructure that can respond to texts and messages in near real time to meet customer expectations for response times. Messaging also allows organizations to find great opportunities to follow up with customers to keep them happy with the product.
6. Desire for personalized experiences
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools now allow organizations to track their customers, habits, and purchase history more effectively than ever before. They have built an impressive repository of customer data over time. By using technologies like machine learning that can more easily and quickly parse this data in real time, organizations can build more personalized experiences across the entire customer journey.
For example, a brand can email exclusive offers based on a customer’s preferences, or send a free product or discount code on the customer’s birthday. Customer service representatives can also access information about the customers they are helping and use that information to improve customer relationships.
7. The need for active support
Organizations interested in delivering great customer experiences can no longer wait for customer feedback. Instead, you should invest in ways to reach your customers before problems arise and ensure they are satisfied with your product and using it correctly. For example, an organization can email customers tutorials to help them understand how to use a product.
Monitor and act on key trends to gain competitive advantage.
To provide exceptional customer service, organizations must stay up to date on key trends to meet customer expectations. As more organizations adopt advanced technologies like generative AI and machine learning, those that fail to do so will fall behind the competition.
It’s important to remember that customers interact with a variety of companies throughout their lives and can easily distinguish between companies that provide excellent customer service and those that undervalue or underinvest in their services.
A majority of service professionals (60%) say customer expectations are higher than before the pandemic. Therefore, poor customer service is a major obstacle to business growth and customer retention. CEOs understand this, which is why they rank customer service as a top priority for consolidating generative AI investments, according to the IBV CEO’s Guide to Generative AI for Customer Service.
For more than a decade, IBM has been helping companies apply trusted AI in this space, with generative AI dramatically transforming customer and field service through its ability to understand complex questions and generate more human-like conversational responses. It has additional potential to do so.
IBM Consulting® provides end-to-end consulting capabilities in experience design and services, data and AI transformation. Using IBM watsonx™, the enterprise AI and data platform, and IBM watsonx™ Assistant, the market-leading conversational AI solution, we partner with clients through their AI value creation process to advance conversational AI, improve and optimize the agent experience. . Call center operations and data.
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