Customer support is a pivotal factor in driving exceptional brand experiences and boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty. This is why 80% of companies plan to increase their investment in customer support.
In addition to this, businesses are also investing in advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) to provide personalized experiences to today’s tech-savvy buyers—the millennials and the Gen-Z.
And it is working! Research indicates that leaders in personalization have a 1.5 times higher customer loyalty rate than their peers.
In short, modern customer support is an ever-evolving landscape—and if you want to provide your customers with a transformative buying experience that helps you morph a mere transaction into an enduring relationship, you need to keep a finger on the pulse of the latest trends and tools reshaping the realm of customer service.
In this blog, we will highlight both, along with some challenges and considerations in customer service impacting businesses in 2024. Let’s get started.
Top 5 Emerging Trends in Customer Support
Here are the five most popular customer support statistics and trends dictating the industry in 2024:
- Rise of Gen-AI Chatbots
60% of CX leaders believe AI will significantly improve customer experience, mainly through chatbots. These AI-powered chatbots, especially generative AI models, are set to dominate in 2024, offering natural, brand-aligned responses across live chats, emails, and feedback.
These chatbots enable personalized service, from product inquiries to post-purchase updates, and feature specialized models for various customer experience aspects. Gen-AI chatbots can tailor experiences based on your consumer history and preferences. Also, they can be integrated across various digital platforms for consistent service, ensuring personalized attention without compromising control or consistency.
Lastly, incorporating a softphone can extend the capabilities of these chatbots, allowing for seamless communication across digital channels to provide personalized service.
- Personalization in Customer Service
Personalization in customer service is now essential, with 66% of consumers expecting brands to anticipate their needs. AI enables companies to deliver tailored experiences, considering customer preferences and history. This results in more efficient services, higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and improved revenue through better retention.
Personalized interactions, such as predictive analysis and automated ticket routing, allow preemptive problem-solving and specialized support, strengthening customer-brand relationships and increasing happiness and loyalty.
- Omnichannel Support
The digital age is an age of convenience, and customers today expect you to provide them with multiple avenues to interact with your brand and reach out, if necessary. However, creating a consistent customer experience throughout a range of touchpoints, including email, social media, mobile apps, and digital channels like live chat, can be challenging.
To simplify the process, you can use AI and machine learning to improve customer engagement by rerouting calls, anticipating client problems, and providing agents with real-time support.
This omnichannel support not only enhances the efficiency and customer experience of your business but also offers data-driven insights into customer behavior, aiding in your business growth and adaptability to market changes.
- Automation For Consumers and Agents
Automation has been established as a game-changer in most industries, and customer service is no exception. Studies show that 76% of customer service representatives report that implementing automation in the form of chatbots has helped them significantly improve support efficiency.
Automation tools like AI chatbots can improve first contact resolution (FCR) time and spot upsell and cross-sell possibilities for relevant products that customers are likely to add to their carts. Additionally, they have the ability to proactively initiate discussions based on a shopper’s demands and track behavioral data in real-time to identify buying intent.
- Data-Driven Customer Service
One of the greatest advantages of the integration of technology into customer service is the availability of granular data that quantifies how well a business is catering to its customers. This includes customer success metrics such as response times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction scores.
This capability is crucial for companies aiming to differentiate themselves by offering a seamless and memorable customer experience. Modern tech solutions now often include features to track and monitor these key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate service performance and its effect on sales and revenue. This enables more informed decision-making, highlighting efficient processes and areas for improvement.
Additionally, AI-powered tools like chatbots can gather customer feedback, such as customer satisfaction ratings (CSAT) and net promoter scores (NPS), through post-chat surveys, providing valuable insights into customer satisfaction and areas for enhancement.
Tools Reshaping Customer Support
Customer support tools help customer success departments organize customer complaints, inquiries, and customer demands and promptly address them. This software emerged as lifesavers during COVID-19, assisting online businesses to provide impeccable customer service to customers on a global scale.
Now, let’s see what customer support tools are essential for your customer success tech stack:
1. Live Chat Software
Live chat software enables website visitors or consumers to communicate with businesses in real time. This customer support tool can be integrated into your website or application for customers to directly interact with your support staff through chat messages.
Customers can learn about new features, download products, and ask questions in an engaging conversation with a real person using live chat software. Common features of live chat software are chat transcripts, chat widgets, pre-written responses, and chat routing.
Live chat improves client happiness by being convenient, speeding up response times, and allowing for proactive interaction. Additionally, it helps companies to get insightful feedback and better client interactions, which boosts conversions.
Examples of live chat software: Customerly, Drift, and LiveChat
2. Help Desk Software
Help desk software is a centralized platform that can organize and handle service requests, technical support tickets, and client inquiries. It helps customer support teams automatically route tickets to the appropriate agents, expedite support workflows, log support tickets, and collaborate to provide exceptional customer service and short response times.
You can monitor, rank, and address customer concerns via a range of contact channels, including social media, phone, email, and live chat, with help desk software.
The notable features of help desk software include ticket management, knowledge base generation, automated routing, and analytics and reporting.
Examples of help desk software: Zendesk, Help Scout, and Hiver
3. Ticketing systems
Ticketing systems are software used by businesses to manage and arrange internal activities and organize and respond to technical support requests and customer service inquiries. Every issue or request that comes in is tracked, prioritized, assigned, and effectively resolved by opening a ticket for it.
The typical features of ticketing software include ticket creation, assignment, classification, tracking of status, ticket reporting, and shared inboxes. Teams can use it to simplify communication, uphold accountability, and guarantee prompt internal or customer issues resolution.
Examples of ticketing systems: Zoho Desk, Kayako, and Freshdesk
4. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software
A customer relationship management (CRM) tool is software designed to help companies easily meet the demands of numerous customers across the board over a sustained time period. CRM tools consist of multiple components, such as instant messaging systems, email hubs, and forms for gathering feedback.
CRM software assists customer service professionals with tracking the status of support issues, capturing customer inquiries, and storing customer information. Additionally, a CRM offers a centralized database via which numerous team members may access critical client data, including prior orders, chat histories, and current requests.
Examples of CRM tools: Hubspot, Salesforce, and Freshworks
5. Customer Feedback Software
Customer feedback software is used by companies to collect, examine, and respond to consumer input about their experiences with the brand. These tools provide a range of ways to get user input, including forms, questionnaires, Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys.
The best customer feedback tools should enable you to hear out and address constructive comments. Your success depends on knowing your customers, and customer surveys and the ensuing feedback can help you gain valuable information regarding your product’s performance and quality, as well as your support team’s perceptions of it.
In order to analyze feedback trends and sentiment, customer feedback platforms frequently come with reporting and analytics functions. Through the utilization of customer input, enterprises may make well-informed decisions, set priorities, and improve their offerings to foster customer loyalty and expansion.
Examples of customer feedback software: Customerly, SurveyMonkey, JotForm, and Typeform
Challenges and Considerations
Let’s move on to some customer success challenges that businesses are facing in 2024:
- Understanding Customer Interests and Behaviors
Understanding each customer’s particular demands and needs is the foundation of good customer service. However, this is a difficult undertaking that becomes more difficult with a diversified customer base and changing market trends.
Another challenge might be your team size. It can be overwhelming to source accurate data, manage changing customer expectations, and track and assess the right CX metrics without a big team. Failure to comprehend customer needs might result in unsatisfactory solutions, which can undermine brand loyalty.
Considerations:
- Create customer personas using a combination of 1:1 discovery, product and behavioral data, and common usage patterns
- Provide empathy training to your customer service staff to help them better grasp customer viewpoints
- Lack of Personalization in Responses
Customer support teams frequently deal with complicated inquiries that call for in-depth expertise and clear communication. Poor replies can cause frustration among customers and damage your credibility. This is where personalization comes in.
Without customized responses to complex queries, your consumers will find it difficult to identify features that are relevant to their individual use cases, which will result in persistently low retention, high churn, and a long time to value.
Considerations:
- Create an extensive and easily accessible online knowledge and FAQ base available for customer self-service
- Make sure employees receive ongoing product and service training to know how to use data analytics to understand the contextual needs of every customer
- Slow Response Times
Delayed responses have been shown to directly impact customer satisfaction. In fact, 52% of customers will not purchase from a company with slow response times.
Moreover, companies that lag in communicating run the danger of losing a lot of money, as customers may end up at your competitor’s doorsteps if you don’t resolve this issue.
Considerations:
- Automate responses through a chatbot for frequently asked questions
- Introduce a priority ticketing system that sorts through customer queries and answers the most pertinent ones more quickly
- Serving Multiple Customers at Once
Handling several customer interactions at once puts your customer service agents’ efficiency and multitasking abilities to the test. In such cases, you run the risk of overworking your customer care representatives, which may result in longer wait times and lower-quality services.
Different communication channels have different average handling times. For instance, if your business offers SMS customer care, standards dictate that your agents should be able to respond to 80% of messages within 20 seconds. This translates to your agents being able to handle 3-5 customers in a minute.
Considerations:
- Use chatbots and other automated methods to answer common questions
- Provide staff with excellent time management and task prioritization training
- Empowering Agents with Knowledge and Training
Many businesses are shocked when they see no improvement in customer servicing, even after investing in expensive customer experience software (CRMs, helpdesk software, live chat platforms, etc.). This happens mostly because their staff members aren’t educated to use their new stack fully.
This is why it is important to assess the degree to which your staff is knowledgeable about your offerings, how they resolve typical problems, and how they personalize your product for customers. Inadequate training of employees will result in subpar customer service and a loss of brand credibility down the line.
Considerations:
- Provide continuous and comprehensive training courses on product understanding and customer empathy through webinars, on-demand training videos, 1:1 coaching, etc.
- Establish a culture of ongoing learning and growth for the team.
Final Thoughts
The future of customer service lies in understanding the deeper human needs of the consumer and supporting them with the latest technology.
Gone are the days of calling a support center or trading emails back and forth. Modern-day customer support is all about transcending traditional boundaries with personalization, automation, and omnichannel communications.
In conclusion, providing exceptional customer support is a necessity in this digital era, and it requires companies to adopt the latest customer service trends and tools to do so. Leveraging advanced technologies can not only help businesses keep up with customer expectations but also lead the way in terms of customer-centricity and establish themselves as market leaders.
