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In the not-too-distant future, we’re convinced that businesses will consider customer service to be the most strategically useful business function.
The current state of customer service, in so many companies, looks something like this:
This is just plain wrong. Customer service is a critical part of the customer’s experience.
When done right, customer service is already adding business value. Great customer service increases retention and repeat business despite the above.
Yet, this current state of customer service leaves opportunity on the table. The opportunity lies in the extraordinarily close relationship between agent and customer.
Talking to customers face to face, en masse, every day is unique to customer service.
Talking to customers face to face, en masse, every day is unique to customer service. That close contact is an untapped and unappreciated opportunity to build strong customer relationships, increase loyalty, hear customer feedback, improve products, build community, upsell, increase basket size, and so on.
More and more businesses are realising this opportunity. Forward thinking business leaders are already elevating the contact centre to strategic status and using it get an advantage over competitors.
We’ve already seen:
Driving real growth through support (like in the above examples) is far from standard and far from optimised.
This will change.
We opened with this statement: "businesses will consider customer service to be the most strategically useful business function". This is happening already and will only increase over the next 3-5 years.
In the next 3-5 years, we expect to see these future customer service trends:
Modern and developing technology enables this future to exist. With new technology, administrative tasks will tend toward zero.
Modern and developing technology enables this future to exist. With new technology, administrative tasks will tend toward zero.
Things humans do best (build relationships, empathise, make decisions, personalise) will be what humans do.
The best way to explain the impact of this is to split the customer service interaction into four layers and look at what’s important at each one.
The four layers are:
Help desks cover most of the ‘method’ of interaction. New channels will continue to emerge, for example, social messengers are on the dramatic rise in customer support already. (See: Is WhatsApp the future of customer service?)
That trend will continue but your help desk should let you expand channels with ease.
Related read: 8 unique customer service improvement ideas that improve ROI
Granular, accurate, and real-time support ticket analytics is the lynchpin for much of what’s next for customer service.
Granular, accurate, and real-time support ticket analytics is the lynchpin for much of what’s next for customer service.
Advances in artificial intelligence have enabled the rapid synthesis of support ticket content. Our product at SentiSum now enables companies to know the topic and sentiment of every support request in real-time.
The application of AI to support tickets opens up a wealth of opportunity for strategic customer service.
In the pre-interaction stage, support ticket analytics will soon enable:
In the interaction stage, support ticket analytics will soon enable:
Related read: Best call center softwares for analytics and help desks in 2021
In the post-interaction stage, support ticket analytics will soon enable customer service teams to:
In short, ticket analytics are the foundational layer that customer service needs to ‘become the most strategically useful business function’.
AI ticket analytics help customer service leaders deeply understand customers at scale, increase loyalty, drives growth and help the entire business to do the same.
Having mastered customer support ticket analytics with AI, we're one giant leap along the journey.
Our product roadmap is a series of steppingstones—each one takes customer support leaders step-by-step into this extraordinary future that awaits them.
If you’d like to learn how our clients use our support ticket analytics technology to get ahead, please book a demo with us today.
Here are three important trends to take note of (other than AI-driven ticket insights):
We don't think chatbots fulfil a positive function. Usually, they're pretty frustrating to talk to and until they aren't, top companies will be hesitant to roll them out.
People, on the other hand, will always be critical to great customer service. The trend we expect to see continue is the fast availability of a real person to talk to.
Live chat software, self-serve content, queue-less phone calling will all be critical to customer retention in the future.
Some customers are digital savvy, some are not, some have strongly preferred communication methods, some don't mind.
With increasing complexity like this, it's critical to provide a seamless experience throughout the customer journey.
For example, you could inject video into the customer service experience,.Videos are a perfect match for millennials especially, and they make the customer support experience feel more intimate and real.
Here's two ways you get started:
Webinars offer face-to-face, real-time content right to the mobile or laptop of your customer. Webinars can be used to reach customers en-mass. For example, if you had a critical issue (e.g. a global pandemic impacting delivery times) you could create one announcement webinar that all customers can attend, rather than calling your customer service team. On the other hand, you could use 1-to-1 video to increase basket size—like Schuh did in this story.
For a long time, email has been a vehicle for stellar client support. Take email to the next level with embedded video. Video emails have higher engagement, too!
You can deliver highly personalised and detailed communication right to an inbox. When you find yourself writing, “Sorry if this is too complicated,” consider a video email explaining the issue instead.
Empowered agents are able to take action that helps the customer. Your customer service agents have a brain, trust them to use it because excessive escalations and inability to make minor decisions alone will kill your team's motivation and impact your customer.
Example 1: Each Virgin customer support agents can reach out directly to customers—and customers can reach out directly to them. Talk about customer care!
Example 2: Other companies give agents the go-ahead to offer solutions to problems without escalating issues. If a customer is angry on live chat, a real-time refund discount boosts customer satisfaction. Ritz-Carlton empowers reps to spend up to $2000 to make a customer happy.
Don't make customers wait while your rep has to ask someone else. And, definitely don't make the customer have to wait for the rep to follow up.
We've done the analysis on this, so we know the answer.
The three most important things to a customer's overall customer service experience is: accessibility (could they get an agent on the phone), responsiveness (did an agent even respond?), empathetic (friendly, useful agents who get the problem resolved quickly).
Here are three rules extracted from the article we wrote for LiveChat:
Customers hate the unexpected. Each industry has its own way of creating an unexpectedly negative customer experience, so you’ll have to work on identifying and tackling your own issues. For example, in the eCommerce furniture industry, customers frequently left vitriolic negative reviews if a piece of furniture arrived damaged (how disappointing) or broke within the first six months (what a waste of money).
In our original analysis, we saw similar in other industries. Food and recipe subscription boxes, for example, drive a ton of support tickets when an item is missing, damaged, or spoiled. Customers will come to the reviews to complain when this happens repeatedly. Once can be explained away, but more than once becomes unacceptable.
Food and recipe subscription companies like Mindful Chef, mentioned above, saw overwhelmingly positive reviews for food taste and quality. However, when you’ve planned a meal for the week and your food arrives mouldy or with an ingredient missing, it really throws a wrench into your plans. Brands should consider simplifying their offering if it’s hard to deliver while also remaining highly responsive to these churn-inducing issues in order to mitigate them.
Across fintech providers, we see a similar impact of the unexpected. Unexpected fees, frozen or blocked accounts, or the sudden inability to pay with a card all led to a severe reaction. More than 1,500 reviews mentioned a frozen or blocked account across the challenger banks we analyzed.
You have the opportunity to “wow” a customer at every touchpoint. And, if you do, you’re sure to create widespread brand advocacy.
In the UK, when Monzo and Revolut grew their customer base rapidly, the “wow” factor was certainly a large contributor to their growth. Both banks provided a previously unseen level of transaction convenience, and the clarity on customers’ financial situation was wonderful because the banks let them know instantly when money is withdrawn from their account.
For Monzo (touchpoint map pictured below), app usability featured heavily in the reviews as did the ease of budgeting and other financial features. Instant notifications also drove positivity under the convenience theme.
Reviews left for food and recipe subscription boxes tell a similar story. People got the “wow” factor from the product taste and the ease of cooking, things they previously struggled to achieve. Usually, perfecting your core value proposition should create your “wow.” If you’re an online marketplace, like Amazon, your product won’t be it. Instead, your usability, prices, and delivery will be.
However, if you’re a product developer, you must uncover your “why.” In other words, what problem are you trying to solve? Doubling down on that differentiating factor by building both product experience and your marketing around it will help you develop brand clarity and penetrate the market faster.
In the eCommerce furniture market, we saw Wayfair perform particularly well when it came to packaging. Packaging quality was mentioned in nearly 2,000 reviews. On the other hand, MADE.com had just 100 reviews on that topic. Details like a well-packaged product create delight along the customer journey that clearly encourage customers to become brand advocates.
You’ve probably heard that in copywriting you shouldn’t focus on your features. Instead, you should focus on how life with your product will make your customer feel. Things like whether your customer will be happier, stress free, or have a higher status tend to create a bigger impact than the specific details of your product.
The data here very much confirms that. Across all industries we analyzed, the biggest drivers of positive sentiment were based on experience. In the food and recipe subscription box category, 67% of reviews focused on “meal experience.” Most prominently, taste, ease of cooking, variety, and health drove positive sentiment.
This shows that customers care most about how food and recipe boxes touch their senses. Brands should take note of this and focus their messaging on how much the customer will enjoy their meal, how easy cooking will become now, and how healthy they’ll feel with your recipes and food.
That’s a lesson for everyone trying to “wow” customers. This is further confirmed by ecommerce furniture customers who frequently mentioned (53% of reviews) the product experience. Reviews talked about “great packaging” and the “quality feel” of the material.
Brands often forget the small things, but the details that stimulate the customer are what really drive positive sentiment.
SentiSum is building AI technology that creates clarity in customer service.
Getting detailed insights from support tickets will allow customer support directors to know the top drivers of tickets, know which tickets are reducing profits, and understand easily how to solve problems facing customers.
SentiSum's platform is like Zendesk but insight. It brings every feedback and conversation channel together in one easy-to-use, simple-to-understand place.
For support leaders, this means reducing volume and contributing to the wider conversation about reducing churn.
For marketers, product managers, operations leaders, etc. it means getting as close to your customer as the frontline customer service agent is. Frontline insight, from the backline.
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