4 big customer service trends for 2017
TRANSCRIPT
Get Ahead of the Game!
How can we, as customer service
leaders, keep up with the new
customer service trends and
continue innovating?
We’ve looked into our crystal ball and
discovered four top predictions for
2017. They come along with actionable
advice on how you can get ahead of
the game and hit the ground running!
Conversations Not Tickets
Companies are beginning to realize that great customer
service is authentic and human. Since treating customers
like a number and shepherding them through a queue
isn’t going to build a fanbase.
Conversations Not Tickets
To get ready:
1. Evaluate the process customers need to go through to
get in touch.
2. Do you force them to call a 1-800 number? Such business
won’t fly in 2017.
3. Consider that more and more companies will be placing
conversation starting widgets on every page of their
website.
Solution Suggesting Robots
81% of customers would prefer to help themselves rather
than pick up the phone. Zendesk’s Automatic Answers (in
beta) uses AI to suggest answers to customers and then
allows them to close their own ticket.
Solvvy, the newest product on the market, is a machine
learning add-on to existing Help Desks. It helps “unlock the
power” of your knowledge base to generate automatic
answers.
Solution Suggesting Robots
To get ready:
Robots can only do so much – they need quality help
centre content to deliver results. Make sure you update
your documentation, organise it well and use test. When
you’re ready to bring in the AI backup, you’ll see results
much faster.
Customer Service As a Career
Turnover is way up, at an estimated 24% this year!
To combat top talent leaving, we’re expecting more
companies to spend more time developing and retaining
excellent customer support.
Conferences like SupConf and Elevate continue to grow
and build a community of customer service professionals.
New podcasts designed to pass on skills to others in
customer support (like Support Breakfast) are popping up.
Customer Service As a Career
To get ready:
Evaluate your plan for customer service agent development.
Don’t you have any? It’s the time to get on it!
Creating a comprehensive roadmap for long-term growth,
and communicating it well, will be the key to retaining top
customer service talent.
All Hands on Deck
While All Hands Support has been around for a few years,
usually just trendy SaaS companies have been adopting it.
In 2017, we’ll see better collaboration and closer
relationships between support and … everyone else.
Software is facilitating this as well. Kayako’s new release this
year featured free Collaborators – primarily light agents then
can view and help resolve conversations. Help Scout just
added @mentions into their interface.
All Hands on Deck
To get ready:
With all these extra hands on deck, it’s important to be really
confident in your support team voice and processes. Update
and share any internal documentation with other teams too.
Happy New Year and Happy
Customers!
We can’t wait for all the great new trends we’ll see in 2017.
Every single one of these predictions will help agents deliver
even better support in the year ahead. And we’re excited to
be part of that!
Give us a shout!
Explore the most advanced world of customer satisfaction
survey tools. 💡
Give us a shout; we’d love to chat about your needs! 👋
Read more here.
We pick companies because of their products,
but we often leave them because of
theirs service failures.
Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, Rick Delisi
THE EFFORTLESS EXPERIENCE
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@nice_reply
Katarína Kasalová
Support
www.nicereply.com