Customers’ experiences have an impact on how they perceive your business and your brand. Service is the core point of your business’s success. Everyone knows the importance of a happy customer that will not only return to you but always give positive feedback and bring new customers along.
Let’s see what’s new in Customer Service Technology & Trends for the 2021s.
Each year customer service and support leaders identify their strategic priorities and investments for the year ahead, but due to covid-19 and its lasting ramifications, things are changing rapidly and it’s important to move along with the new requirements of Customers. Service and support face increased pressure from competitors on the role of the service function in improving operational excellence and growing the business. The main support for effective customer service is a combination of tools, systems, and processes to convert policies into customer satisfaction.
It starts with equipping your agents with all tools that they need to provide a top-notch customer experience, including:
In 2020 the Customer Service department had to readjust their employees to remote work. This transition had a huge impact on customer service trends in 2021. Remote work will most likely become a more permanent strategy due to the current situation worldwide and the new opportunity of cost savings due to the remote workforce for business owners.
In fact, 89% of UK contact center leaders say that the COVID-19 crisis has changed the industry forever. A recent industry survey supports this view of a long-term work-from-home transition. 35% of contact center leaders now think that their contact centers will become mainly homeworking. And a higher percentage, 58%, think homeworking will be partly optional and partly compulsory.
Either way, the busy on-premise contact center of the past is set to give way to a more flexible and remote work culture.
As for trends, Service became a sales tool in 2021.
Omnichannel communication with customers is a top priority today. Customers want to reach you immediately with great convenience, meaning being able to choose a convenient contact form like live-chat on a business website or have multiple choices of mobile messengers depending on the preferences of the consumer and get an immediate reply independent of the device type. A true omnichannel approach includes the ability to deliver a seamless and consistent experience across a variety of communication channels. So if your company is not operating with omnichannel communication, now is the time to adapt.
Since not all customer service departments work 24-7, developers took it one step further by inventing chat-bots. But this option lost its popularity within a short period of time. Custer’s enjoy interacting with actual human beings since chatbots lack intelligence and are able to solve only the basic requirements of customers, so they are revealed with ease. So creating a chatbot for your customers today should only be to generalize the question of your customer and lead the conversation to a responsible employee or department. It’s also good to have a chatbot to answer the most common questions or to gather contact information to get back to the customer during working hours. They are a necessary asset today as well, but nothing in comparison to actual human interaction.
Let’s not forget about social media. Its popularity increased among some of the largest companies in the world as a way to foster customer communication and share the latest products with its potential customers. Social media is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ channel, it’s an essential tool. Companies that spread their brand on social media are archiving greater value of new customers and benefits as well as customer satisfaction and increased retention. In 2021, social media will only become more and more important as a tool to share information, communicate with customers, and retain users.
Today the market is growing rapidly, and as customers have more options, service becomes part of the product experience. Companies are focused on customer’s desire for a better customer experience. The E-commerce market was already growing before Covid, but that growth was accelerated by the pandemic to deal with increased demand. More businesses needed more help services from B2B companies.
The world stands right in front of a new era, and we need to make sure to be up to date with all the new features and services to keep our existing customers happy and have new customers join. The world stands right in front of a new era, and we need to make sure to be up to date with all the new features and services to keep our existing customers happy and have new customers join.
Unlike years prior, this new type of conversational commerce is much bigger than just offering live chat. That’s part of it, but consumers now want to be able to connect with your brand immediately on their preferred platform — whether it’s Facebook, WhatsApp, email, etc. The right tools will allow you to deliver a unified customer experience and treat all channels as equal — prioritizing queries based on importance.
As always, customer reviews play a massive role in success
Summary of trends 2021:
1. Building teams with support agents who can work remotely
3. Providing personalized customer experiences
4. Delivering real-time support through live chat and chatbots
5. Customer-centric success strategies
6. Mastering social media as a support channel
As previously mentioned, we stand right in front of a new era, and there are more changes to come within the near future. For some industries, this means having to change up the whole business plan and readjust or in the worst-case scenario close their business completely.
For them, it means a second chance, and if they play their cards right, a bright future.
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