At the end of each year, I love to take my time to see what may await the Customer Support industry in the upcoming year. I do this to understand what awaits us in the upcoming year and what we can do to prepare for it.
Today, I want to take a look at the future of customer experience. What will the main trends of 2023 be, and what will users expect from customer support and service teams?
In this article, we'll cover:
CX Will Have to Become a Priority for the Entire Team
73% of businesses compete primarily on their customer experience. And it is my belief that customer experience cannot be perfect unless the entire team is involved in it.
Is that at all possible? Yes. It all starts with the product that is developed with customers in mind. With software, it should be usable, understandable, and customer-centric. Hardware should be easy-to-install, affordable, and user-friendly.
The HR department should aim to hire only those with a customer-centric mindset. The Onboarding team should include as much information about the importance of customer support into their materials as possible. The Tech department should understand who they are developing for and what their target audience is expecting from their solutions. And customer support specialists should provide the best service they possibly can.
In other words — everyone in a company should do their best to enhance CX.
Omnichannel Approach
For businesses, it is important to understand that customers want and expect support teams to provide omnichannel service. And that is exactly what the SupportYourApp team is doing.
With our in-house developed QCRM, our support teams can communicate with our clients’ customers via any communication channel — live chat, phone, email, and even social media. This way, we miss no tickets and can promptly answer every customer’s questions. Omnichannel approach to customer communication ensures our 95% percent customer satisfaction KPI.
Teams Will Have to Be Proactive
When trying to build a personal relationship with customers, proactivity is a must. To show proactivity, support teams can:
- Reach out to customers after big updates to make sure they do not have any questions about new features or functionality.
- Follow users up after providing them with ticket resolution to make sure they do not have additional questions.
- Ask customers to rate their services and come up with strategies to make customer support more efficient.
Among others, these are the proactive steps SupportYourApp takes to make sure our clients’ customers are satisfied with our support services. We also regularly conduct additional training sessions and make sure all our support consultants have the information and the resources they need to fully satisfy every user.
Digital CX Has to Become More Human
It is estimated that by 2025, 95% of customer communication will be carried out by chatbots. But do customers really want to talk to a machine in 9 cases out of 10? Researchers say — no.
Even though we at SupportYourApp are digitizing our processes as much as we can, we still make sure machines and people live in perfect harmony in our support teams. We:
- Develop AI solutions that can optimize our processes. For example, a bot that will greet users and gather important information about their issues. This saves human consultants’ time and rids them of monotonous, burnout-causing tasks.
- Make sure our clients’ customers can always switch from a digital solution to a human one.
- Conduct regular surveys to stay in the loop on what our clients’ customers really want and expect.
These steps help us harmonize our relationship with any user, no matter their stance on AI and digital communication tools.
Self-Service Options Have to Become a Must
As much as customers want to have a possibility to talk to a human support consultant, they also want to be able to resolve their issues themselves. FAQ, self-service portals, and self-troubleshooting solutions will become a necessary addition to your services in 2023.
It’s important to make sure the entire team is involved in a product’s development and support takes part in developing the knowledge base for the self-service portal. It should be understandable, up-to-date, and easy-to-find — these are the three main ingredients of a working and helpful self-service portal.
Will customer behavior change that much in 2023? Not really. But, having spent more than 12 years in the industry, I know — one of our main tasks is to anticipate what customers will want and to provide it without them having to ask for it. For us, there are always things to perfect and develop to make every customer satisfied and happy.
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Daria Leshchenko is Partner at SupportYourApp — Support as a Service company with a focus on the tech industry. Taking charge of SupportYourApp at the age of 21, Daria turned it into a multinational business and one of the TOP-3 customer support providers. Today SupportYourApp has 3 offices in Kyiv with 900 people on a team and 150 clients from around the world. Daria graduated from MIM business school, the Aspen Institute Kyiv and is a Harvard Kennedy School alumna. She is also in Top 30 under 30 list by KyivPost and #1 on the list of Top 50 Entrepreneurs in Ukraine by MC.Today. In 2021 Daria was recognized as the Woman of the Year in Customer Service by the Stevie Awards. Daria is a startup mentor, a public speaker, art and sports enthusiast.
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