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5 Customer Service Trends That Will Shape Our Future

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Contact centers are following the trends for customer-centric culture these days. As in, the customer’s expectations are immensely soaring day by day. Eventually, the companies are also shifting their focus from product selling to customer satisfaction. They are implementing continuous improvements for better business performances. Contact centers are going for the latest technologies and tools to keep pace with the customer’s expectations. They cannot afford to lag behind their competitors. For survival, it is essential for the companies to remain in the trend and adapt only to updated resources.

Here are 5 must-follow contact center trends of the future:

1) Focus More on Multi-channel:

All customers are multichannel users these days. In order to reach your customers’ way before your competitors, you should be readily available to them via different modernized channels of communication. A mobile device works as an omnichannel platform; it has email, voice, video chat text messages, and social media capabilities. According to a study conducted by HeyWire Business:

• 52% of respondents preferred text messaging to their current means of customer service communication.

• 53% of respondents aged 18 to 34 preferred electronic media over traditional phone calls for customer service support.

Another mode of interacting is through a webcam, where the customer service representative can contact face to face with their customers.

Companies can better prepare for jumps in communication channels if they use cloud technologies to track users.

Gartner predicts that through 2018, the lack of support in mobile applications will lower customer satisfaction rates by 5%.

2) Proactive Approach:

Companies should reach their customers even before they seek help. Instead of expecting your customers to come up and initiate a conversation with you, follow up a proactive approach and ask them if they need any assistance. This can help your company build a constructive brand image. And all of this is possible with the help of a customer engagement hub platform.

For ex- When a customer spends a lot of time searching for a product on a website or on an application, but they are detected fumbling through the web pages, the customer care rep should make a move and approach the client for help.

3) Self-Service:

Self-service means the customers can resolve their issues themselves. They don’t need to contact the customer service support for any query. Millennials are tech-savvy and want to help themselves without the need of any human intervention. They will not tolerate waiting in lines, repeating their problem to five different people or being treated like a number. They like solving their own issues.

It is equally beneficial for the companies, as it reduces the cost of hiring a huge number of customer service agents and at the same time it offloads the existing support team’s work pressure. It also helps in increasing customer satisfaction by enabling customers to solve complex problems when and how they want.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, the customer will manage 85% of the relationship with an enterprise without even interacting with a human.

4) Provide Service Via Social Support:

Few companies are providing proactive services to customers through social media. Answering the customer’s questions through social media is on the rise in 2015. They provide a custom link through Twitter that directly connects the prospect with an agent. The agent this way resolves the issue right at the moment. Millennials Gen Y is routinely active on Facebook. They want their issues to be solved through social networking sites itself. Few companies provide contact centers the access to “social interaction management” which helps an agent to generate a ticket right from Facebook itself.

5) Bridge the Gap Between the Query and the Response:

A contact center’s job doesn’t end only with noting down the customer’s query, it is equally and adequately important for them to give an instant solution too. According to the research study of Jeff Toister of Toister Performance Solutions, Inc., customers expect an email response to their question within four hours. Another research conducted by social media experts has revealed that 42% of customers using social media platforms as a customer service mechanism expect a response to their problem within an hour. Quicker replies to their queries make the customers feel important.

All that your customers want is a faster resolution and if they aren’t being met to what they want, they will stop doing business with your company and hop over a competitor. Businesses have to be alert of the fact that the customers need their issue to be resolved in the next 24 hours of their complaint.

For maintaining a competitive edge in the marketplace, businesses should work on the excellence of customer service department. It works in fostering brand loyalty.

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