Top Customer Service Trends for 2016

Exceeding-Customer-Expectations-with-Proactive-Customer-Service

Customer service is one of the most dynamic aspects of any industry. The kind of service you offer to your customers is a fore-teller of how your business will grow. It is the reason behind exponential changes in the quality and types of customer service that are seen every year.

Companies are competing for a share of customers’ disposable income, and it makes sense that they extend such service that they make a place in their customer’s mind for good. With this brand loyalty and recall, they can save on multiple advertising expenses thereby boosting profits. So there is much more to effective and efficient customer care than just answering service queries. It is for this reason; there have been multiple speculations about the kinds of trends that you can expect in customer service this year.

Two major aspects of customer service

When extending customer support, there are two major aspects that come into play. The customer care personnel aspect and the technological aspect. A company that can make the most of both can expect to gain a lot from its customer service initiatives. In the year 2016, it is estimated that about 89 percent of the companies will be competing on the basis of customer service. It is a huge leap from the 36 percent figure marked in 2010. To prepare for this key change, companies are embracing the trend of training and developing their customer service personnel. They are the first point of contact for the customers and it is imperative that they have a good first experience through their correspondence.

Here are the ways in which company leaders can ensure a stellar customer service experience this year.

Identifying shortcomings

Through thorough search and observation, companies should find out the pitfalls and areas that require improvement. They should find out where it is that their employees are falling short of expectations. Is it a certain kind of customer, their approach, or product or service information that they are not well-versed with? It is only by finding out the problem areas that companies can aim to fix them.

Planning training strategies

Upon identifying the shortcomings, comes in the next step of planning training programs to build service capabilities. Training can include programs on building communication and behavioral skills; it can also include training programs on specific software. Such training can help the service personnel understand the use of new technology and adopt it to deliver better service experience.

Developing knowledge insight

There is a lot to learn from the top performing workforce as well. These are the people who have mastered the skill of attending to the clients of the organization and know well how to handle every kind of situation. It is important to identify these individuals and appoint them to train and impart their learning and experience to new and existing batches. They can do a lot to improve the practical expertise of the customer service professionals.

Appointing and training the new workforce

A company should be clear about the kind of employees it is looking for. It should find customer service executives who have a clear aptitude towards the profession. They need to have the drive, skill, and motivation along with the much needed virtue of patience. Finding and appointing the right people during recruitment goes a long way in maintaining retention rates. Once recruited, using the above three points, companies should develop a strong training plan. It will help new customer service personnel to understand the objective, requirements of their profile and help them deliver their service with good competence.

Service talent – The trend in 2016

Since service talent is going to be the leading trend in the year 2016, it makes sense to bring your company’s customer service talent to a level of good competence. It is not only the human perspective but the technological aspect too. Whichever kind of service it is, remote, self, or assisted, companies should plan strategies for smooth delivery of the same. The thought is to provide the customer with the best service with least effort when there is no human intervention. On the other hand, the client should get the best service and guidance when human interaction is required.

How companies can achieve this trend

Apart from bringing service talent into focus, companies should try and understand their customers better. They should find out, what all their customers value and where do they put their priorities. It is only expected that no two customers will have the same preferences. It is here that wielding the best customer service software come into the picture. By pooling in the three components of service talent, customer preference and right technology, companies can aim to hit the bull’s eye. However, it is not possible to attain all this in a year itself. As such, we can expect the trend to last at least over one year.

Shambhavi Sinha

Shambhavi Sinha is working as an SEO expert at Ameyo. She also likes to write tech-based stuff. Her aim is to provide knowledge to users by sharing the knowledge about the latest trends about contact centers.