2022 had a lot to offer when it comes to customer support. We saw a gigantic upheaval as we got introduced to a new world of possibilities. But, the primary focus has always been on providing stellar customer experiences (CX), come what may.
Though Forrester Survey suggests that nearly 20% of brands saw a drop in CX quality in 2022–the lowest level ever recorded within the last 17 years.
No wonder 2023 calls for a complete overhaul where businesses need to elevate their customer support by making informed decisions. But it is easier said than done.
Fret not; we’ve separated the chaff from the wheat and compiled these top 5 customer support trends to help you achieve CX success in this blog post. Let’s get started.
1. Humanized Artificial Intelligence for the Win
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has infiltrated every walk of life and industry, and it is ready to make inroads into the support industry expeditiously. Why you may ask? The support teams are juggling with challenges such as long customer hold times, prioritization of support tickets, re-routing, and so on. Here, AI comes to the rescue. Let’s find out how.
The better you are able to troubleshoot agent issues the better the support outcomes will be. This can be done using intelligent case assignment that analyzes customer sentiment, the kind of issue, and agent expertise. It then assigns the cases to the best-suited support maven. All this reduces Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) and increases Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) along the way. This helps combat the challenges that lead to support success.
2. Soar High with Elevated AX and CX
While devising strategies for a better support ecosystem, one must start with agents. If their experience is top-notch, it will elevate customer experience as well. But, like any other process, it is too faced with a lot of unnecessary hiccups like poor content discovery, limited real-time insights, etc. that need to be fixed.
Fortunately, cognitive technology can rescue you and your agents from these unnecessary hassles. It eliminates the struggle of recuperating the right information by integrating various content sources and populating top-case articles in real-time. All of this serves as a major turning point, by improving AX and ultimately CX.
(Looking for more information on this topic, here is a quick blog post to skim through)
3. Premium, not Freemium Support
Support is often considered a cost center and treated as an afterthought. This leads to poor retention, lower ROI, increased costs, and a lot more. In fact, 2022 witnessed it in full swing. So, what should be done?
This narrative is bound to change in 2023 with premium support. It helps turn support into a profit-center rather than a cost-center as it emphasizes on boosting revenue. Premium support is also a retention keeper as it helps expand product usage by making the customers realize its potential and how well it aligns with their goals.
4. Knowledge-first Rather Than Case-first
Therefore speedy case resolutions are the need of the hour. However, many organizations still depend on the case-first model to resolve tickets, which leads to poor discovery. All this increases churn rates and turnaround time manifolds.
Fortunately, a well-aligned knowledge-first model entrenched with cognitive tech can help mitigate these issues by gauging and extracting the right information at the right time. In addition, it directs the right knowledge toward the right people.
5. Personalization with Security is the Cherry on Top
Personalized customer support has become very popular lately. And customers prefer it at every touchpoint.
However, with personalization, customers assume that a threat of intrusion and malicious cyber attacks like phishing, and password attacks, emerge. This brings out a need to balance the scale with optimum personalization and data privacy measures in your organization.
Embracing AI, ML, and NLP can help you here by analyzing previous attacks, understanding how hackers penetrate networks and flagging suspicious activities in real-time. This is done by scanning large amounts of data and segregating malicious emails or domains using Autonomous Systems Number (ASN) mapping. Additionally, they leverage vulnerability management ingrained with User and Event Behavior Analytics (UEBA) that detects unusual incidences on corporate servers, routers, and endpoints– blocking them right away.
Final Verdict
We haven’t even scratched the surface yet. Feel free to give this eBook a read if you’re curious to know what’s next for your innovative firm. Because remember achieving your business objectives and maintaining your competitive edge is easier when you have all the critical pieces in place.