The Future of Support: 5 Customer Service Trends of 2024

With a future that promises autonomous, self-learning machines seamlessly managing the broader supply chain process, now is the time for organizations to overcome the inherent silos and enterprise systems that will restrict their progress. For marketers, product managers, operations leaders, etc. it means getting as close to your customer as the frontline customer service agent is. In the eCommerce furniture market, we saw Wayfair perform particularly well when it came to packaging.

Since customers prefer self-service, we will see more companies adopt and implement technology to provide it. Having a robust knowledge base on your website is an effective way to provide self-service support. You should also consider developing how-to guides and videos and make them accessible to customers through your website. With the ever-changing role of the support agent, it’s a good idea to focus on agent enablement technologies.

How AI is creating support roles, not taking them

According to the survey, while “younger generations are more trusting with their data, 66% of Baby Boomers say a lack of control over third-party access to data decreases the level of trust they place in an organization”. The permanent business decisions made around remote work and cloud solutions enforces the essentiality of having a solid data protection-as-a-service solution. Customers want businesses to be able to provide adequate protection for their important asset.

Personalized customer service is becoming the new standard in the industry, with as much as 81% of consumers expressing frustration over impersonal customer service. Let’s take a cursory glance at the top emerging trends shaping the future of customer service this 2023. To find out how support leaders are navigating the current landscape, we surveyed a random sample of 593 support managers across both B2B and B2C and industries like education, retail, healthcare, and tech.

Rush To Control The Hardware And Platform Supply Chain

The 50’s witnessed the rise of digital computing, reshaping industries and societal norms. Today, artificial intelligence plays a similar role, forging the next industrial revolution. Although voluntary to date, the collection and reporting of Scope 3 emissions data is becoming a legal requirement in many countries. Consequently, data availability, quality, cadence, and consistency – are now critical considerations. Supply chain professionals must manage the complexities within their data landscape efficiently; to be able to make informed decisions and enhance their operations.

The future of customer service and support is contextualized, predictive, value-focused and ubiquitous. Customer service and support leaders must prepare for five emerging trends that will shape their function through 2025 and beyond. Understanding customers’ needs and expectations for the service experience is integral to improving loyalty and creating customer value.

Your customer service agents have a brain, trust them to use it because excessive escalations and inability to make minor decisions alone will kill your team’s motivation and impact your customer. For example, you could inject video into the customer service experience,.Videos are a perfect match for millennials especially, and they make the customer support experience feel more intimate and real. Talking to customers face to face, en masse, every day is unique to customer service. That close contact is an untapped and unappreciated opportunity to build strong customer relationships, increase loyalty, hear customer feedback, improve products, build community, upsell, increase basket size, and so on. Organizations that want to succeed and establish enduring connections with their clients must go beyond first contact resolution and consistently provide value to customers. While swiftly resolving customer complaints is crucial, companies also need to realize the importance of delivering memorable experiences that go above and beyond for all phases of the customer journey.

In this setup, customers would pay based on the extent and nature of their AI usage, offering a flexible and potentially more equitable pricing structure. Humane AI’s Pin (powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon processors) and Tab are redefining the wearable landscape. These devices offer a glimpse into a future where wearables are no longer just about tracking health metrics or receiving notifications. They are about enhancing human interactions, offering real-time AI assistance, and providing an augmented experience of the world around us. Time is of the essence, and those who are ready and willing to adapt quickly will be better able to unlock value, reduce costs and embrace new models of success. Most supply chain tasks can be fully or partly automated through low-code platforms, which use a wide range of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and pre-packaged integrations to link previously separate systems.

Make every call count: The evolution of phone support

Since customers will increasingly expect higher-quality support, not providing it will result in higher levels of customer churn. Walker info reports that by 2020 the customer experience will overtake price and product as the main driver behind consumers’ purchasing decisions. The most successful businesses of the future will be those that embraced new technologies and understand shifting customer needs. Those that don’t anticipate and prepare for emerging trends will be left behind. Our analysis highlights five trends that will push service and support functions towards achieving this future vision. This research is based on conversations with customer service and support leaders, and experts throughout Gartner, and leverages data from numerous Gartner surveys.

However, “a true customer-centric transformation often entails rethinking business or even the business model itself” and it can only be achieved through a holistic approach. A Study by McKinsey revealed that digital transformation in customer experience can increase the company’s revenue by percent. There are several building blocks of achieving a strong digital transformation in customer experience, and a crucial one is redesigning new digital experiences for the customers by tapping into collective customer feedback loop.

Advantages of Outsourcing Your Customer Service to BPOs

Offshore wages, estimated to be around only 30% of the cost onshore, is just one part of the overall cost. Human office space, equipment, IT support, and client account management are all incidental expenses that BPOs must also factor into their pricing. BPOs seamlessly integrate tech into their processes to maximize efficiency and minimize cost. High staff churn (up to 60%) is one of the most significant issues contact centers face.

Companies are integrating platforms, namely unified communications (UC) and contact center, but some enterprises also are integrating CRM applications, resulting in improved customer service. When agents can’t resolve an issue, they can connect a non-contact center expert to assist in the interaction. Various departments, including customer service, sales, marketing and product development, are using voice-of-the-customer programs and analysis to make decisions, coach employees and improve products and services.

Teams using Help Scout are set up in minutes, twice as productive, and save up to 80% in annual support costs. Investing in this also means making sure that the easier cases are solved before they reach support agents’ desks. An overarching issue that plagues chatbot usage is the fact that humans don’t give machines the same liability that we give each other.

Voice will always be a core component of customer support and a key channel, especially for urgent issues. However, we’ve consistently seen the growth of messaging support year-over-year. As more and more Millennial and Gen Z consumers enter the market, the steady rise of messaging support interactions will only continue. Outsourcing uses a potent combination of digitization and personalization to guarantee quality customer experiences while simultaneously boosting productivity, revenue, customer satisfaction, and real-time customer engagement. While technology drives most customer service trends, human empathy is still the core ingredient that propels customer loyalty and satisfaction. This poses a challenge since research shows that customer service organizations need help to keep pace.

As we stand on the brink of 2024, the supply chain landscape is on the cusp of profound transformation. AI and other advanced technologies are quickly reshaping the very core of supply chain management. KPMG professionals believe organizations with the right approach and culture can harness these seismic shifts. A solution is to adopt a use case-driven approach to proactively address data quality issues. By focusing on specific use cases, organizations can prioritize data quality improvements where they matter most, thereby gradually refining and improving their datasets.

Concerns over privacy and the societal impact of AI are driving consumers and regulatory bodies, especially in regions like the EU where GDPR was the catalyst to modern data privacy laws, to advocate for more stringent governance of AI. This year, we expect to see strides in establishing frameworks for auditing AI models, standardizing accuracy, and introducing “report cards” for AI systems but there is still a long way to go. The rise of autonomous AI agents and multi-modal models, coupled with advancements in wearables and extended reality (XR), is paving the way for a more immersive and interactive experiences for consumers. Their foray into VR wearables has already shown us the potential for immersive digital experiences. As they continue to innovate in this space, we can expect wearables that not only augment reality but create entirely new realms for us to explore and interact with.

• Users will be able to pre-train, fine-tune, deploy, and scale generative models efficiently.
• According to a study by Boston Consulting Group in 2019, companies with the highest customer satisfaction score have generated twice as much shareholder value over the last 10 years relative to the average score.
• Research is early however expect to see someone take a leap of faith and break ground in this space.
• To get started, organizations need to first embrace the trends that will define 2024.
• Apple, with its track record in creating trendsetting devices, is highly likely to introduce wearables that integrate seamlessly with its ecosystem within or alongside their XR Apple Vision Pro, offering unparalleled user experiences.

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