Summary
If your business isn’t focused on customer service, it’s time to refocus. You might have a stellar product, but that’s no longer enough—if you don’t have thoughtful, kind, and enterprising customer service teams and technologies working for you, you can kiss a lot of your business goodbye. Don’t believe us? Take a look at some of these statistics that highlight the importance of customer service:
- 71% of customers say they’ve made a purchase based on the quality of a company’s customer service.
- 50% of customers say they’d switch to a competitor after a single bad customer service experience; 80% say they’d do it after more than one.
- At least 55% of customers expect better customer service year over year. This gets higher in the 18-34 age range—70% of them need consistent improvement or they’ll head elsewhere.
- Bad experiences happen anywhere, but 78% of customers say they’ll forgive a company a mistake if they get excellent service.
- 78% of customers believe the crisis should be a catalyst for improvement, and 91% clocked customer service as one of the sectors that needs work.
Even if you’re proud of where you team stands, there are always opportunities to leverage new technologies and insights and take your customer service operation to even higher levels. Ready to make the changes that will better attract, retain, and serve all your customers? Check out our top customer service trends and tips for 2024 and beyond.
Improve Agility + Adaptability
More than ever, customer service can change on a dime. You may be dealing with last minute supply chain issues, have to respond to something that’s just been said about your company on social media, or are just a rapidly-growing company with frequent product upgrades and features. No matter the reason, make sure you’re training your employees to be resourceful, providing them with updated information about your offerings and continued learning opportunities, and giving them the digital tools they need to quickly manage any ticket that comes their way.
Use Data to Improve Response Time
You already know that customers hate being put on hold or waiting for an email. But have you just been pushing your agents to do more, faster without utilizing data insights that will help them improve their response times? It’s time to take advantage of customizable data updates that services like Ringover provides. With real-time updates on metrics including average call abandonment time, maximum wait time, service level, and TMC in and out times, you’ll be able to track patterns and garner insights you never would have realized before.
Equip Agents With Info + Power
The more info that customer service agents have, the better they can do their job. This info can come in a few different ways. First, remember that customers now expect agents to have their entire history in front of them during a chat. Rather than being passed around to different departments, they need to know they’re dealing with a competent and cohesive team ready to help them in minutes. If you don’t already have a system that gives your agents contextual info about past customer purchases, shipments, service tickets, and more, invest in one today. Additionally, share your data with your team—they may be able to garner more insight than you can from some tricky numbers. Confused as to why your average call time goes up around the holidays? Maybe they’ll let you know that it’s not necessarily increased issues with your product; it’s just that people get a little chattier that time of year. Trust your team to help you analyze your data and manage improvement going forward. Finally, make sure to give your team examples of amazing customer service. Ringover makes this super easy, since they can provide recordings of customer interactions. When someone does a great job in a challenging situation, share it with your whole team, either in training sessions or in company-wide chats. This way, agents can learn from each other about how to navigate even the toughest of customer calls.
Deliver Omnichannel Support
Don’t get left behind with the companies that only offer their customers one or two ways to get in touch. Customers want to be able to fire off a quick support ticket from their phone while on the go, and then hop on a call with an agent if their issue isn’t resolved. Make sure you’re able to provide multiple ways for customers to check on their support ticket—phone, email, text, chatbot on your site or app—and the ability to switch between them whenever needed.
Build Social Organically
In the earlier days of social media, most companies just made a push to be on all the channels, prioritizing their mere presence on a site over actually engaging with the different demographics who frequented any given platform. Now, customers are looking for frequent, organic engagement on a platform that matches your target audience. Don’t have a product you’re marketing to Gen Z? Then don’t think you have to hack it on Tik Tok. Frequently get questions about your services on Facebook? Then make sure a resourceful, intelligent member of your team is dedicated to maintaining a relevant presence on there, engaging with fellow businesses, and delivering swift, knowledgeable responses to anyone who heads over to your page.
The result will be an engaged, dedicated audience who trust and enjoy your excellent social outreach. Building lasting customer relationships, retaining their business, and earning their word-of-mouth confidence will go farther than trying to recruit customers on platforms outside your demographic.
Get Personal
As the world grows more digital, customers crave the chance to get personal. Utilize AI tools that help you deliver the service they need. From personalized recommendations to birthday emails to special offers based on their history, you’ll give customers plenty of reasons to keep coming back to a brand that knows what they need.
Ringover makes it easy for you to start offering those personalized tools in minutes. Features like multilingual voice greetings, intelligent IVR abilities, and suggested support tutorials help subtly let customers know you’re looking out for them.
Be Ready for Remote
Remote teams are here to stay, and there are two ways you need to prepare for this. First: your team. Make sure they use a collaboration tool like Ringover to help keep you constantly connected and monitored, no matter where on the globe they are. Secondly, know that your customers might be working remotely, too. If your customer service requires sending data back and forth, make sure it’s all safe even if they’re not on their more secure office network. You might also have to increase your flexibility. For instance, if you offer a professional product, you may have received a lot of support tickets during the traditional 9 to 5 hours when people were sitting at their desks. But now, as teams any time, anywhere, make sure you’re staffing accordingly to accommodate a global, remote workforce. There are tons of opportunities to improve customer service in 2024. By focusing on training adaptable workers from the onset and continually providing them with the data and tools they need to meet your customers’ needs, you’ll squash any competition and become the company that consumers know they can trust.
