According to Microsoft’s State of Global Customer Service Report, over 2/3rd of the global customers surveyed are in the favor of self-service. In terms of percentage, 88% expect an organization to provide a self-service portal. These stats say a lot about the state of customers’ expectations and underscore the value of customer support service.
To survive in a cut-throat competition in any industry, excellent customer service is a must. You can’t afford to be lax about that as it can cost you a huge loss. While the customer service sector has always been crucial, it has evolved into a more “demanding” sector of late.
Several latest trends have flooded the customer service sector. Hence, it’s essential for you to stay ahead of the curve by staying on top of customer service trends. Incorporating the latest helps transform your customer service and enhance your customers’ experience.
So, if you are looking to finetune your customer service and keep it in line with the latest trends; this post will serve your purpose. In this post, you’ll learn about some latest customer service trends to adopt in 2021 and ahead.
So, here you go.
1. Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence
Many businesses have already started using AI-driven chatbots in their customer service. These chatbots resemble closely to virtual assistants and answer customers’ common questions without any need for human agents.
These AI tools work on algorithms to recognize customers’ questions and respond to them accordingly. Besides, they can also carry out simple service tasks including generating quotes, price estimates, or redirecting customers to your knowledge base.
In other words, chatbots deliver a comprehensive and real-time alternative to human reps – that too at just a small fraction of the cost of hiring human agents. In fact, Insider Intelligence predicts that customer retail spend via chatbots will hit $142 billion globally.
Machine learning is also another popular trend that most businesses have started incorporating. Machine learning involves analyzing incoming data and identifying patterns to improve the quality of responses. You can upgrade the quality of your responses by integrating machine learning in your chatbots. The more interactions your chatbot does with customers, the better it gets at resolving issues.
2. Remote & Freelance Customer Service
Since the onset of the global pandemic, customer service has also adapted to the trend of remote work. As the call center software has become more refined, customer service teams of different companies can work from home. There are cloud-based calling systems that facilitate calling via the internet and eliminate the need for a direct and in-office phone line.
This advancement in customer service has resulted in hiring of more freelance and remote customer service agents. Remote reps in various locations across the globe give your company an additional advantage as you can handle queries from customers in different time zones simultaneously and faster. You can also save the cost of the new infrastructure to accommodate new in-office service agents that come on-board.
3. Self-Service is the New Customer Service
Customer self-service is the future of customer service. There is hardly any customer who likes waiting on a service line or composing a long email describing their problem. Rather, they want a self-service system to search for the solution to their problem and troubleshoot it on their own.
Integrating self-service support saves both your and your customers’ time. As customers don’t have to reach out to customer service agents every time, it gives them more time to focus on bigger and more complex problems than random one-off issues.
Owing to these advantages, self-service customer support is sure to grow in the coming years. The best way to start off with self-service is forming a knowledge base for customers. A knowledge base is a compilation of resources like FAQs, help articles and guides, white papers, etc. to guide customers through various common problems.
One more way to provide self-service is the creation of a customer portal that also includes ticket management. Once you create a customer portal and provide your customers with a secure log-in to your CRM entities relevant to them; it makes the work much easier.
Customers can view their details, update them, view knowledge base, generate tickets, and track them via your portal. This eliminates the need for back-and-forth and redundant communication between you and your customers and improves customers’ service experience.
4. Social Media Customer Service
While you may find the term “social media customer service” a bit confusing, it is an emerging trend. Businesses no longer use social media platforms only for ads and brand promotions. Instead, businesses have now understood the power of social media and are leveraging it to build their rapport.
According to Statista, 59% of global Social media users form a favorable view of brands that respond to customers’ queries on social media. And as you know that global social media is on a continuous rise, customers will likely expect answers to their queries and issues more on social media accounts.
You can offer customer service on social media by:
- Responding to your customers’ grievances or solving issues publicly on FB, Twitter, etc. Your replying to and solving your customers’ problems publicly help display your commitment and transparency.
- Providing links to useful knowledge base resources in case your customer’s problem is complex and not fully answerable on social media.
- Staying ahead of problems and being proactive in identifying the possible problematic areas. This is especially helpful when you have launched a new product or upgraded your product. If you keep explaining issues customers have reported and answering them regularly, it leads to betterment of customer service.
- Thanking followers for their kind and positive reviews timely to make them feel appreciated and valued.
5. Videos and Live-Streams
A video is a highly valuable asset and a great means of communication. It has a greater engaging capacity and the ability to deliver very complex information easily. Live-streaming and videos have emerged as the new customer service tools now and marketers are using that at a large scale worldwide.
“How-to” videos are the best example of this type of customer service.
There are also various other ways to offer videos to augment your phone and email support as below:
- Conduct Q&A live streams to answer customers’ queries.
- Conduct webinars and video courses to explain your products and services.
- Embed videos in emails to show customers how to troubleshoot an issue they have.
How CRMJetty Customer Portal Can Help?
CRMJetty provides you with a customer portal that you can use to enhance your customer management. Our Customer Portal – a configurable and ready-to-integrate portal solution for Dynamics 365 that you can customize to fit your business logic.
By using a customer portal, you can get the following benefits.
1. Centralized Database
Frequent back-and-forth between CRM and customers’ complaints in a sheet or document can be tedious. Our Dynamics 365 customer portal helps you overcome the hassle of retrieving customers’ details every time from CRM to solve any query or view the past history.
By integrating our portal directly with your Dynamics 365, you can get a centralized collection of your customers’ details. You can have a full overview of all your customers’ details right from within the portal and get a better visibility.
2. Hassle-Free Complaint Management
Our customer service portal for Dynamics 365 also enables an easy management of your customers’ incoming queries and complaints. You can utilize the live chat or chatbot to tackle customers’ queries in real-time. You can also let your customers generate tickets for their complaints and view their statuses on the go.
Online ticket generation and resolving helps bypass the need to call your agent for every small issue. It also makes the process faster and easier leading to an increase in customer satisfaction.
3. Role-Based Access
There are times when your customer service agents may have to navigate through the entire CRM to access the relevant information. However, as your CRM data is highly sensitive and prone to abuse, you can’t let anyone view and access anything. You should have a way to restrict what your different portal users are viewing in your CRM.
Our portal provides that way to restrict access based on the roles of users. You can define roles for different users and provide access to relevant CRM entities in your backend accordingly. For example, while your sales reps may need to view sales details of different customers, your customers need only their personal information, transaction history, etc. For this, you can configure the CRM entities you want your sales reps and customers to view separately and provide a secure log-in to both.
Time to Upgrade Your Customer Service – Do It Now with CRMJetty
Customer service is an ever-evolving sector with various popular trends as above ruling it. It’s time for you to rise to the occasion, embrace the trends, and make your customer service future-ready. Our Customer Portal can help you with that by giving you a centralized system to manage your customers’ details and complaints.
So, let’s build your customer portal to make an impact in your customer service!
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