Technology is ever-evolving and to be able to survive the changing customer experience trends, it is important for organizations to keep changing their behaviors to meet the expectations of customers. However, the only thing that doesn’t change is the philosophy of organizations when it comes to customer service. Year by year, the importance of customer service is increasing and today, it has become more important than sales for most businesses.
Whether it is 2014 or 2020, customers will always want to be valued for more than just being someone who contribute a few dollars to your company’s total revenue. There are a number of tools that empower customers and make them the most valuable aspect of any business, leading to big market change.
The other big change that we got to see in 2014 in the department of customer service is because of the newly incorporated tools in the system that are making easy for organizations to create all the content to ensure best delivery of the services. There’s not a lot of time, attention and sharing that companies have invested to achieve valuable outcomes according to changing customer experience trends.
Before we discuss about the customer experience changing trend that we have seen in 2014, it is important to understand that we are living in a millisecond economy where we have to make the most of each second that is being exhausted. This not just helps doubling the products, but also ensure that companies are able to capture the attention of their customers to create long-lasting business relationships.
Customer Experience Trends We’ve Seen in 2014
Everyone can feel it! The role and nature of customer experience trends are changing. Something that working in 2013, may not have worked in 2014. Similarly, the factors that are influences customer service may get null and void in 2015. The trick is keeping oneself alert about changing trends and modifying the previous strategies to match with the current expectation of the market. The maturity of social channels when combined with adaptation of traditional sources, creating a multichannel-experience is what one needs to attain when catering customer service in 2014.
Real-Time To Right Time
The focus of customer service in 2014 has been particularly on social media. It has been about making the right move at the right time. While a lot of techniques, tools and methods have been formulated this year, the process of keeping the customers engaged on social media platforms continue to strive. Communication and managing expectations became the key of organizations to successfully cater the needs of customers, communicate and meet expectations before customers start setting their own expectations for the company.
Customer Service As A Marketing Opportunity
In 2014, we also saw companies focusing more on integrating customer service data into overall market customer experience and research. It wasn’t about the big data, but correlating everything that helps deliver better returns from customer service efforts. Customer service activity, knowledge and community forums were moved to the back rooms and instead more integral pieces of puzzle were introduced.
The edge went to companies that were able to effectively mine their data and find relevant value, leading to improved customer experience or feedback loop to marketing strategy and product development. The bonus point is that helping the customers find you. Since Google’s Hummingbird favored users more than the keywords, the new changes like community forums and knowledge bases brought in greater values.
Customer Service Are More Important Than Sales
When given a look at a customer’s value, customer service has become almost more important than sales. This is because it is the only area where companies get to build relationships with their customers. When this relationship is extended with good customer service, it leads to more sales, referrals and longer customer lifetime value. In 2014, more emphasis was laid on putting these pieces in one place and making most of them to ensure lasting and better results.
Every Employee Plays A Significant Role In Customer Support
It’s not just about aligning the business model, but employees make a crucial part of a company’s effort to get in sync with the customer experience trends. In 2014, we got to see the indulgence of employees and how companies understood the integral role of employees have in the success of their customer service. Instead of having different functional teams like sales teams, servicing teams, marketing teams, throwing all together in one department helped achieving better synchronization. For instance, if you’re selling a small business, building small business team and putting the marketing and sales in service can extend the relationship across the board.
Multichannel To Customer-centric
Having a toll free number was once considered to be enough for any business to achieve credibility and reputation in the market among both new and old customers. However, in the year 2014, the focus was more on the evolution of integrated multi channels for customer experience trends in practice. This is also a complicated way of saying that organizations focusing on customer service need stronger subjects to connect with their customers. Customer may even initiate interactions on social media, but expect integrated and unified experience as the conversation moves through web, email, voice and other channels.
Mobile Apps Have Support Buttons
Customers can be less interested in going to the channels for support. They are more inclined to expect support to reach them in the time of need. For mobile apps, having support button inside is one thing that companies have focused on and such kind of customer experience trends are likely to grow in the near future. For example – Amazon had set the bar by putting up a “mayday” button in its Kindle Fire.
Gamification And Beyond
One of the major part of attaining good customer service experience is the interaction between customers and their service agents. The customer service organizations not only focus on customer experience, but also inwardly on the agent experience. Such organizations have shown a tremendous increase the adoption of Gamification and other similar techniques to improve the morale of their agents
Whether your business is B2C or B2B, in the end, customer service boils down to P2P where interactions play a major role. There will be a tremendous increase in the focus on productivity and effectiveness of customer service agents to reduce the friction at the point of contact. Motivated customer service is one of the most seriously taken aspects of customer experience trends in 2014.
