Know the top 5 customer service trends for 2023
Consumers expect your service to be quick, easy, and personalized. If the level of service they receive is lacklustre, they could look for alternatives. This brings us to the importance of customer service and some of the top trends for 2023.
Top 5 Customer Service Trends
1. Harmonized digital experience
Your customers expect and demand excellence, and the Customer Experience has emerged as one of the key factors in attracting, converting, and retaining clients.
Digitized organizations gather data from a range of touchpoints, and then make this available to service personnel which empowers them to better fulfil the customer’s needs, for example, aggregating customer journey data and making it available to call centre agents via the CRM.
In 2023 we will see a shift to a more customer-centred engagement strategy, finding the balance between automation and human intervention.
While parts of the customer journey can be automated, others are expected to remain as human as possible. Traits such as empathy and creativity are crucial to leaving a positive impression of your brand when used at the right time.
2. Enhanced Personalization
Personalized experiences are among the top key factors for a customer to choose whom to do business with. Soon, companies must invest in personalized strategies that allow the creation of unique journeys for each customer. For this, automation is crucial to capture valuable data that will allow a higher level of personalization at every touchpoint (for instance, targeted product recommendations via chat support, or predicting consumer needs based on behaviours).
3. Evolution in Self-Service
Empowering customers with the ability to solve their own problems is a significant contributor to reducing the overall effort that they need to expend to achieve their goals.
Bots and other automation technologies have matured to the point where they form a critical part of the overall customer experience, and these provide an opportunity to differentiate from competitors.
As consumers look for quick and easy tools to help them troubleshoot and solve issues, simple question-and-answer chatbots are likely to become a thing of the past, and companies will need to invest more in concepts like AI, machine learning, workflow automation, and conversational analytics.
4. The Growth of “Total Experience”
In recent years, we’ve started to realize that a number of things affect a business’s success and its relationships with its clients. For example, we now know that customer satisfaction can be directly impacted by employee engagement and experience.
This whole new era of CX requires companies to think beyond the “customer experience strategy”. Gartner predicts that “Total Experience” (TX) will be the new focus for businesses in the future, which means that every part of the experience journey will be considered holistically.
Gartner also suggests that organizations in all industries embrace an integrated TX perspective that brings together the four disciplines of experience: the multi-experience (MX), the customer experience (CX), the employee experience (EX), and the user experience (UX). Gartner adds that by 2024, organizations providing a TX will outperform competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for both CX and EX.
In the future, companies are more likely to invest in innovative tools to support and engage their employees – which is crucial in a new age of hybrid and remote work, where employees are spread across the globe, many times lacking motivation.
5. Omnichannel Experiences
The concept of omnichannel is well understood. It focuses on customer engagement by providing a seamless CX, through whatever touchpoint or platform customers choose to interact. However, the omnichannel landscape is becoming more complex as new channels enter the mainstream, and companies must evolve their strategy to provide consistent customer service across these.
As we move into 2023 and beyond, the channels that businesses need to connect are likely to evolve even further. Customers may start demanding more connected journeys in Extended Reality (XR) and in the metaverse, but time will tell.