To deliver excellent customer service, CX executives and leaders should be well aware of their priorities. In this blog, we will be discussing what are the top priorities of customer service & support leaders in 2023.
Customer service and support
In 2022, the customer support and service teams gained more significance as the whole world has gone remote and virtual. And consumers today demand high-quality and personalized service. To meet the expectations of the customers and increase engagement with customers, the customer support leaders have planned their budget for the upcoming year as follows: 55% of leaders on technology, 58% on automation, 78% on a proactive approach, 30% on team’s effort to improve customer retention rate.
As the responsibilities of customer service agents have shifted from mere transactions to building relationships, the priorities of the customer service teams have forever changed. There are no more target-based calls per day or ending the relationship after just one transaction, but customer support has become more about creating loyalty in users and building mutual trust between the company and the consumers.
In the business world, salespeople do not read scripts anymore but try to understand the customers’ wants and respond accordingly. That’s the prime reason why there is an increasing demand for talented salespeople with a suitable skill set. Besides, businesses are embracing chatbot technology to address customers’ grievances at scale and equip customer support teams to handle even complex problems within just a little time.
According to a report by Salesforce, 91% of product users are more likely to return and make another purchase if they have a positive customer service experience with the company. This is possible only when companies consider customer service as a domain that plays a crucial role in business growth and not just a call-answering team.
Customer Experience Never Becomes Obsolete
“Customer service and support leaders face increased pressure from leadership on the role of the service function in improving operational excellence and growing the business. Given this environment, it’s unsurprising that customer service and support leaders’ top 2020 priorities are rooted in customer experience (CX), managing talent, and data.“
-Allegra Ubbes, Senior Specialist, Advisory, Gartner
Customer experience was one of the significant trends in 2022 and will be the top priority of customer service leaders in 2023. 59% of consumers choose a product based on the quality of the customer service which the company provides. According to a report by Microsoft, 56% of consumers will stop using the product if they have a poor customer service experience. With more millennials and Gen Z being inundated, the need for experience will only increase in the upcoming years.
Thus, the service leaders will invest more in creating compelling customer support strategies and processes for the company. Also, the management teams are looking to create an education system within the organization to train the employees properly on managing customer experience and creating qualitative interactions with the consumers. According to a Salesforce report, 71% of consumers reckon that businesses that show more empathy and care in their customer conversation have gained more loyalty.
However, in 2020, a survey by The Petrova Experience revealed that 53% of companies did not even have a leader in formulating and executing a customer experience strategy, and in 29% of companies, the leaders did not report to the CEO, which negatively impacted the alignment between the business goals and the customer support teams’ objectives.
Therefore, most companies have the enhancement of customer experience (CX) as their top priority because the other priorities are AI tools to facilitate this improvement.
Priorities of Customer Service & Support Leaders in 2023
Here are some of the top priorities of customer service & support leaders that you need to be aware of in the year 2023.
Investing in Technology and Embracing Chatbots
A survey reveals that 77% of business leaders have invested in digital capabilities such as automated support with chatbots. Implementing chatbots can save time, effort, and money for companies as the first-level repetitive questions will be answered by chatbots. The frontline employees can quickly focus on more complex situations and resolve them for the customers.
The users of the product or the leads need not wait for hours to hear that the human agents are on a National Holiday. Besides, a report suggests that nearly 60% of customers feel frustrated from long waits and state that the hours spent waiting to get a response is the most depressing part of a service experience.
Chatbots can resolve this issue as they are available round the clock and on all days. And chatbots are capable of handling multiple queries from different clients at the same time and delivering answers within seconds. Matt Schlicht, founder and editor of Chatbots Magazine, says, “The emergence of conversational commerce gives businesses the ability to communicate with each of their customers in a private, personalized, and two-way environment.”
Realizing the importance of chatbots and improving customer experience further, 47% of organizations have planned to implement chatbot technology in their customer service practices in 2021, and 40% of companies will invest in bringing virtual assistants into their business operations.
Data, Insights, and Reports are the New Mantras
Data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire new customers and increase the retention rate six times compared to the previous fiscal year. Companies directed by data are always 19 times more profitable. The reason is that the companies will be able to analyze customer behavior, which includes what the clients prefer, what strategy works the best to increase the demand in the market, why some products sell more than others, etc.
Besides, data and analytics can help organizations save a lot of money and open a new range of opportunities to explore if the sets are leveraged accurately. These reports save the entertainment industry giant Netflix from spending $1 billion on customer retention.
Research by Gartner reveals that 67 percent of customer support and service leaders believe that gathering the voice of customer data and generating value from them is very important to thrive in business. The leaders’ priorities in 2021 include capturing and analyzing data with the help of technology to predict customer actions and provide consistent, high-quality customer service. Chatbots will be very helpful in gathering the customers’ likes, dislikes, and wants as they directly interact with the customers and know their preferences.
Proactive Customer Service
For years and years, something happens in the product, the customer complains, and the customer service person addresses it. This has been the procedure, and the service leaders want to break that chain and create a new approach in the service sphere. A study shows that around 78% of service leaders want to move from a reactive business approach to a proactive one, and 50% of companies that have more than 3000 employees want to take a proactive customer service approach as soon as possible to revolutionize the service domain of all the organizations.
Without being proactive, companies will have a lot of backlogs and unanswered queries by the customer support team. In an aggressive business approach, customer service agents will be aware of the known issues that the consumers will confront and send the responses as FAQs beforehand to steer clear of basic repetitive questions. This will dramatically reduce the number of interactions between human agents and consumers. Chatbots, if implemented, will take up this role and help the site visitors with FAQs and other marketing collaterals.
The support leaders want this kind of change in the customer service department and are trying to transition the domain from being reactive to becoming proactive. This, in turn, will enhance the customer satisfaction rate and build stronger relationships that stay during the good days and when businesses weather storms like this pandemic.
Measure ROI
In particular, businesses and customer support domains measure their team’s success either with the traditional, outdated way of closing tickets every quarter or a little advanced method of measuring customer satisfaction and ratings. However, though monitored closely, these metrics do not provide the exact impact on the business growth in dollars. Such technology has not been developed yet, and also businesses do not have the time to trace the impact their teams create on customer retention, renewals, sales, and other marketing-related processes.
Therefore, the customer support leaders have decided to allocate resources to calculate ROI. And the study is necessary as it provides exact numbers, which prove whether the efforts of implementing chatbots and digitizing processes are worth it. Indeed, these tech tools ease the work of human agents and facilitate in successfully completing more complex and productive works. But still, that is a vague report that gives no actionable insights. Thus, the service leaders want to throw away this unclear approach and make their companies more data-driven.
These are some of the top priorities of customer service and support leaders in 2023. These trends will stay for another couple of years, with a few more added on. The pandemic, however, has taken the digitization of processes off the businesses’ to-do items but still has embraced advanced technology to enhance the customer experience on its bucket list. An organization that puts in more effort to complete these priority tasks will have its flag soar higher and higher. And upgrading systems will keep you ahead of your competitors and help you thrive in the business world.
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