What Makes a Customer Support Trend Dominate In The Year 2018

Image Credit: Pexels

The new year has arrived with a certain sense of challenges for the businesses and organizations. And the most important one is, how to deliver a better experience to the customers.

Now, if we look at it in the perspective of the customers, we get to understand, the customers are looking for a complete experience. It includes the customer psyche that further encapsulates favorable scenarios with creativity and business success.

But tackling these challenges come with certain steps that become widely accepted and make a trend. The trends of the coming year in the customer support are going to be influenced by new technologies and human values together.

And these trends have a lot to do with the purposeful use of resources and doing something offbeat from the ongoing ways and methods. And the only concern that bothers most of the executives is, the trend they follow should not anyway fail them when the year ends.

Focus on Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. Now that the customers are more informed and they look for value in everything. Such is the case today, that has led the businesses to the completely new ways of starting a relationship.

In the customer support environment, most of the customers are looking for options and solutions that are specific to the results.

And this is the reason that most of the solutions are using the attributes of data deductions to understand the relationship between customer satisfaction and good business results. This includes the factors like increased revenue, reduced churn, and much-improved customer lifetime value.

In the same context, the customers are looking for solutions that are beyond flaws and one way or other data is going to be a crucial part of it. And in the coming year too, this trend is going to follow as more number of people are going to rely on virtual call centers because of the associated benefits they bring in to the fore in customer support environment.

Truly Omni-Channel with Seamless Integration

There are various touchpoints that come into picture such as – mobile, web, social, interactive voice response (IVR) and now chatbots are also participating in the customer support. This has made the current scenario more omnichannel with sheer focus on the better and uninterrupted way of customer connections.

The number of such channels is increasing exponentially and this is one such reason that number of customers will use different channels to reach a final decision about a product or service.

Now if we consider the mapping of the customer journey, it is going to be more pertinent to take all these touchpoints into consideration where customers make their presence felt.

And this is why the customer support solutions are going to be more dependent on the cloud technology because they offer a seamless integration with the offered features. Virtual is going to make its real presence felt for the customers in the coming new year because of the cloud.

Inclination towards Advanced Analytics

Gone are the days, when customers believed in the hit and trial method. Now they don’t speculate about the results but they show faith in the data-driven methodology.

And for the same reasons, analytics is going to play a more important role in better business results. And customers are more inclined towards the related analytics. And these ideas are becoming more promising because of the results.

The year 2018 will be more influenced by the intervention of analytical tools to get the best out of the available data. Another big reason is, the way artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to the mainstream, it’s going to influence an increased number of organizations and industries. With such automation to the customer support environment, the idea of self-service will rise more in the coming year.

Because the presence of AI and chatbots is making it possible for the machines to understand the problem on their own and take the best decisions further.

The capabilities of AI are expanding exponentially and this reminds of Moore’s law that says the power of a microchip will double every year because the number of the transistors on the microchip will double every year. The growth of AI is the same.

With such an imminent presence, AI is going to be one important topic for the customer support world. The capabilities of AI are increasing at a rapid pace. Earlier, the solutions based on AI were too costly but now, new and affordable AI solutions are also being developed for smaller companies as well.

But AI is not going to replace humans at least in the coming year. And AI will not only help the customers but will help the employees as well.

More Focus on Customer Loyalty

Customers look for a personalized experience and they want to be treated as an individual. On a different note, the customers themselves want to get involved by giving meaningful suggestions and also provide the companies with the right marketing message.

Small activities such as when customers are watching an ad or a video, they are highly engaged with the service offerings and make sure they are also becoming a part of it. Small acts of customer engagement will matter even more.

So, in the same context more and more companies will seek customer loyalty and would form a long-lasting relationship with the customers than just doing business. With this approach, more companies are going to deviate from this notion that customer is a commodity.

For that companies will work more on these four steps such as providing value for money, quality of product or service, offering loyalty reward programs, convenience and consistency while making a purchase.

All in all, the coming year has many promises that bring some fathomable challenges to the customer support environment. Such challenges can be overcome with the help of some meaningful practices.

And these practices when followed on a large scale take shape of a global trend. And here in this article we just saw the trends that will dominate the customer support environment in the year 2018 with the reasons behind them.