The new year has started and we wanted to share the predictions for 2021 customer service trends.
Covid-19 Pandemic is still part of our lives and even if a vaccination plan is on the horizon, this scenario will generate a huge impact on business and on customer needs for a while longer than the end of the Pandemic. Maybe it caused a breaking point from the past that would affect customer expectations forever.
Using online customer service or online chat to obtain assistance has become the new habit and people tend to be less patient than before expecting their questions to be answered immediately or in a few minutes at most. Keeping that in mind, companies must rethink their business model, strategies, and maybe their infrastructure to increase customer satisfaction and customer experience, favoring this new end-customer behavior. How could they do that?
Here there are three customer service trends for 2021, you don’t want to miss.
1. Customer service will remain from home
Thanks to the experience accrued in the past months -when companies had to unexpectedly organize their employees working remotely during the lockdown or in a hybrid-remote scenario- this year employees will continue working from home.
In the UK, during the Pandemic, 77% of customer service companies had more than 50% of their employees working from home and this scenario is still in place this year. Remote work could be in part optional and in part compulsory and companies will have both remote managers and agents.
It is anticipated that companies will implement tools to track and control the employee’s activities, but also services able to reduce the stress caused by working isolated. Indeed, helping employees taking care of their mental health when working remotely will be a challenge in 2021 that can determine whether remote workers are happy and productive or not.
The selection of the best collaboration platform will help both the company to keep statistics high and the staff to reduce mental stress. This aspect, together with the employees’ training, will help fulfill customers’ high expectations.
2. New remote support technologies and optimized tech stack
As homes have been transformed into office spaces, companies will invest more resources in changing the technologies used to provide remote support to customers (that is, how employees working remotely get in touch with customers from home).
Among these technologies of course there will be cloud VOIP systems, video consultation, live chat software,e and so on. Remote technology will be used in monitoring contact center activities as well, as during this current WFH-year managers will be determined to analyze the performances of agents and services.
A collateral effect of WFH is the so-called point pollution problem, that is data and information coming from different sources. This was a pain point for enterprises in 2020, so this year convergence and cohesion of data is an objective to be achieved through an optimized tech stack. Both remote and office workers’ data needs to be better shareable (while remaining protected) between the different technologies used.
3. Web-based customer experience
Automation and artificial intelligence will be used massively to manage first-level customer service requests, to filter just the ones that require a skilled agent to be solved. 39% of UK companies is to use these technologies and 89% of customer services companies said that covid-19 is the reason why their shift to AI and automation has been accelerated in the latest months. Chatbots will be more used in customer service, solving customers’ most common questions immediately, decreasing the volume of requests which need to be handled by an agent.
As in the post-pandemic era 59% of people give more importance to the customer experience, rating it as the main reason to follow or buy from a brand, companies will have to optimize their service to increase brand awareness and customer satisfaction.
Do you agree with these previsions, or do you see different scenarios for customer service in 2021? Share your opinion here.