13 Customer Support Trends To Watch In 2024
- January 4, 2023
Customer support helps ensure customers are satisfied with their experience and continue to choose your product or service as their solution. As we enter a new year, it’s time to look at the future of customer support.
In 2024, we can expect a range of trends to shape how businesses interact with their customers. These trends are anticipated to change how companies approach customer support in the coming year, from the rise of hyper-personalization to the increasing importance of self-service options. By staying up to date with these trends, businesses can continue providing high-quality customer support.
In this blog, we’ll explore the top 13 customer support trends for 2024 and how you can stay ahead of the curve to provide the best support experience for your customers.
What are the top customer support trends for 2024?
- Implement hyper personalization
- Increase self-service options
- Enhance the omnichannel experience
- Use advanced chatbots
- Make data-driven decisions
- Ensure data privacy
- Foster transparent and empathetic communication
- Automate support
- Utilize proactive and predictive analytics
- Align customer support with sales and marketing
- Continue to utilize live agents
- Leverage the power of video
- Make customer service mobile responsive
Why Does Customer Support Matter?
Customer support is an essential part of every business and plays a key role in ensuring the satisfaction and loyalty of customers. That’s why keeping up with evolving customer support trends is crucial for success.
1. Gather valuable feedback
By listening to customer questions and concerns, your company can gain valuable insights into how your products and services perform, which can help you make necessary adjustments and improvements to your offerings.
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform (DAP) that helps organizations improve their customer support experience. With Whatfix, you can embed a feedback form within your application, which can then be triggered after completing a task. This gathered feedback can then be analyzed and used to improve your products or service.
2. Resolve customer issues faster
Customers may have questions or encounter roadblocks with your product or service, and effective customer support can help provide solutions quickly and reduce time to resolution.
3. Improve the customer experience
By providing quick and efficient resolutions to customer problems, you can improve your overall customer experience and increase customer satisfaction.
4. Improve your business reputation
Providing high-quality customer support can improve your reputation and help you stand out from your competitors. When customers have a positive experience with your customer support, they’re less likely to leave a negative review or tell others about their negative experiences.
5. Increase customer loyalty
Customers who have an excellent experience with your customer support are more likely to continue doing business with you, upgrade their package or subscription, and recommend your product or services to others.
13 Customer Support Trends for 2024
Here are the biggest trends influencing customer support in 2024:
1. Implement hyper-personalization
Customers expect businesses to understand their needs and provide tailored solutions to their problems. From personalized communication to tailored recommendations, hyper-personalization aims to provide individualized support beyond traditional customer support techniques.
Your company can deliver personalized support that meets customers’ unique needs by using data and technology to gather customer information and provide personalized help at scale. Whatfix allows you to contextualize customer adoption for a more personalized customer experience.
2. Increase in self-service options
Self-service empowers customers with the tools and resources they need to solve their problems or answer their questions on their own– without help from a customer support rep. Some examples of helpful resources you may have heard of include FAQ pages, knowledge bases, help centers, and other tools that can provide more immediate support.
This trend is largely driven by the increasing demands on customer support teams and the need to provide customers with a more convenient support experience. Companies that effectively implement customer self-service options can anticipate reduced support costs, improved better ticket queue management, and less customer support rep burnout.
Whatfix empowers users to self-service their queries and offers valuable insights into your product to cut down on your support costs.
3. Enhance the omnichannel experience
An enhanced omnichannel customer experience focuses on providing a consistent customer experience across various channels. This means that no matter how a customer contacts your company for support, they’ll all receive the same level of support and have access to the same resources.
An enhanced omnichannel experience provides a more convenient and efficient support journey for customers and ensures customers can access help in the exact moment of need regardless of how they reach out. According to Business Wire, 40% of consumers cited “multiple options for communicating” as the most important feature of a company’s customer support department.
4. Use advanced chatbots
Chatbots are designed to handle simple requests and respond to customer needs quickly. They can handle a variety of tedious customer support tasks, like answering frequently asked questions, providing product recommendations, or troubleshooting technical issues. Advanced chatbots help to provide a seamless customer support experience and reduce the workload on customer support reps, which can help to avoid burnout and improve customer support rep productivity.
5. Data-driven decision-making
Data-driven decision-making involves using customer data to guide customer support strategies and decisions. This could mean analyzing customer behavior to identify trends, leveraging feedback to optimize customer support processes, or using customer data to tailor support experiences. Data-driven decision-making improves the effectiveness of your customer support by using data to drive continuous improvement.
Whatfix empowers customer support teams to discover key behavior analytics that help to build a data-driven digital adoption strategy. With Whatfix Analytics, you can get actionable insights on customer behavior within your applications and real-time feedback on in-app experiences.
6. Ensure data privacy
Data privacy ensures that customer data is protected adequately and handled delicately. Top-performing companies often implement measures to keep customer data secure and are forthcoming about how customer data is both collected and used.
Prioritizing data privacy helps to build trust with customers and assures that their personal information is managed responsibly and ethically. As the importance of data privacy in today’s digital age continues to grow, so too should the awareness of potential data breach consequences and other risks involving customer data.
7. Foster transparent and empathetic communication
Empathetic and transparent communication is all about understanding and relating to customer experiences, and being upfront and honest. This approach to customer support creates a more personal and open connection with the customer, demonstrating that your company cares about their experiences and is willing to go the extra mile for them.
This communication strategy can take many forms, like actively listening to customers’ concerns, offering thoughtful and personalized solutions, and expressing compassion for their circumstances. This trend is becoming increasingly popular as customers seek more honest and genuine experiences with companies.
8. Automate support
Automated customer support can take the form of ticketing systems, virtual assistants, contact center as a service (CCaaS) software, and other automated systems that are designed to tackle simple tasks and provide quick responses to customers.
Automated customer support allows companies to handle a large volume of customer questions, reduce the workload on customer support agents, and provide quick customer responses. However, many customers still prefer to speak to a live agent or may have a more complex issue that requires the human touch, so it’s important to strike a balance between automation and human interaction.
9. Utilize proactive and predictive analytics
Predictive and proactive customer support uses customer data to anticipate and address issues before they arise. Predictive algorithms and machine learning make it easy to analyze customer data and identify patterns that highlight an opportunity for improvement.
Predictive and proactive customer service can automatically provide personalized recommendations to customers based on their past behavior or identify potential issues with a product or service before they occur. Staying one step ahead of customers’ needs can empower your company to provide a more thoughtful and seamless customer support experience.
10. Align customer support with sales and marketing
As companies recognize the importance of creating a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints, fostering a collaborative relationship between sales and marketing becomes a non-negotiable. Aligning customer support with sales and marketing demonstrates an awareness that the customer journey continues long after a purchase is made.
By aligning customer support with sales and marketing, companies can create a more integrated customer experience, build long-term customer relationships, and boost annual revenue.
According to a survey by Zendesk, companies that align their customer support, sales, and marketing teams experience an average of 18% increase in annual revenue.
11. Continue to utilize live agents
Despite the drive to go digital, some issues simply require the human touch. Companies that recognize the value of having a human presence to address more complex issues can improve the customer experience and support the overall success of the business.
Live agents can provide support in several impactful ways:
- Provide immediate assistance
- Prevent negative reviews
- Troubleshoot complex problems
- Offer personalized recommendations or solutions
- Handle complaints or escalations
Staffing a team of live customer support agents allows your company to make a more human connection with customers and gather valuable insights that can shape your product offerings and support processes.
Whatfix Self Help can be configured to integrate with your existing Live Chat application. Once set up, this feature enables a user to chat with your agents.
12. Leverage the power of video
The use of video in customer support facilitates real-time communication and collaboration between customers and support teams. Video allows companies to create a more immersive and engaging customer support experience and enhance the impact of their support efforts.
Video can be useful for simple product walkthroughs or more complex or technical issues. It allows customers and support teams to demonstrate and resolve issues in real time and can be used to troubleshoot roadblocks.
Whatfix allows organizations to create interactive tutorials and walkthroughs for customer training and support. Flows can be created to provide in-app guidance for users to effortlessly navigate through different processes or products. These flows can then be converted to video, uploaded, and embedded directly in your product or support dashboard for customers to refer to any time.
13. Make customer service mobile-responsive
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The future of customer support is full of potential. From the rising popularity of advanced chatbots to the growing importance of mobile responsiveness, these trends will influence how businesses interact with their customers this year.
By staying ahead of the curve and embracing these trends, your organization can provide the best possible experience for your customers and stand out in an increasingly competitive market. As you look toward the future, keep these trends in mind and strive for excellence in customer support.
Schedule a free demo with Whatfix to learn how to maximize and improve customer support today.
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