Did you know that 77% of customers say that they are more loyal to businesses that offer top-notch service? Customer support is considered to play a vital role in this regard. This means that if you focus on the latest customer support trends, your business can excel by meeting changing customer expectations.

This is because customer support is the most authentic way to directly reach out to your potential customers and quickly solve their issues. One trend that will never change is the expectation to respond quickly to customer inquiries while providing quality solutions with short waiting times.

To discover more customer support trends, scroll down!

Why is it important to pay attention to the latest customer support trends?

Companies that provide excellent customer support are always respected by their clients. These companies also manage to maintain stellar reputations on social media platforms as well.

The most beneficial aspect of keeping yourself up-to-date and aware of the latest customer support trends is that you will remain ahead of the curve and drive customer loyalty.

Businesses that don't consider the provision of excellent customer support important and avoid keeping up with the latest support trends often lack a positive reputation.

To establish or keep spotless brand reputation, take a look at the top 7 customer support trends in 2021 below!

Top Customer Support Trends

1. Consider personalization

Customers love to receive personalized service and is often thought to be the most important step during the customer journey. The importance of personalized service is increasing and the latest trends reveal that hyper-personalization is highly in demand in 2021.

Nowadays, there are a plethora of technological tools and automated systems that help a company provide their customers with a personalized experience.

For instance, you can automate AI chatbot and live chat greetings that include your customers' names. Also, customer profiles that include purchasing histories as well as an efficient helpdesk ticketing routing system can help you make every customer feel special and appreciated. By using their data during conversations you can show them how much you have learned about them and your aim to provide better service each time they reach out.

These practices result in businesses creating happy customers that prefer a single brand over the competitors.

Data is critical to creating a personalized experience for the customer.

An efficient data management is an essential asset in personalized service strategies, especially when businesses focus on unique personal information that only relates to one person.

Regardless of whether you want to proceed with marketing or provide customer service support, you have to rely on the unique data of the customer. This is possible only with a team of experts and experienced customer service representatives that are familiar with efficient managing of data procedures.

2. Use chatbots to offer real-time support

Recent research has found that around 60% of millennials already use chatbots to purchase goods and services online, and 64% of users of all ages say that 24-hour service is the best chatbot feature.

It is no secret that chatbots are the most convenient way to complete transactions. A chatbot is a program or set of instructions that simulates human-like conversation while delivering instant answers and real-time support to your customers.

The best part about chatbots is their ability to work 24/7 while also providing customers with a feeling of being prioritized and helped at every touchpoint. Every touchpoint must reflect and reitrate your core business strategy.

They work by accessing company's knowledge bank and utilize machine learning techniques to answer relevant customer questions. Questions that cannot be answered by chatbots can easily be converted into helpdesk tickets.

Thus, chatbots are helpful in reducing response times as well. They can transfer an issue to the next available agent when the knowledge base doesn't have any information about the particular problem of the customer.

3. Focus more on data transparency

It is the core responsibility of a business to provide their customers with a notice regarding the collection, use and sharing of personal information. Customers can only rely on a company when it is transparent about the way customer data will be used. Moreover, when a business receives permission from the customers before using their data and focuses on the best customer service experience possible, it witnesses a drastic improvement of the customer-company relationship.

According to a 2020 McKinsey survey, 71% of customers immediately give up on a company that uses their data without their permission. Initially, customers may feel slightly hesitant about sharing their personal data for a personalized experience. However, once a company proves to handle private customer data responsibly, customers will feel less indecisive to give companies access to their private information.

4. Omnichannel is vital in customer support

Companies that focus on providing customer support through multiple channels are often more trusted by their customers. It makes sense to use various communication methods to connect and share information with a wide audience. Some of these communication channels include social media, email support, self-service knowledge bases, customer support chat systems, and call center support.

The importance of omnichannel can never be denied. This is especially true in 2021, with the variety of available cloud-based services that can easily be integrated with different platforms, thereby providing real-time information to a very large customer base is more than possible!

5. Use social media customer service to enhance engagement

As a business, you must invest in a winning customer service strategy. In 2021, almost everyone is online and browses social media regularly.

There is a double benefit of using social media for providing support services. When you successfully maintain your social presence, your customers find it easier to reach out to you whenever they need. This means that even outside of normal business hours, customers can tweet you or leave you a Facebook message so that you can respond later.

The social media customer service strategy has proved very helpful for businesses, especially e-commerce businesses.

6. Focus on agent experience (AX)

Before evaluating the satisfaction level of your customers, it is important to know how your agents are performing. This means that you need to research, analyze and evaluate your agents’ task execution.

In other words, the concept of agent performance covers the level of efficiency, training, expertise, and work experience of your agents. Businesses need to evaluate the timeliness and responsiveness of their customer support agents to detect weak links and provide additional training.

This can be done by building strong working relationships with your customer support team members and creating a top-notch strategy for providing customers with rapid and useful assistance.

This is important because when your agents are happy and know how to satisfy the customers, you will enjoy a boost in your sales that will benefit everyone.

7. Prioritize user experience (UX)

User experience involves how the customers feel when they land on your website using their phones or computers. If your website offers easy navigation that results in constant customer engagement, it means that you are providing a good user experience.

One support study revealed that every £0.73p ($1) invested in UX results in a return of £73 ($100), that’s a whopping ROI of 9,900%! Given those figures, there’s never been a better time to invest in your UX.

Further research found that companies lose £45 billion ($62 billion) every year due to poor customer service. Moreover, 70% of customers stop making purchases because of a bad user experience.

From the above-mentioned statistics, it is evident that companies face big losses by not focusing on user experience. Loss of customers means loss of business expansion opportunities and revenue. Therefore, UX is a very important and highly in-demand customer support trend in 2021 that you must implement in your customer service strategy.

Make sure to provide the best experience on all online channels, including desktop computers, mobile app, mobile web, etc. You never know where your potential customer will find it easer to contact you.

It’s time to start treating support as part of the user experience.

Whether you are using social media or customer support software, support is highly connected to user experiences. Customer support is the most reliable way of getting in touch with your customers, listening to their inquiries, solving their problems, and apologizing when they are not happy.

According to a study, 42% of people stop purchasing from a company after experiencing poor customer service. On the other hand, it is also observed that excellent customer service makes people recommend your business to others.

Therefore, it is your responsibility as the customer support agent to focus on the best customer experiences. Here are a few tips that will help in achieving those goals.

• If your business has an issue that affects multiple users, don't wait for them to anxiously reach out to you and discuss the same problem again and again. The best solution is to send a personalized email and inform the users in advance that you are working on resolving the issue. This will reassure customers that you are proactively solving support issues.
• Don'y make empty promises that only temporarily satisfy your customers. Instead, you should focus on your long-term goals and be realistic, no matter how hard the circumstances may be.
• It is important to equip your staff with guides and other relevant resources. When the customer support team has detailed guidelines, they can provide consistent solutions.

Are you interested in learning more about customer support software systems and how they can help you in providing the most secure and memorable experience to your customers?

Click here to learn more about the importance of spectacular  customer service.