We’ve officially entered the “age of the customer.” What does this mean? Buyers are more empowered than ever before and, as a result, are demanding a new level of customer service. While 92% of companies^[1] [i] view customer experience as a top priority, 53% of customers say they have experienced very poor, poor, or just okay service.^[ii]

So what are the best ways to close this gap? In a salesforce.com webinar, guest speaker Kate Leggett, a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc., discussed a variety of trends in customer service to help businesses everywhere understand the level of service they need to provide to make and keep customers happy.

The following eight trends summarize our takeaway of Leggett’s discussion.

Trend 1: Understand that your customers expect effortless service

52% of consumers will abandon online purchases if they can’t find a quick answer.^[iii] In addition, customers want to be able to interact over a range of communication channels during the same interaction. These include phone, email, live chat, social media, and mobile/SMS messaging.

Trend 2: Customer service organizations must adopt a mobile first mindset

Today’s digital consumer has an average of three connected devices. Time spent on the Internet using mobile devices has now overtaken time on all other devices. Unfortunately, companies have been slow in meeting demand by not providing mobile customer service.

Trend 3: Rely on outbound communications to keep your customers in the loop

There are several benefits to this approach. First, there is a savings on carrier cost as a result of less calls, fewer incoming lines, and reduced long-distance charges. Second, there’s lower costs for fewer agents and smaller overhead, training, and recruitment costs. The third benefit is less infrastructure because of fewer space requirements due to a smaller support staff.

Trend 4: Deliver consistent knowledge strategy across all touchpoints

Whether a customer is reaching out through search, email, phone, the Web, self-service, live chat, or another channel, or being moved across channels, there needs to be context around their experience. In addition, agents are empowered to offer personalized and engaging service.

Trend 5: Use decisioning to power offers, actions, and connections

This trend aims to accomplish predictive customer service by: understanding customers and their behavior, knowing what upsell or cross-sell would benefit them, giving that work to the right person/system, guiding the customer’s service experience, and connecting them to the right agent.

Trend 6: Listen to your customers and act on their insights

Collect data on what customers are saying on various channels, including email, over the phone, on the Web, in community forums, and on social media. Service managers can then use this data to get insights into how the customer service process can be improved and pass this on to the agents.

Trend 7: Realize that an improved agent experience leads to better customer satisfaction outcomes

According to Forrester Consulting, 43% of those polled say that they correlate a good agent experience to good customer satisfaction ratings over 80% of the time. Some 46% said they do the same between 50 and 80% of the time.^[iv]

Trend 8: Cloud deployments are increasing (because they increase business agility)

The Business Technographics Software Survey, Q4 2013, found that 15% of companies have already replaced all or most of their customer service and support with software-as-a-service (SaaS). Seventeen-percent plan to do the same within two years, while 24% are using some SaaS technology to complement other methods. Meanwhile, 14% of those polled plan to add some SaaS tools within two years.^[v]

Hear more from guest speaker, Forrester Research, Inc.’s Kate Leggett, on The Future of Business in a Customer Centric World, (a salesforce.com webinar) by tuning into a free webinar recording. Just click here.

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