This is the final of two postings on the Zendesk Customer Experience (CX) Trends report 2020 to see what Zendesk customers are experiencing worldwide. If you have not had the chance to read Part I, you can find it here. Today we will summarize the findings related to customer service.
In the first post (click here), we discussed how a good customer experience could benefit companies, also, how a bad experience could chase off customers. One of the indicators listed respondents wanting to have support 24×7. Another indicator mentioned the negative feelings when having to repeat your issue or personal information for each customer service component.
Customers want a smooth conversation across all components of a CX. They also want to initiate and maybe have their problem solved when they want to report it. This means companies need to have more than a phone or chat service available. These two services mostly deal with people communicating with people. The bad part is what happens, after-hours?
The Omnichannel approach to customer support involves providing customers many ways to reach the company. Company respondents that use an omnichannel support system reported resolving tickets up to three times faster than those using a more traditional approach. On average, customers spent 75% less time in the queue, and customer service agents could handle over five times more tickets.
Sadly, less than 40% of company respondents said they are using an omnichannel support system. An opportunity?
Those companies that reported the most gains were the ones that used an omnichannel support system and integrated it with other company systems. Nearly 70% of respondents stated they were annoyed when being transferred between departments because they had to “start from the beginning.” Linking systems allow all CX touchpoints to have the same information and avoid customers repeating their issues.
The integration of touchpoints is what tools like Zendesk are all about.
Consider. In many companies, sales own the customer relationship while support owns the ticket. This is a traditional operating process that limits or filters information from each group. Additionally, in smaller companies (less than 100 employees), less than 40% use a CRM system, let alone one linked to support. The global average, including large companies, is 60%. What does this mean?
Over 75% of respondents expect their interactions with a company to be personalized. They want to know their order status, history, shipping status, etc. from whoever they are talking to at any given time. To meet these expectations, companies must integrate their systems and data.
Another CX channel that would benefit from integrating systems is the use of answer bots. These bots could provide the initial responses to customer queries with self-service articles. The use of bots could help with an earlier question. “What happens, after-hours?”
A good use-case for using bots is to cover support channels with self-service articles and after-hour support responses. CX agents might be motivated to create easy-to-use articles based on common questions.
Could this work in Japan? A positive note for bots, like Zendesk’s self-service solutions, is Japan ranked 3rd regarding respondents thinking that answer bots are helpful with over 50% positive responses. As expected, younger customers also were happier to work with bots to resolve their issues.
Customer service is imperative in Japan. Great employees offer good CX. We do not always have those great employees or lack the tools to provide that good CX. Building an omnichannel support system helps good employees offer the same CX as great employees and makes great employees offer great customer experiences. As mentioned in part one, great CX feeds brand loyalty, and those that are loyal are more than likely to go out of their way to use your products.
If you’d like to learn more about Zendesk and CX solutions please feel free to contact Unwired Logic at info@unwiredlogic.com or click the “Learn More” button to be taken to our contact form.
