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What Lies Ahead for Service Experience

By Krishna Raj Raja, CEO & founder - SupportLogic

Companies of all sizes are dealing with staffing issues, and this includes a shortage of customer service professionals. At the same time, there is a backlash against long wait times and poor customer experiences, including in the business-to-business (B2B) sector.

How can firms deliver a better customer experience, even in these difficult times? And what tools and practices can organizations use to provide a better service experience and stand out from the competition? SupportLogic draws upon its background working with some of the fastest-growing companies in the technology sector - some of them unicorns - to predict what lies ahead for customer experience (and service experience) in 2022 and beyond.

1)      2022 will be the year of the (customer service) agent - In an age of short-staffed companies and a backlash against poor customer service, organizations will prioritize the role of the agent as part of the ongoing battle against "the great resignation." Look for companies to enhance agent training and recruiting, and adopt new AI-based technologies to help agents do their jobs better and faster, while also making their work "life" easier. (*a recent story in CustomerThink cited a study saying that agent turnover in contact centers is 58%, year-over-year).

2)      Support Experience (SX) gets C-suite attention - While Customer Experience (CX) is a widely used term, B2B organizations will increase focus on Support Experience (SX) in 2022, finding that support interactions increasingly protect revenue streams (by retaining existing customers) and act as a revenue generator by creating cross-sell opportunities. As a result, SX will get the attention of C-suite executives and board members at many B2B companies.

3)      AI transforms service agents into superheroes - The combination of service agent + AI will become the model for human + machine working effectively together, with AI enabling agents to do more, do it better, and do it faster. The result = issues get resolved faster, customers are happier, and companies become more profitable. (*according to a recent survey/study by HubSpot, brands will continue to invest more in automation and AI.)

4)      Customer Experience (CX) tools get smarter, faster - These tools can be deployed quickly and leverage purpose-built AI/ML configurations and applications for B2B use cases. They will allow companies to turn their ticketing systems into a treasure trove of actionable insights. And this will enable a faster transition from reactive, legacy approaches to a more predictive and proactive approach, which will be critical in today's subscription/retention economy.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Krishna Raj Raja is founder and CEO of SupportLogic, creator of the world's first continuous service experience (SX) platform that uses AI to extract and analyze customer signals from both structured and unstructured data across multiple service channels and provides recommendations and intelligent collaborative workflows.